If you can’t get the number one ranking in Google for your desired keyword, partner with the online publisher that does
It’s very likely that you don’t know who your competitors are in the online space. In fact, you might THINK you know, but I bet you’ve never looked, have you?
If that’s the case, you should conduct a Mequoda Online Market Audit (OMA), which begins with a quest for the leading keywords associated with your website.
Do you know the 10 keyword phrases that best define your overall content? How do you answer if someone asks you what your site it about?
Well, if you ask that question of Motley Fool, at Fool.com, according to the site navigation, the answer is investing, retirement and personal finance. Those are three of the über words they would use to describe their site.
If you ask the folks at Better Homes & Gardens, at www.bhg.com, they might say decorating, gardening and crafts.
When we conduct an OMA, we limit our keyword list to only 10, because the next step is to record the first 30 websites that show up in Google for each term.
Once you know your competition, or put more nicely, who’s in your online neighborhood, you can ask yourself these questions:
- Who are my potential partners for content syndication?
- Who are my potential partners for marketing?
Here’s an interesting example that very well could have come from an OMA conducted on the word “fruit”.
Food & Wine magazine clearly has many keywords they can target for search engine optimization. Food is a pretty broad subject but my guess is that one of their keywords is “fruit”.
If you Google “fruit”, the fifth result that comes up is Edible Arrangements. Being that Edible Arrangements is a fruit bouquet creation and delivery service, they’re not competing with Food & Wine in any way.
However, when you search for “fruit”, guess who doesn’t show up? Right, Food & Wine magazine.
How do they remedy the situation? Edible Arrangements doesn’t take advertising, so how about a cross-promotional deal? Maybe that’s the idea behind this package, which we found at the bottom of an email newsletter from Edible Arrangements:
One can only assume that this was in exchange for a promotion on FoodandWine.com, and that the revenue from this package was shared. Besides that, Food & Wine has officially tapped the audience that searches for “fruit” by partnering with a company that shows up when someone searches for that keyword.
Whether or not that was the exact deal that went down between the two companies, it’s still a legitimate marketing plan that you can try to implement in your own business.
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Start looking for new marketing partners
Take an hour today to do the following:
- Come up with 10 keywords that define your brand
- Google those ten keywords
- Make a spreadsheet of all of the URLs that leaves columns open to define who they are, what they are, and how you might work together
There are likely at least a dozen opportunities for you out there in places you hadn’t even thought of. If you can’t get the number one ranking in Google for your desired keyword, partner with the site that does.
At the end of the day, conducting an online market audit enables you to choose or change your website business model, plus show you which competitors represent potential marketing or content-sharing partnerships.
How have you been using competitive intelligence to build out your online reach?
If you’re looking to expand your network with like-minded, forward-looking publishers, attend the Mequoda Summit in Boston on October 7-9, 2009.
At every Mequoda Summit, our attendees start developing agendas of their own. By the end of the Summit, they’ve developed great new contacts and many begin new business partnerships by the time the Mequoda Summit is over.
During your days at the Mequoda Summit—whether you just stay for the initial two days, or opt for our half-day SEO workshop on Friday October 9th— you’ll be busily jotting down new business and product ideas. When a light bulb goes off for you, so will it in the minds of the publishers around you.
We encourage you to use the Mequoda Summit as an opportunity to immediately apply your new skills by brainstorming with the group.
So REGISTER TODAY for the Mequoda Summit Boston 2009 and you can still get our very discounted price of only $897 per person, or $797 per person if you bring someone with you.
Hello, I attended Don Nicholas’s sessions at the American Horse Publications Seminar in New Orleans, June 25-27. I was hoping to get an outline of the seminar and some of the tools Don mentioned in our meetings. This is great stuff. I’d really like to dive in and do some exploring but was hoping for some of the tools. Thank you! BTW above article on marketing partners is great!