Ever been listening to your iPod (or your chosen brand of MP3 player) and a series of seemingly random tracks come-on that relate directly to what you’re doing or thinking?

Sometimes we’ll shrug it off and think it’s just co-incidental, other people may use these songs as a “sign” that they should (or shouldn’t) do something… I don’t know how good an idea that is, but despite how you react, doesn’t change the fact that this strange phenomenon has happened to me on more than a few occasions and I’ve heard a lot of other people make similar comments too.

The reality is that this isn’t some strange mystical force driven by fate and destiny to determine what songs should be played at what times – it’s all to do with our subconscious.

Have you ever been in the market for a new car, decide what make and model you want and then strangely start noticing there seems to be more of that particular car on the road than any other. It’s the same thing.

Some psychologists would say this is based on the principal of Priming – where an early piece of stimulus influences your response to a later stimulus. For instance if a person reads a list of words including the word table, and is later asked to complete a word starting with the letter “T”, the probability that subject answers table is higher than for non-primed people.

Other new-age psychologists will call this the “Law of Attraction” most commonly associated with motivation books like “The Gift”. Where, basically, if you think positive thoughts, you’ll be much more likely to notice opportunities that occur around you that may otherwise have been missed if you were too busy thinking about how crap your day has been.

But regardless of what you want to call it, or how you wish implement this in your day-to-day life, doesn’t change the fact that if we’re thinking about something (consciously or subconsciously) we’re going to start noticing things around us that relate to those thoughts.

So, why have I just spent the last 300 words prattling on about music, cars and psychology on an SEO blog?

Because it doesn’t matter what business you’re in or what your website is about – if you’re aware of this concept and can tap into the mindset of your prospective clients, you’ll have a much better chance of converting them.

Let’s say that you sell blue widgets. If you’ve optimised your site well, and/or have some pay per click ads running, the search engines will do half the job of getting your product in front of the eyeballs of anyone thinking about purchasing some blue widgets.

Now it’s time to start thinking about what’s going through the head of this potential customer.

• Why are they looking for blue widgets?
• Was there something wrong with the red ones they had so they’ve decided blue is going to be better for them?
• Do widgets wear-out really quickly and need to be replaced?
• Are the blue ones cheaper, or better quality, or different in any way (other than colour) to the other widgets?
• Will the client even know why they’re looking for blue widgets in the first place, or is it the type of product that they’ve just heard someone say “sounds like you need a blue widget for that job”?
• Do blue widgets have a good/bad reputation?
• Are there other products that people will often try before deciding that maybe a blue widget is probably best?
• Is this purchase going to cost them a lot of money?
• Is this purchase essential or just something for fun?
• etc. etc. etc.

These are just a handful of possible questions and I’m sure that you’ll be able to think of many more that pertain to your products and services.

Once you’re aware of how your product is perceived in the marketplace, the questions people commonly ask about it, the problems people have with it, the concerns they might have about spending the money in these tough economic times etc. etc. You can start to address these issues in your website and ad copy.

If I’m shopping for a non-essential, luxury item, the thought is always in the back of my head “Do I really need this?” – so if I then happened to stumbled across a website that said “Sure you may not need this item, but imagine how much more fun your life would be if you did buy it… plus, if you compare how much you’d spend on [insert random item you buy everday] – our product isn’t really all that expensive in comparison”…

I’d be a lot more likely to buy that product because they seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. They knew that I wanted to buy the product (otherwise I wouldn’t have been searching for it in the first place) but also knew what barriers could potentially be stopping me.

Many businesses think they’re already doing this quite well by putting words like “Cheap” or “High Quality” in their ad copy, but just by using generic terms that could relate to any product really doesn’t cut it.

To do this properly requires detailed product analysis, market surveys, research, testing and should be an ongoing process. Then once you have this information, it’s important to understand how and where to put the most important details so as to catch the attention of your prospective clients.

For the initial impact, you usually don’t have a lot of space to get the most crucial reasons to buy your product.

• If you’re going to do this in PPC ads, you only have 3 lines of text (with 25 characters in the title of the add and 35 characters… including spacing.. for each of the following two lines).
• In the organic search results, Google will only show 65 characters of a website’s title tag and 156 characters in your meta description.
• To broadcast info about your products on social networking sites like Twitter, you need to concisely explain the benefits of your product within 140 characters.

Fortunately once you get people to your website, you’re only limitations are the amount of content your prospective client is willing to read.

You can make the process even easier by structuring the content well, using headings to break-up the info into it’s relevant parts, use formatting like bold text or italics to draw further attention to the most important parts and try and keep all the best content ‘above the fold’ (so people will see it first-up without having to scroll down the page too far or click to various sections to get to it).

When people find you in the search results, see your ads or end-up at your website, it should just be like hearing a seemingly random song that co-incidentally relates directly back to what they were thinking. If you can do this effectively, I can assure you your conversion rate will increase substantially.

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