Choosing Keyphrases in Marketing Communication

Professor: Keys and key phrases, this is going to be a fundamental activity because this is what your audience is topping into the Google search box and you need to figure out if you sell small cars as an example. You need to figure out what audience you are looking at buying a small car when they selected to for in Google because those are the terms you want to appear high on, or rank highly for I should say. So we’ll talk about some issues to do in choosing key phrases. The first thing that one can do is try and brainstorm effectively. You try and brainstorm how would people search for my product and my service, what could they be typing into the search engines, in order to come up with a candidate list or short list. And this is just intended to help prompt some thoughts around that, so this is you know, they’re looking to compare, they’re looking to search according to it’s intended use, high mileage, according to a particular product type or features such as a very light notebook, netbook or whatever the case maybe, multi-car insurance, by price, by brand, et cetera. So you can see how this is no more than a guide in that brainstorming effort, to try and think of all the ways you might be searching just because I hope it doesn’t need to be same, just because you use a certain language or terminology to refer to your products or service, it does not mean that’s you’re holding to share that terminology—they works, because you’ll be using probably a technically correct terminology, and they end up using slang, vernacular, whatever you need to do the researching to all the different types of things people might be searching for. And we’ll go onto in a moment to discuss tools that help you do that, that help you do this research, but for the moment, I'm going to be talking about key phrases. This diagram here is really talking about something that’s called retail and it’s very simple. What it says is that all the majority of industries, what you have is this area here are a relatively small number of search phrases that account for just proportionally large percentage of searches on the internet because people don’t have that much imagination and that they need that much imagination, if you’re searching for a small car, there is going to be a small number of words or phrases that most people use to do that search and these will be a high volume. However, in theory as you move along this scale, if fewer and fewer people are using these search terms, you could say, it goes to infinite and there are any number of possible key phrases you could use to search for products or service, but gradually they decrease in likelihood and they decrease in volume. So what we need to do is think about primarily really what the high volume wants because that almost always id going to be the ones that we’re going to be interested in optimizing for, interested in doing the work. In some industries, just so you know, are considered to be long-tail industries which where you continually do have a tail that almost goes into infinity. A classic example of that is the holiday industry because that has every city in the world, every country in the world and you have hotels, flats, apartments, condominiums, et cetera—resorts and you have activities and skiing, whatever else it is people doing at holidays—sun bathing. So for the holiday industry, the tail goes on forever, other industry such as car insurance have a short tail which means that realistically, there is not that many things that we’re going to be typed into a search engine to search for car insurance because car insurance is almost always cart insurance, because there are no really other terms. And once you started thinking about it, you know, any products or features or phrase in that question, so that would be short tail. Male: When you create a key phrase, is it always just one word or can you create a phrase with two words? And how would you section that, to recognize separately to everything else within your— Professor: If you had a key phrase of three words as an example and within that, you can imagine running a search with any one of those words, if you are optimizing for those three, you will optimize for that one anyway because it’s included within it. Male: Right. Professor: Interestingly, the trend is for people to—when they typed in to a search engine, people are tending to type two or three four words as opposed to one which makes sense because it gives you more detail and more likely we’ll get a good result back. So, you would ordinarily not optimize a phrase with just one word. It would normally be two or three words and makes a phrase that is relevant to the products or service on that page. And by default, you would also be optimizing each one of those individual words, if anyone were to type those individual words into an engine. Male: Right. Professor: Right so, you can see here how—in the head, which is the high volume bit, these tend to be quite generic, all encompassing words or phrases. It’s quite hard to rank highly for them because everyone knows in car insurance, car insurance is a big term or current account and baking or whatever the case maybe, that’s very, very competitive and you could argue, they tend to be associated with early stage in the consumer research for this tool, researching the purchase and researching the area. But you could argue again in the tail that these tend to be more specific because there, you know, the fewer people searching them, they tend to be more detailed query, so then you could argue that these indicate a higher intent to purchase, so it would be more like to recur later in the purchasing cycle.