Web developers and SEO firms often focus on increasing the sales from a defined keyword base. Realigned forms, layouts, and landing pages can take your site from selling to 2 out of 1000 visitors to 15 out of a hundred, depending on the market. However, conversion optimization can only get you so far.

The next level of sales boosts comes by a broader target. Maybe an optimized selling effort is moving 15% of 500 customers per month, and it can become 15% of 5,000 instead. Here’s the method to expand your target audience:

• Recognize the nontraditional applications. A dealer offering estate auctions, for example, could re-target their services towards storage unit owners and landlords who often have abandoned assets to sell.
• Find low hanging fruit. Especially on a non-traditional market, there’s often cheap ads and easy rankings to be had. $50,000 in SEO may only move you up one or two places in “Real Estate”, but “buy short sales in Scottsdale” might cost only $5,000 to get to number 1.
• Manage risk using landing pages and sub-sites. If you’re a trusted expert in one market, you don’t need to rebrand totally to reach for another.

Like many of you growing up in the 1990s, I have fond memories of playing the classic role-playing games on the SNES, and later, the PlayStation.  Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, and the like.  I bet many of you can still hum the level-up song from Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest in your sleep.

A frequent theme for these titles was, about 80 percent of the way through the game, your character’s love interest ceases to be an adorable 20-pixel-high maiden, and turns into a screen-filling ball of evil spells and tumors which must be dispatched to move forward.

What does it have to do with the Internet?  A lot.

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