Get a Mini-Site Off to a Winning Beginning
ByI have written elsewhere about trying to decide the ideal size of a business website. Should it be a large, authority website or a highly targeted small website (a mini-site)?
Now I’ll look at the appropriate place to begin after your determination that building a mini-site is most appropriate for your online presence. I especially want to concentrate on your preparation, before you even begin designing that first page.
Before you even buy your domain name, you need to thoroughly research the details of the niche thatyou have chosen and its keywords and key phrases. The success of a mini-site is going to depend in part upon your commitment to choosing a few relatively low traffic keywords, focussing particularly upon the long-tail keywords. You also need to make sure that the small list you select for a given site are quite similar semantically.
Providing my definition of some of the most important terms in that last paragraph will help me clarify. Much of niche research is simply a combination of analyzing the competition and conducting thorough keyword research. Keyword research is really just a form of market research from the vantage point of the customer; we want to identify what combination of words your prospective customers will enter into a search engine in their attempt to find the types of goods or services that you offer. “Long-tail keyword” is merely the term that is applied to a search term that has more than just a few words. For example, “television” might be a keyword for your niche. “Panasonic high definition television” has a longer tail. “Buy a Panasonic HD 46 inch TV in Omaha” is a very long tailed keyword. Notice that the last of those sample phrases also signals an interest in conducting a transaction; it has what is often referred to as “commercial intent.”
Competition research can be broken into two parts. On the one hand you will gather information about what your top competitors are doing by visiting those sites in the top twenty results of a seach for each of the words and phrases you have selected for your website. You will spy on your competition to find out which other keywords they use, the number of external links that are directed toward the page that the search engine listed and take note of their copy, their design and their marketing strategy. The second meaning of competition research is to get some sort of measure of how much total competition there is for each of your chosen keywords. A quick way to gather that information is to see how many sponsored ads appear on google for each of the keywords that you plan to use. Google, for example, places eight to ten advertisers on the first page of search results; if there are eight or more advertisements appearing in the search results, then you have chosen a competitive keyword. Ironically, in this instance, high competition is a good thing. When lots of other businesses are willing to spend the necessary sums to attract visitors to their site who have search using that term, chances are good that at least some of those businesses are making money on those terms.
Finally, I mentioned that the long-tail key phrases that you select for your single mini-site should be closely related semantically. Using our example, if we take the example of the last key phrase I made up, we might, for example, use that as our main phrase and substitute other series to build our total list. Alternatively, we might want to keep everything except the “46 inch” part, and substitute “42 inch” and “54 inch” and “36 inch” and so forth. Or we might want to substitute other words that signal commercial intent, such as “purchase,” “deliver,” “delivery,” “best price for,” and others.
It is not possible to over emphasize the essential nature of this preliminary research. Many businesses who recognize its significance elect to not purchase the necessary software and hire professional keyword researchers. Some will also outsource the competition research. Clearly that decision is yours to make. After all, it is your business!
