How to Dominate an Entire Market - Part 4

Horizontal Marketing.

Expanding your conversation to include the niches around you.

How to Dominate an Entire Market - Part 1
How to Dominate an Entire Market - Part 2
How to Dominate an Entire Market - Part 3

How to Dominate an Entire Market - Part 4

Remember my hypothetical… ‘JD’s Guest House’?

I am going to show you how to increase the bookings and profits by exploring its Vertical and Horizontal Markets.

Self Marketing

The ‘JD’s Guest House’ website currently only talks about everything within and below it:

• A tour of the property
• The gardens
• The Rooms and Prices
• Testimonials from the guest book
• Some history
• and a contact/booking page

First we need to identify the current location of my guest house in its current market.
The hypothetical Guest House is physically located about one hour from a major hypothetical city - Kazbar City.
The property is just 10 minutes from the town called - Kazbane.
Finally we are situated in the Kazza Valley surrounded by Wineries.

This gives me something to focus some keyword research on and get a look at the market - up, down and around.

Market Research and Discovery

Now I need to uncover the markets above, below, in and around my current business model, then I need to select areas of high traffic!

This can be uncovered manually in two stages:

1. Generate a list of relevant keywords using
   https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
   • A. Descriptive words or phrases
     (check - ‘Use synonyms’)
   • B. Website content
     Enter the top ranking website for your market/niche keyword
     (check - ‘Include other pages on my site linked from this URL’)The two methods of generating relevant keywords will be merged and can be downloaded as a csv file.

2. Take your list of keywords and enter them into..
   https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
   • Select your region or ‘all countries and territories’
     (via the ‘Add >>’ button)

Take note of the ‘Estimated Clicks / Day’ column

• This is the range of clicks per day that a top position Google Ad gets for via a search Engine Result Page (SERP) for each keyword.
• To work out the amount of traffic the actual SERP page gets you can only guesstimate, but I multiply the low number by 5.

The people I want for JD’s Guest House are the ones searching for ‘Kazza Valley Accommodation’.
On the vertical market this is one step above me.

When I look at my CSV I discover:

• Kazza Valley Accommodation = 50 searches per day
• Kazbane Accommodation = 180 searches per day
• Kazbar City Accommodation = 1500 searches per day

Kazza Valley Accommodation immediately steps forwards because it has very little real competition. So I could either increase the conversation on my website to include this or create/commission a second website targeting this niche that then includes ‘JD’s Guest House’ in its conversation.

But lets just zoom upward vertically once more…

• Kazza Valley = 450 searches per day
  This is now 2 vertical steps above me…
  If I zoom back down into this market I uncover the following:
  • Kazza Valley Accommodation
  • Kazza Valley Wine
  • Kazza Valley Wineries
  • Kazza Valley Wine Tours
  • Kazza Valley Restaurants
  • Kazza Valley Hotels
  • Kazza Valley Festival
  • Kazbane Tavern
  • Kazbar City Day Tour

  All of the people driving these search engine requests will be needing accommodation so why not dominate those conversations from my main website or a second website. After all, more traffic will equal more conversion and lead to increased profits.

Horizontal Marketing

Now lets look Horizontally by uncovering all the businesses and websites under the same vertical market but not above me.
These are the ones that are next to and around me:

• Kazbane Tavern
• Kazza Valley Caravan Park
• Kazbane Apartments
• Kazbane Art Gallery
• Kazbane Botanical Gardens
• Kazza Valley Scenic Drive
• Kazza Valley Caves
• Kazbane Indian Restaurant

Once again all the people driving these searches may also be interested in accommodation so why not dominate these conversations from my websites as well.

I am starting to accumulate quite a list of new webpages that need to be written but I can outsource that job via websites like Getafreelancer.com

To dominate these conversations and rank well in the search engines I will need to provide my copy writers with a list of ‘Important Keywords’ (approximately 5-10 important key phrases per 100 words per). Important keywords should have traffic attached and be derived from (relevant to) your main keyword or phrase for each article.

For example: My first new article’s main targeted keyword/theme = Kazza Valley Accommodation
The list of important keywords to include in an article with this theme should consist of:

• Long tails
  Phrases with words added to my main phrase
  Eg. ‘Cheap Kazza Valley Accommodation‘
• Short Tails
  Ok …I made that up to describe phrases that include only some of the words in my targeted keyword or article theme.
  Eg. ‘Kazza Valley Hotels’
• Unique Phrases
  Phrases that do not contain any of the word in my main targeted keyword. These should be highly relevant phrases that won’t increase the keyword density of my main words.
  Targeted words should not exceed a keyword density of 5%
  Targeted phrases should not exceed a keyword density of 2.6%
  Eg. ‘Places to stay around Kazbane’
• Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPS)
  These are phrases that would only be used in a conversation related to your market.
  Amazon.com provides these via its ‘Search Inside’ feature on the detailed pages of a book related to your targeted keyword or market.
  Eg #1. ‘rooms with a late checkout’ would only be used in a conversation about short stay accommodation.
• Google Synonyms
  If you enter a keyword into Google with a tilda ( ~ ) before it, the Google Synonyms will appear in bold on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). If you then repeat the keyword with a minus before it ( - ) it will only display the Google Synonyms and will remove the main keyword so that you can identify them better. I recommend setting your preferences to show 100 results per page when looking for Google Synonyms.
  Eg #1. see here > http://is.gd/Bmk
  Eg #2. keep excluding each synonym you find > http://is.gd/BmyThis tool will also help to uncover them > https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Horizontal and Vertical Marketing Combined

My vertical market now looks like this:

• Kazza Valley
  • Kazza Valley Accommodation
    • JD’s Guest House

As my vertical and horizontal market combines it starts to look like this:

• Kazza Valley
  • Kazza Valley Accommodation
    • JD’s Guest House
    • Kazbane Motel
    • Kazza Valley Caravan Park
    • Kazbane Apartments
  • Kazza Valley Wine
    • Kazza Valley Wineries
    • Kazza Valley Wine Tours
  • Kazza Valley Restaurants
    • Kazbane Tavern
    • Kazbane Indian Restaurant
  • Kazza Valley Festivals
    • Kazbane Harvest Festival

A dilemma would occur if I wanted to write an article called “The Kazza Valley Wine Festival” because I would need to decide where to put it, or create two (non-duplicate) articles.

Starting to resemble a perfectly organized Site-Map for a Kazza Valley web site isn’t it?
Both visitors and search engines will quickly find information on a web site structured like this and all the information stays neatly contained in in isolated groups (sometimes referred to as Silos).

…coming soon - Diagonal Marketing
How to Dominate an Entire Market - Part 5

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