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Reach the right audience by finding your shop's niche

Who is your customer?
To determine who your customer is, it might help to determine a number of buyer types. These buyer types may help you realize that there's probably more than one customer profile for your website. To illustrate, I would like to refer to a study about buyer types (partially funded by Carnegie Mellon and the Russell Sage Foundation) that divides customers into three main groups:

Unconflicted: the majority of people, also called the Average Spenders. A group of buyers that make common, logical buying decisions and that care about value-based pricing. "I need something, so where can I find the best buy with the best reviews for the company and product?"

Spendthrifts: a small group of rather uncontrolled buyers. "I want it now, even though I don't really need it right now." This group is triggered by premium products and cares less about the price. To give another example, this group is triggered by scarcity more often than other customer types.

Tightwads: a slightly larger group of careful buyers. You'll need to work hard to convince this buyer to purchase your product. They tend to do more research and have a need for more details. More than the other groups, this is the type of buyer that will highly value a proper blog on your website.

The three groups mentioned above provide us with a very rough division in customers. Your (potential) customers probably have many more characteristics that will help you find your niche. So start by analyzing your audience to find out who your customer really is and determine the different customer types in your audience.

Besides that, I think most of us can be all of the three customer types discussed. It just depends on the type of product you want to buy online. The difficult task you face, as an online shop owner, is to make sure the right triggers reach the right person at the right time. Setting up this strategy will help you narrow your niche. But we're not quite there yet, because's there another question we need to answer before your niche is determined: what's your product?

What is your product?
It might seem a bit silly to ask yourself what your product is. However, it's important to really know your product to be able to find and narrow down your niche. For example, if you're an online art shop, there's lots of competition out there. And that makes it quite difficult to rank for the focus keyword 'art' because a lot of your competitors are probably making an effort to rank on this keyword as well.

But when you know your product through and through, you are able to focus on long-tail keywords, meaning keywords or keyphrases that are more specific. And although these keywords get less search traffic, they tend to have a higher conversion value. This SEO strategy helps you find your niche, and gradually get more (of the right) traffic to your site!