Most people want to spend a lot of money trying to get visibility on high search terms or land in the top three positions on Google. Their effort gets little leads for the amount they spend.
Competition is one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that not enough people are looking online and are in buying mode.
The intention of people searching online
There are four groups of searches online.
- Informational – people search to answer a question or learn about something. They type in the search words like ‘how,’ ‘why,’ ‘what,’ or ‘tutorial.‘
- Transactional – people search to buy something. They type in the search words like ‘buy,’ ‘cheap,’ ‘sale,’ or ‘quote.’
- Commercial – people search to find out more about what to buy. They type in a search like ‘best’, ‘review’, ‘compare’ or type the product name.
- Navigational – people are searching for a specific company. They type in the search words like ‘Phonak’ or ‘[insert your company name here].’
Almost all businesses want transactional customers because they are ready to buy. This is where the Google Search and paid Ad competition and cost get fierce. People searching ‘buy hearing aids’ are considered goals. Or is it?
Conducting a keyword search on the term, we can see that ‘buy hearing aids’ only get a global search of 2.1K Globally. In the US, it’s 880 keywords every month. This is considered very low.
With over-the-counter hearing devices becoming more popular in the hearing care industry, I double-checked and searched for earbuds to see if there were more search volumes. I tried searching for ‘buy earbuds for hard of hearing’ and no data came about or even ‘buy earbuds for hearing impaired barely showed up with anything.
Not many people are searching to buy hearing aids or other devices.
What does a low monthly search tell us?
People may be searching under other terms.
Vocabularies are important when it comes to search. People searching may choose other words to describe what they need or want.
This process would require investigating social groups to identify the vocabulary people are using instead.
Cultural factors influence behaviour.
We talked previously about how stigma can influence buying decisions. When people are trying to integrate socially, they want to be perceived as worthy to be part of social groups.
However, if you are dealing with a stigma about hearing aids, people will not take action on what will cause them to be removed from social groups they want to belong to.
People don’t think of hearing aids as an option.
People experiencing hearing loss may not think they need to buy hearing aids. They will choose nothing or buy other things that will provide a solution to what they think their problems are.
How do you fix the low-volume search for hearing aids?
Avoid spending all of your financial resources on trying to get to the top of pages of the search.
Think of it like this: 20% of the searches may be they’re in a buying mode, and 80% of the searches are not.
While it makes sense to concentrate all your effort on 20%, you are missing the opportunity to build a relationship with those who are in the informational phase or the 80% crowd seeking to learn more about their problems and challenges. You can present your business as a solution to their problems.
You can use this opportunity to educate the 80% even though the volume may be smaller than the 20% because there are plenty of searches, they bring a lot of inbound traffic when you add them up over time.