search engine marketing

Not that I deserve to be grouped in the same league as Pareto or Chris Anderson, but I’ve developed a new ‘rule of thumb’ to help microbusinesses grow online, called the 3/30 rule of search engine marketing, which states:

In a market with less than 30000 competitors and approximately 3000 customers, there is potential for a Google number 1 ranking.

Let me explain. Suppose you sell cashmere scarves on your website, as one of my new clients does. A quick search on Google tells me that if my you also sell a ‘plaid cashmere scarf’ you will be competing against just 4930 companies for a Google number 1 ranking. And if your website is optimized efficiently, you can expect a large chunk of the 3600 people who search for and want to buy a ‘plaid cashmere scarf’ each month to at least visit your website. That’s not bad for just one product.

Now imagine you could optimize each page of your website for a specific long-tail, or niche keyword like ‘cashmere sweater v-neck’ (6600 searches a month with only 2650 competitors) or ‘black cashmere sweater’ (3600 searches a month with 21100 competitors). With 20 different product pages on your website all optimized effectively and ranking in Google’s top 3 results, you could expect to receive around 48000 visitors to your site each month.  Impressive!

How to research 3/30 niche markets

As with so many things in life, Google makes it easy to research 3/30 opportunities for niche markets.

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