Over-Targeting

In the past, we've discussed some of the issues with over-targeting your market. While it's very important and beneficial to find out your market and how best to target them, there is always a downside – the more you target a specific market, the more you miss out on other potential revenue. This type of problem occurs with more than just market research. It happens with website optimization as well.

One of the things that companies do as they try to best optimize their website is keyword-targeting. Most companies do this by going into their analytics and picking out the search terms that seem to attract the most visitors and/or sales conversions. They then optimize their website for those keywords, and try to attract more visitors and more conversions.

While this type of targeting makes some sense, companies that take this route are over-optimizing. They're focusing too much on that specific market and those specific search terms, the effects of which are: Forgetting Other Keywords Incoming search terms are not the only possible search terms that can create sales. Often companies forget that their incoming keyword data is due to their own previous optimization.

For example, a company may have purposefully or accidentally written content that successfully targeted a keyword, and that's why they were receiving so many hits for that keyword. Keywords that don't appear on your site but would otherwise be beneficial are going to be lost or forgotten. Similarly, keywords that are on your site but the pages they lead to do not have good enough language to encourage sales may be just as beneficial to target but other being forgotten.

Over-optimizing to successful keywords loses out on those other potential keywords. Finally, just because other keywords are less valuable doesn't mean they are without value. While you may get fewer sales through other keywords, you still lose those sales if you stop utilizing those keywords.

Overall, forgetting these keywords can represent a problem for your company. Limiting Returns In addition, when you focus too heavily on specific keywords you may run into diminishing returns. The Internet is a vast place, and if you're making the choice to only target a specific keyword you may also be making the choice to only appeal to a very specific subgroup or marketing.

While you may quickly become the best at reaching that subgroup, you're also going to be missing out on all the potential business elsewhere that would have easily earned you the revenue you needed to keep your business successful.

Many companies introduce these same issues into their business. While it's incredibly important to know the best market for your products, and you should absolutely target them, over-optimizing your marketing campaigns for that market will prevent you from finding alternative revenues elsewhere.