Earning cash online begins with understanding what people are searching for in Google and other search engines. To quote Big Dan Teague from the movie Oh, Brother Where Art Thou, “Recognize your customer. Who are you dealing with? It’s an exercise in psychology.” Basically there are 3 reasons why someone will find your site using a search engine. While all three types of searchers can lead to sales, one type in particular is the most likely to result in sale or a click on an advertisement. Let’s look at these types of visitors.

First, we have the navigational visitor, someone who’s looking for your site or sites because of who you are. For example, if someone is looking for a particular blogger they’re likely to type in that person’s name into Google. If they’re looking for a particular brand of product, they’ll enter that brand name. Their intention is to use the search engine to find the site rather than using built-in browser tools like bookmarks or the navigation dropdown bar. These visitors are not that likely to buy an affiliate product or click ads although if your site is selling something directly they will often buy if you make it easy for them to execute the purchase. This kind of traffic is great for a Seven Dollar Script site but isn’t that great for your average niche marketing blog in terms of making sales.

Next, we have the information seeking visitor. This is someone who’s looking for information on a particular topic, essentially trying to gather information about it. This kind of visitor is probably the least desired by Internet marketer’s trying to sell something or to subtlety convince visitors to click ads. There are two types of information seekers though. First, a visitor may be looking for a very specific topic, for example, “how to unclog a drain”. The second type may be looking for general information on a topic like “bathroom sinks”. However, the news isn’t all bad for this kind of visitor.

The first type of information seeker is looking for an answer now. If your site doesn’t have it they’ll move on to the next. With any luck they’ll select an ad you’re displaying to move forward in their quest rather than clicking the back button to return to Google. That’s why proper placement of ads is so important. If you tuck your ads away in nice, neat, 125×125 squares or 160×600 skyscapers in the sidebar the average informational visitor won’t notice them. But, if you put them in their face and make the ads the star of the show on the page, you stand a much better chance of getting a click through.

Our second type of information seeker is more of a browser. They probably aren’t in a buying mood but just gathering information on a topic that interests them at the moment. This, of course, means that they’re unlikely to buy unless they encounter a compelling sales pitch or something else that interrupts their browsing pattern. The good thing about a browser is that they’re often looking for more links to visit. Therefore, it’s important to present them with this option in a clear manner. I do this by using links in posts like this one to move browsers to offers but I’ve found this to be of limited effectiveness. What you have to do is interrupt the pattern of the browser although this is kind of tricky. Some people use “sales agent” popups on window closing, which some people find quite annoying. Other’s use pictures of attractive women on the page while others use compelling graphics (a technique common for email and zip submit landing pages). If you find yourself getting a lot of informational browsers on your niche site while getting low click-thrus or conversions you might want to look into one of these techniques to interrupt the pattern while working toward targeting more productive keywords.

The last type of search visitor is the buying visitor, a visitor that’s looking to make a purchase or take some other specific action. This searcher is most likely to arrive at your site by typing in buying keywords into the search engine. For example, they may be looking for “cheapest electric guitars” or “best bankruptcy lawyer in Houston”. For this kind of visitor you want to get right down to business and show them what they want. If they’re looking a a cheap guitar or a good local lawyer, show them how to get it right up front. You don’t want them to read your long boring article about how to pick the right guitar or attorney. They certainly don’t want to read it no matter how well you wrote it. Instead, they’re ready to buy, now. Make it easy for them to figure out exactly how to do it by having your advertising and offers well placed and not buried in a sidebar or footer. Also, don’t distract them with stunning graphics or other social flagship blog building tricks.

It is important to understand which kind of visitor you’re getting the majority of in order to effectively monetize a site.

If you’re getting navigational traffic to your blog based on your name or blog’s name, this means that you are the product. Therefore you have to sell yourself and then sell the visitor on signing up for your RSS feed, subscription email list, following you on Twitter or the like. You will be counting on getting back end sales later on. In fact, you may find it effective to not show any ad blocks at all and go for mini-sales letter blog posts, emails or twits to promote affiliate products or your own products to your regular readers.

If your site is for a product and you’re getting navigational traffic, your sales letter needs to be effective at selling the product.

If you’re getting information seeking traffic present them with links for more information up front and consider using methods to get the visitor to break their browsing pattern and take notice of your site and its advertising. You should also consider trying to target buying keywords instead in your link building and titles if you want to improve the monetization of this kind of site.

If you’re getting buying visitors, congratulations, you’re doing things right. Just make sure that it’s very easy for them to find the path that will lead to you earning online cash.

Frank Carr December 16th, 2008 SEO

SEO
buying keywords, Google, searchers, visitors