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.

Similarly, move any kid related content off the parents site onto the kids site. This way each site has a theme and a target audience.

Then, we can more effectively attempt to position the sites where they are most likely going to receive the most traffic.

For example, we will probably want to look closely at Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! For the kids site as these engines have larger kid audiences. I know from my own experience that my 10 year old son prefers Yahoo! To any other engine out there. He does use Google from time to time but only to find desktop wallpaper for his current favorite band. Otherwise he searches with Yahoo!

For the parent portal we’ll want to focus on Google and MSN as there’s a greater chance of intercepting the parents here than on Ask or Yahoo!

So you can see here how profiling their target audiences – in this case 2 different groups with different search habits – will benefit them in the long run.

But profiling can (and should) go even further than this.

As a website owner, it is helpful, no necessary, that you you know who your target is. And I don’t just mean “female aged 25-34 with a 35,000-42,000 annual income.” I mean get specific. Get an image in your mind of who this female is. Is she married? With Children? Where do they live? What color hair and eyes does she have?

The better idea you have of this target audience the better job you will do at positioning your site in front of her eyes.

Because once you know who she is, you can begin to develop a persona about her. When does she use a search engine? What does she search for? What factors motivate her to click on a listing? These are the questions you must be able to answer in order to define your SEM campaign. And the only way to properly answer these questions is to have that picture in your mind of what she looks like.

You can also use this persona for competitive intelligence gathering. If you can place yourself in the persona’s shoes and act as they would, why not take a tour through your competitors sites. What do you like about them? What don’t you like? Perform some searches on their sites as well as a search engine. Did you find what you were looking for? What were you looking for?

The more able you are to make yourself act like your target audience the better you can position your site in front of them.

This leads to the point I made earlier when dealing with my client – how much easier do you think it will be to position a kid friendly site in front of kids than a more general site dealing with a much broader range of topics?

I hope that you can see what power you will have if you take the time early on to properly identify your target audience. And I also hope I’ve illustrated just how important it is to get as much detail about this person as possible. If you can put a face to the persona then you’ve successfully determined who your target is. And once you’ve done that you can more effectively position your website so that it attracts that audience at the right time.