Many business owners think of their ideal client as anybody who will hire them.  But with digital, inbound marketing, it’s dangerous to make your target audience too large.  Your ideal clients may not make up as large an audience, but they do make up the segment that will convert the best. 

Say you’re a lawyer in Denver.  You want to do some search marketing to get new clients.  Your first assumption may be that the more people you can get to your website looking for a lawyer, the better.

Or maybe you run a pizza restaurant in Seattle.  What could be better than to target the keyword “pizza Seattle” and rank at the top of page 1?

Now let’s add some detail.  You’re a lawyer in Denver, but you specialize in traffic cases involving DUI.  You’re the best in Denver at handling those types of cases.

Or your Seattle pizza restaurant has the best gluten-free dough out there.  For those on a gluten-free diet, your pizza is hands down the best.

Now, who is the ideal client?

In other words, is quantity of traffic or specificity traffic better?

Your Ideal Client Needs Your Best Service Offering

Your ideal client does not come – necessarily – in the largest numbers.  With inbound search marketing, it’s not all about the number of visitors you can get to your website.  Rather, it’s the number of visitors that convert into paying customers that count.

With inbound marketing online, specificity sells.  The closer your advertising copy and website content match the intent of the searcher, the better chance you have to convert.

So a lot of people might look for a lawyer in Denver.  But you get thrown into a pool of generalists.  However, if someone is looking for a DUI lawyer in Denver and you have ads and website content that demonstrate your expertise in that area, you have a much higher chance at conversion.

There are countless pizza joints in Seattle.  But is someone is looking for the best gluten-free pizza and you’ve got it, you’ll get that person to go out of their way to visit you.

Avoid Wasted PPC

Finding your ideal target audience is particularly important when you a doing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.  With this type of search marketing, you pay for all of the traffic you drive to you website.

In this case, a large amount of traffic that “might” convert into business can be a low ROI proposition.  It’s usually a poor strategy to go for high volume, low-conversion percentage audiences with paid search.

Instead, you want to target your ideal client with a specific add campaign and landing page content.

When it comes to organic search (where you don’t have to pay for clicks) it’s fine to get more traffic on general searches, with the caveat being that those searches are usually much harder to rank for.  For example, “pizza Seattle” could take years for a website to rank for.  But “gluten-free pizza Seattle” will be less competitive and easier to rank for more quickly.

The bottom line is that the more closely your service offering relates to the active need of the searcher, the better your chance to turn that traffic into business.  That’s ideal.