Internet Marketing Point-of-purchase: Be There Or Fail

There are many of misconceptions about internet marketing and website development. Point-of-purchase is possibly the most overlooked of all. The best way to equate the importance of point-of-purchase is to think of a business with a physical location. Imagine that business has over 5,000 visitors a day who go through the store, look around, talk to sales representatives and leave. No purchases are made, but the store looks very busy. Now imagine another store across the street. This store only has a couple of hundred visitors daily, but the store converts a number of those visitors into sales. The second store has less overhead and is making money.

This scenario happens daily on the internet. Business owners believe, "more traffic = more sales". That formula in reality is, "unfocused traffic = visitors not ready to buy". The equation SHOULD be, "Point of Purchase Traffic = Qualified Visitors Ready to Make a Purchase" The number of visitors DO NOT MATTER if they are not serious about making a purchase.

To be at the point of purchase requires thinking like a customer looking for your particular goods/services within your service area. Take my family vacation last year for example, We began by Googling something like "Top 100 Vacations". We looked for a website that looked reputable on the top page and then topically went through their list. We cross referenced that website's "top 100" with another website's "top 100". Then came up with a list of two of three destinations that were a good fit for our family. We made additional searches for each specific area to narrow down our vacation destination. THEN WE WERE AT THE POINT OF PURCHASE. We Googled "Vacation Packages San Antonio, TX". Then a series of other factors not related to keywords went into our decision.

People looking for your goods and services follow the same process everyday (and yes, it does apply to your specific business). Your job is to make sure your internet marketing campaign is being fine-tuned to define and capitalize at the point-of-purchase. So it's apparent why optimizing for obtuse keywords such as shoes, clothes, and fishing trips provide little real value for most businesses today.

Tips to Fine-Tune Your Internet Marketing Campaign to the Point-of-Purchase:

1. Create a list of keywords by looking at your competitors' websites (your competitors are defined as similar business, offering similar services within the same geographic area). Most browsers, like Internet Explorer and Firefox, should show the the website's keyword focus at the top of a given website page.

2. Run an Adwords campaign using those keywords with others you've considered or found using tools such as WordTracker,. Run the campaign for 2-4 weeks.

3. Review the campaign and notice which keyword phrases gave you the most impressions and most clicks.

Impressions are important to get an idea of the total number of searches for a given phrase (make sure to have a descent budget so your ads run most of the time).

Clicks are important to see how many people actually click to your website. HOWEVER if your ads don't have an optimized call to action, focus, and content, you may receive few actual clicks. Hiring an internet marketing professional to create your ads can definitely add value to this variable's results.

4. Cross-reference your Adwords data against Google's External Tool, WordTracker, etc.

5. Think like a customer and ask yourself with each keyword "Is this a keyword my typical customer would type when they are ready to make a purchase?" Also ask actual customers who you may have a good relationship with for additional input.

6. Revise your list as needed.

ONE IMPORTANT EXCEPTION! If your business includes seasonal products/services you will need to run several tests throughout the year. Using GoogleTrends can help identify seasonal search trends.

This is a solid step in fine-tuning your keyword focus to match the point-of-purchase for your industry. Once your keyword phrases are fine-tuned, use this data to hire an SEO provider to help optimize your actual website for organic placement. Use this data to also propel your overall internet marketing campaigns. You will find, if you hire a serious SEO provider, that your website will more than likely need some additional work.

A FINAL POINT:

Keyword focus is only one step of hundreds to help your business convert internet visitors to customers. Your website needs the right design, authority, credibility, support pages, architecture, social media outlets, niche marketing exposure, etc. These factors are symbiotic in nature.