As web users become more savvy e-tailers are going to have to learn how to adapt their sites to suite many different users.

In this article I look at why segmentation is going to be so important in the new year.

As our industry grows up we begin to apply more and more traditional marketing tactics to SEM. In 2006 I think this trend will continue and the biggest tactic that will need to be applied will be profiling and segmentation of the market.

I am already steering some of my own clients down this path – trying to devise strategies which will help get their sites found by the right audience at the right time. This is because I see the ability to properly target their clients will mean much more to them than a broad approach.

Consider SEM like fishing. A fisherman can cover a larger area with a bigger net, but many times the large net leaves just as large holes which smaller fish can get out of. This is the way the web used to work – simply placing a website up meant there was a good chance that everyone – old or young, male or female, rich or poor – would see your site.

But in todays market, we as online marketers have to get smarter. We need to have smaller nets which, while they catch less fish, catch the right ones.

This is because the search engines are evolving yet again to consider these things. They realize that no site can be all things to all people and are adjusting the results to reflect this.

Granted there are exceptions to this, but in most cases that I’ve seen, search engines are getting better at returning results which are more tailored to the searcher.

That means when you search for a “New Jersey Bankruptcy Attorney” you don’t see a big site like Findlaw.com or Lawyers.com at the top of the results. Instead you see a New Jersey Bankruptcy Attorney’s website.

We’ve been seeing this geographic segmentation happening for some time – where engines are assuming that if you are using a geographic qualifier then you must want geographic results.

But as time goes on, we’ll see a further refinement of these qualifiers.

We already know that men and women search differently, as do people of different ethnicities and income levels. Even boys and men, or girls and women tend to search differently. So wouldn’t it make sense that the engines will want to tap into that diversity?

Let me give you a practical example. We have a client which has a large site devoted to children – from games to hobbies and more. They also have a parent oriented portal coving topics such as health to family travel. This client would like to roll the 2 sites into one and phase out the children’s site.

I am recommending against this course of action mostly because such a site would be too broad and not able to effectively target any group of web searchers.

Instead I’m proposing they keep the kids site and instead move any non-kid related content off the kids site and into the parents site.

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