Conducting Market Research

Before you can optimize your website to rank well and get your business in front of thousands of eyes, you must first understand who you're optimizing it for.

Market research can help you better understand your target audience and your keyword landscape by identifying the keywords or phrases your direct competitors are targetting. This can help you avoid keywords where competition is high and take advantage of those they're not using.

In this chapter we'll go over the two types of market research and provide a few techinques to get you started.

There are two types of market research:

• Primary — data gathered directly from customers through surveys (SurveyMonkey, Google Surveys), interviews or focus groups
• Secondary — data collected from published research or industry reports such as D & B Hoovers, The U.S. Census Bureau, Alexa, and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Gathering data from your existing customers will help you create customer profiles. These profiles can be used to channel your SEO and marketing efforts to your ideal customer. Secondary research comes into play when you start researching how you're comparing with others in your industry.

Here are just a few of the tools and resources you can use to conduct your research:

• Google Trends — analyzes a variety of data of top search queries in Google Search
• Facebook Audience Insights — provides insight into Facebook users as a whole or those following your page
• Amazon Most Wished For list — aggregates registry and wishlist data to show the most wished for products. Best Sellers, New Release and other sections are also available.
• Social Mention — tracks and measures in real-time keyword inquiries from social media including YouTube, Facebook, and more
• Stats iQ — a tool that automatically finds relationships within your data

Building a successful SEO strategy comes from understanding your business, customers, and products. Market research will give you insight into all of these areas. Below we'll cover a few market research techniques using some of the tools and resources we've mentioned.

Surveys provide an excellent opportunity to touch base with your customers and target audience. They can help you get a feel of how happy they are with your product or business and the needs that led them to choose your brand. Those needs can help you when developing your keyword strategy which, we'll go over in more detail later.

When choosing which customers to survey, set a clear goal by asking yourself the following questions:

• Why am I doing the survey? (Purchase Process, Customer Intention, Content/Product Ideas)
• What information am I trying to gather? (Competitive Analysis, Brand Awareness, Customer Behavior, etc.)
• What problem am I trying to solve? (New Product Acceptatnce, Demand, Product Fulfillment)

Once you've set your objectives, review your customer profiles or personas and tailor your surveys for each one. If you don't have enough customers to fill out each persona, don't worry. Even if you're a small business without a vast customer base, you can still take advantage of surveys by using tools like SurveyMonkey Audience or Google Surveys to reach millions of people.

If you're not familiar with Reddit, as of February 2018, it ranked as the #3 most visited website in the U.S. and #6 in the world. It can provide a wealth of insight if you know where to look. What makes Reddit special is the fact that it contains a vast collection of communities organized into "subreddits" which focus on specific topics ranging from fitness to camping to awful commercials.

To get started, use Reddit's search tool to find subreddits relevant to your products or business. Every search will generate a list of subreddits but keep in mind that not all of them will be relevant to your query. Take some time to investigate them and make a list of the most popular subreddits. You'll know when a subreddit is popular by the number of subscribers and how many comments or discussions an average post generates. Don't be afraid to subscribe to a number of these subreddits. You can always unsubscribe later if it's not a right fit.

Once you've generated your list, sit back and read the content. Reddit is a massive social media platform where anyone can post and comment anonymously. As a result, the discussions are real and honest, providing you with valuable insights into how your audience feels about your product and industry. It's a great way to find keywords and phrases to help you get started in your research. Furthermore, these discussions can help you generate interesting content ideas that will resonate with your target audience.

Analyzing your competitors will help you understand how you currently measure up and open your mind to ways you can improve your site. It will help you answer the following types of questions:

• How does my user experience stack up to the competition?
• What type of media are my competitors using to appeal to my audience?
• Do they have a blog? How often do they post and what type of content creation do they focus on?
• What is the quality of said content?

These are just a few questions you should be thinking about when you start your competitor analysis. So how do you get started? The easiest method is to do a Google or Amazon search for the products and services you offer. Scan the results and see who shows up on the list. Tools like SEMrush, Google Trends, and Buzzsumo are other good ways to identify your competitors.

One often overlooked method we've already mentioned: ask your customers through surveys. Questions you might ask are:

• Who else did they look at before choosing you?
• Why did they choose you instead of the other guy?
• What do your competitors do better?
• What would they enter into Google to find your product or business?

Getting to know your target audience, what they're searching, and how they're searching for it will not only help you optimize your SEO strategies but also create high-quality content that they will find valuable. In the following chapter, we'll discuss the next part of the research required for improving your SEO. Keyword research.