Posts Tagged ‘competition’

Three Great Reasons Why Specialization Is Good For You

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

Specialization is the key to building loyalty, having accurate market research, and utilizing scalability for your online store.
Some people believe that diversity is more important than specialization. Specialization is your best online business decision. There are three strong reasons that tell you specialization is the best option. Plum Tree Group helps clients recognize that specialization helps build loyalty, makes it easier to do market research, and gives you scalability improvement. We at The Plum Tree Group can help you understand the specialization solutions that your emerging business may need.

Build Loyalty
Unless you are a Target or Wal-Mart you should focus on a specific type of product and not every product. For example, it doesn’t make sense to combine stickers and metal detectors on one website. They are each very different products with a very different client base. When a person knows what products to expect from your online store and combines that with positive feedback you have a very good chance of having a repeat customer.

Market Research
When you focus on a limited range of products you can do market research quickly and efficiently. That can make the difference between you being the innovator and you being the follower. Online businesses thrive when they are the innovator. Market research should always include learning about your competitors, their price ranges, and how they drive people to their site.

Scalability
Scalability has everything to do with picking and choosing vendors. If you have a smaller array of products you can purchase from fewer vendors. You take advantage of the best rates because you are purchasing more. That means you will have increased profits.

If you are not happy with the results that your online store is producing, you may want look at your products. If they are not compatible there is a good chance that you are not building customer loyalty. Now is the time to help create your solution. Your first step is to talk to the experts at The Plum Tree Group. They will help you find the solutions you need for your emerging business. They will help you build a loyal client base, do the proper market research, and learn to utilize scalability to increase your bottom line. Specialize to maximize.

Keyword Research: How to choose the right keywords for SEO

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Keyword Research is one of the most important pieces of an effective Search Engine Optimization strategy. Selecting the right keywords will have a great influence in several aspects such as brand image, merchandising, site traffic, conversion rate and search engine ranks.

The first step that the Plum Tree Group takes is to conduct a comprehensive market research on your industry, including market structure and segmentation, target costumers, competitors, product brands, product trends, and social media analysis. Once we come up with a list of hundreds of keywords, we evaluate them according to the following criteria:

Search volume
This metric indicates the number of people searching for a given keyword. Although this information is pulled from Google, the numbers are not completely accurate, and therefore it is important to weigh them relatively to the search volume of the other keywords in our list.

Relevancy
This refers to the degree that the keyword connects with your goals. In other words, how would a searcher feel if they searched for this term and found your site? Would your site satisfy the searcher’s need? Once we have determined the most relevant keywords, specific landing pages should be developed for them.

Competition
The competition level represents the number of sites targeting a given keyword. There are two primary sources to determine this level: the number of sites competing for the keyword advertising space on Pay Per Click networks, and the number of sites optimized for the term.

Final Keyword Evaluation
The most valuable keywords will strike a balance between search volume, relevancy and competition. There are three combinations that hold a high value:

Higher competitiveness and higher relevancy: Sometimes there is no choice but to fight for a competitive term. If this is the case, we have to make sure that the term has a high degree of relevancy.

Higher search volume, lower competition and higher relevancy: Keywords that have high search popularity, are targeted by a reasonable number of competitors, and are related to your site conversion goals represent the ideal balance and must be on our keyword list.

Lower search volume and higher relevancy: Even if the number of people searching for the term is small, the people that do execute this query are more likely to land on your site and ultimately convert.