Search engine optimization (SEO) has grown into an extraordinarily wide online marketing tool and is used by small, medium and large organizations alike. Businesses are trying to utilize search engine optimization techniques to drive traffic to their company websites in order to increase sales and ensure a high ROI (return on investment). At first sight, SEO may seem like an obvious marketing tool to take advantage of. Since search engines are responsible for the majority of web traffic these days, organizations are scrambling to invest into their SEO campaigns in order to get to the top of the rankings. SEO is a very detailed process which requires beginning at the very bottom and slowly working our way towards the top.

You must invest a lot of time and research into determining the key factors for a high ROI. As with any online marketing campaign, one of the most important factors that come into a successful SEO campaign is determining the target audience business. While this is not an easy task, being able to determine your target audience can be the difference between going over your budget and cutting costs of upwards of thousands of dollars. In order for any seo or online marketing campaign to be successful, businesses must work closely with a professional SEO company and develop a concrete plan to determine the target audience of the small business. If a business fails to do this, or decides to try and run an seo or online marketing campaign themselves, they are going to be in for a rude awakening when they find out their seo campaign has wasted tens of thousands of dollars with nothing to show for it.

So why is your target audience such a big deal? The answer is the marketing dollars that will certainly go to waste targeting to the wrong online consumers. The root of this problem lies in the disconnect between the company and their knowledge of internet users. Many companies will fail to look at this aspect and may do one of two things. They will begin investing tens of thousands of dollars into their SEO campaign for keywords that are highly competitive but seem like the right way to go. They end up just spinning their wheels by targeting keywords which are simply too broad and generic. Your target audience involves the analyzing the keywords that your potential customers will use in order to find your company’s products or services and drive traffic to your company website. This should be the first analysis in the SEO process before any technical work begins.

As companies become increasingly reliant on online marketing techniques such as seo they must ensure that enough attention is being paid to who they are really marketing to. Proper website SEO is not done overnight and without the required steps such as analyzing keywords and analyzing your search engine competition, a business is setting itself up to watch their marketing dollars disappear faster than they can blink.

Bottom line: Know who you are selling to and why you are selling to them and the rest will follow.

Author Bio: John Ferrughelli is the founder and president of Potenture, a professional website design and SEO company. His company specializes in SEO, Pay per click marketing, website design and social media marketing.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: target audience, seo, search engine optimization, online marketing