Designing an online marketing strategy by Robin Good, 24 November 2006

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From: Robin Good, Master New Media

To: Susan Webster, Virginia Veg

Susan,

Let me say straight away that I am not a professional search engine marketer, nor a “black hat” online marketing wizard. I am a generalist; I look at the whole picture and from it I draw interesting insights.

Helping your online marketing strategy in a new, fast-growing niche market like the one for vegetarian dog food is definitely a tough challenge.

It may appear that vegetarian dog food is a unique niche market with no competition, but try a Google search on the subject and you will see that is not true.

So, I’d first scope out the market to understand the opportunities available to Virgina Veg without trying to compete head to head with the established leaders.

Wordtracker helps identify “keyword sets” and “keyphrases” that are both in high demand yet have few “suppliers” using them. This will help you reach significant, targeted visibility on the web in a relatively short time.

First steps

By utilizing the Wordtracker Keyword Universe it’s easy to identify an initial group of complementary keywords that could provide great value to the online marketing strategy later on.

I first searched for alternatives to the keyword “vegetarian.” Wordtracker started computing, searching, and aggregating, returning hundreds of good alternatives, from which I chose:

• vegan
• health
• organic
• meatless
• veggie
• veg
• whole food
• organic food

Then I used Wordtracker to find good alternatives to the keywords “food” and “dog.” Wordtracker suggested some more interesting ones including:

• pet
• animal
• perro

and

• meal
• diet
• snacks

By mixing these different sets of keywords I created quite a number of new, unique, short keyphrases. For example:

• dog health food
• meatless dog diet
• organic pet food

I entered these phrases into Wordtracker’s Exact Search, saved my newly identified keyword combinations, and emailed them to my teammates for their ideas.

Internally I placed the brief for the assignment together with the identified keyword sets on a password-protected “wiki” where all my online marketing colleagues can directly contribute new ideas and variations.

Honing the research

After collecting responses from my colleagues, I have 24 different “keyword sets” or “key phrases” that are complementary alternatives to the key competitive terms “vegetarian dog food.” These include:

• organic dog food
• dog diet
• organic pet food
• recommended holistic organic dog food
• vegetarian dog food
• holistic organic dog foods
• holistic organic dog food
• dog food health
• dog food organic
• vegetarian pet food
• organic dog food reviews
• organic dog food statistics
• healthy dog diet
• organic cat and dog food
• certified holistic organic dog food
• dog diets vegetables and fruit
• organic dog foods
• benefits of organic dog food
• organic dog food analysis
• homeopathic dog diet
• vegetarian diets dog
• certified holistic organic dog food
• healthy dog foods
• all vegetarian dog food

Next, I wanted to identify the ones that are not only in demand, but which have the least competition.

Wordtracker makes this part of the job the most enjoyable, as it does the heavy lifting in calculating – for any major search engine – the number of actual searches compared to the number of existing websites competing for that very keyword set.

The ratio that can be calculated by dividing those two values (KEI) provides any Wordtracker user with an immediate sense of which are the competitive niches that are still available.

In a matter of minutes I was able to test my 24-keyword set across major search engines including MSN, Google, Yahoo!, ODP, Overture, FindWhat and several other ones.

Finding niche markets

As I repeated the competitive evaluation task multiple times across all of the different search engines, it rapidly became clear that there was a set of unique key phrases that had much greater chances of competing on the major search engines than the typical ones I would have come up with, without the use of a tool like Wordtracker.

In particular, by looking closely at the results, I realized that there were a few interesting sub-niches that appeared to have a strong potential. They were:

a. Organic/holistic dog food: the terms “organic” and “holistic” offer some characterization that very few competitors used. The use of the terms could be inverted, as in “holistic organic dog foods,” and still provide an apparent opportunity for competitive positioning.

b. Recommended/certified holistic organic dog foods: the use of the words “recommended” and/or “certified” appeared to be a powerful unique identifier that many potential customers would be attracted to. You could work around this competitive intelligence info and design a marketing and promotion strategy that leverages these traits.

c. Statistics on vegetarian/organic dog food: the term “statistics” appeared to offer the perspective of many searches with very few sources providing information on it. Again it is a scouted opportunity that can give you good ideas on how to tailor and customize the profile of the site and the type of information to be provided next to the products sold.

All in all, Wordtracker really helped me open a trail in a jungle in which I would have otherwise ended up doing what everyone else was already doing. With Wordtracker, I instead unrolled the niche marketplace that appeared to me and helped me “see” the many complementary sub-niche marketplaces available within and around it.

Recommendations

With the data collected, I suggest you design an online marketing strategy centered around:

1. Marketing vegetarian dog food as “organic/holistic dog food” and therefore taking a slant to the health-conscious buyers in that marketplace.
2. Offering certified and authoritative recommendations on vegetarian dog food by partnering with veterinarians and related associations and promoting their own suggested certified/recommended diets.
3. Stretching and testing the marketplace with targeted products and information pages on “homeopathic dog food” and “vegetables and fruits” to get a pulse for complementary emerging opportunities.

Today there is no better and more useful alternative than Wordtracker to help me strategize an effective online marketing campaign that can leverage the reach and visibility provided by search engines.

Wordtracker gives me the pulse of what people are searching for, the terms they use, and the amount of competition already existing for each one of those terms.

It is then up to me to leverage Wordtracker to explore, research, and scout smart alternative and complementary keyword sets that help me position my product, not head to head with established industry leaders, but on the tip of new, unnoticed niche markets that few or no others have yet been targeting directly.

This is page eleven of the HTML version of Wordtracker's Free Keyword Research Guide.

Keyword Research Guide in PDF

Contents

• Introduction
• Why Keywords Matter by Ken McGaffin
• What You Can Do With Wordtracker by Ken McGaffin
• Not This Saturday (offline keyword research) by Ken McGaffin
• Convert Traffic Using Wordtracker by Bryan Eisenberg
• It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Emotion by B.L. Ochman
• Gauge the Size of the Market by Stephen Mahaney
• In Paid Search, Keywords Are Key by Kevin Lee
• Find the Keywords and You’ll Find the Marketplace by Ken McGaffin
• The Wordtracker Breakthrough by John Alexander
• Adopt a Healthy Position by Neil Davidson
• Designing an Online Marketing Strategy by Robin Good
• Only People Buy by Nick Usborne
• Where To Use Your Keyword Phrases by Ken McGaffin