The power of well optimized content pages - niche markets

When I put up my new site one of the things that was redone was the section on Our Coffee Customers. First thing we did was put it in a subdirectory called "restaurant". The reason for this was when we looked at what people had searched for to find our customers alot of the time "restaurant: was one of the keywords used. If people had not used that extra keyword or had a more random keyword I would have put these pages in the main directory. But this worked out and it keeps things nice and clean on the web site.

So adding to our base "restaurant" keyword was also obvoiusly the name of the restaurant in the URL, page title, and H1 tags. Again this was mostly done searching to find out what keywords were most used to find the majority of the restaurants listed, and then finding a uniform way of presenting those keywords.

Another thing I did was for the page description I it is "We are proud that Bymark Restaurant in Toronto has chosen Bean Coffee Shop to be their coffee supplier." It is also the first line of text on the main body of the page. This was done so that is what will show up first in the SE's. Some SE's will show the description starting with the keyword which is the reason "Bymark" shows up before our company name. "Toronto was also placed there as a minor keyword search just for those searchers that wanted to narrow their results.

The end result is a fully optimized section that is not only relevent to potential customers but also for the SE's. The results are best shown on MSN (Google is liking the site a bit better but still not happy). For the keywords;

Terra Restaurant #15
Presidential Gourmet #4
Bymark #4
Allens Restaurant #4
North 44 Restaurant #6
Acqua Restaurant #16
Sassafraz #1

Those results are pretty good and will get noticed. The results so far on this have been positive an this section of our web site has resulted in about 24% of the keyword searches that people have used to find our site.

The reason this is good for the site is that most of these restaurants are not only known in Toronto but also internationally. They are known by their reputation for 5 star restaurants with the price tags to match. If someone is searching for them on the internet they have either visited the restaurant and know how good quality their food is or they can't afford to eat there and just look at the pretty pics of it (I fall into the later group). Either way the association that is made between our company and the restaurant in the consumers mind tells them that our coffee "must" be of good quality if we are their supplier.

These web surfers were probably looking for the restaurants web site at the time of their search and they can get to it from each page. They might not purchase our coffee right away, maybe never, maybe they don't drink coffee. Who knows, but the seed has been planted and they did leave our site with at least 1 piece of knowledge, and that is "we supply the coffee at the high end restaurant that they were surfing for".

Also looking at our stat files I see that over 10% of the visitors to our site bookmark the site. To me that sounds really good. This is all about having people find your site and also finding a new potential market.

For other web site owners you can do the same. Say you own an Online Gift Store and support Team Burt in the 50km Annual Pub Race. An optimized page on your site might bring in some traffic to your site. Not people looking for gifts, but people looking to find out about the race. Your association with that might not mean much to the surfer at the time but if that race is dear to their haeat then when they are looking for a product you sell they might come back to your shop and purchase it just because of your association with the event. They will already have a postive image of your company and you have a potential customer that might have never found your site through your usual marketing means.