Platonik blog

If your website is not working for your business, if it's not getting enough traffic, if it's not getting enough enquiries or sales, then I would recommend you watch this 17 minute video.

It's a screencast of research I've done into the "home made cushion" market.

I know, not my thing either. But if you are serious about your business and leveraging the web, you will find this dynamite.

This video will give you a firm grasp of :

• What people search for versus what you think they search for
• What traffic there is for hundreds of search phrases you never thought of
• It will show you the difference between search and likely traffic to your site
• It will show you the competition and whether you can or cannot compete in certain markets.

Then it goes on to building a framework for a website based around what people are searching for and finishes off with a wireframe - an outline of a website.

This is what we do unlike most web developers and web designers. This is what we do before we even look at design or coding.

This type of research and planning is what differentiates a website that works for a business and one that is just pretty pictures and code.

Here's the link to download the file if you wish to save to your desktop. The file is near 100MB in size. So give it time to download and also time to load up if you are watching below.

Continuing the "What the Market Wants" series, I decided to look into the number of people in the UK and Ireland with a golf interest on Facebook. Facebook have a really simple targeting tool that enables you to type in different groups and pages which golfers may be interested in and follow.



I don't think I have captured all the interest groups as this only took me a couple of minutes research. Not the biggest market size in the world but it does show this bunch of people do hang out on Facebook.

Last week I picked up on a comment made by a designer called Mike Sullivan aka Mister M. Mike said "I'm going to design some ironing board covers. Untouched market"



Not sure if he was being sarcastic or not, but I thought I would have a little look into "What The Market Wants" using Market Samurai software.

Anyway, just in case you don't know what an ironing board cover is, it's a cover you place over the ironing board so make ironing a garment easier.

Firstly I like to look at phrase keywords ie: words in the exact order as shown in the graphic.

If you take the terms "ironing board cover" there are 8100 searches a month but the SEOC (265,000) is pretty high indicating competition is high.



Again look further down, you'll see the term "large ironing board cover" and again SEOC (competition) is high (213,000)

I have exported all the above data into the following spreadsheet. I have taken the searches where the competition is less than 40,000 SEOT ie: where one could realistically compete; ie: I am looking at the long tail of search.



Then I have added up the monthly searches which comes to 2971 searches a month.

So, my train of thought is this :

There are 60 million homes in the UK. Every home must have an iron. So at best 8100 searches x 12 months (97100 people a year search for an ironing board cover problem online)

That's just not a big enough market online for a product that retails around £10. I am thinking this is more of an impulse purchase that people would pick up in a store.

 In my opinion and based on Seth's criteria "match what the market is looking for", this is probably too small a market to tap into.

I am going to start this blog section called "What the Market Wants"

Seth wrote this blog post saying the challenge is to develop product that match what the market is looking for; as opposed to trying to guess or alert a bunch of people who aren't looking.

So, every week I am going to post some examples based around Google keyword research on "what the market is looking for"

Today, I did a research on "iPhone developers"



Have a look at the row highlighted in green "how to develop iPhone apps"

This research from Market Samurai (which takes it data from Google) tells us :

In the UK every month,

4400 searches are made for "how to develop iPhone apps"

SEOT of 1848 is a calculation of how many visits a month to your site you may get if you got to number one in google for that search term.

SEOC is the competition telling you the number of pages mentioning "how to develop iPhone apps". Below 30,000 generally means you can easily compete with a well optimised page for that phrase

SEOTC tells you how many pages titles mention "how to develop iPhone apps"

SEOUC tells you how many urls have "how to develop iPhone apps" in the url

SEOTCR of 1% means the competition is very weak.

Related to that is the row called "iPhone development tutorials" - another cracking indication of what the market wants.

So this is a great opportunity for someone developing iPhones so maybe developing a video training site on how to develop an iPhone app.