Keywords, key words, key-words

Posted by Peter Labrow on 5 June 2009

By using a couple of keyword analysis tools, there’s no need to guess your way through website optimisation or campaign planning.

In previous blogs I’ve talked often about the need to communicate clearly in a language that customers understand and sell what people are buying. While this is very important, it’s also important to ensure that your website contains the right keywords – the exact words used when customers are searching for your services or products.

It’s a balancing act. You want to create clear, informative text, but you also want to make sure that the text contains those all-important keywords, probably in a higher quantity than they might appear within the text ordinarily.

Identifying the right keywords is incredibly important – and seldom as simple as it first appears.

One barrier is that organisations often have a different vocabulary to their customers. As someone with a design background, I can look at a page and understand where the gutter, folio and orphans are. I can pick up a book and tell you which page is the bastard-title page (I kid you not). But very seldom would a client be aware of these terms, let alone use them.

Another barrier is that marketing copy lives in a little parallel world that’s in a slightly different dimension to the one we live in, where emphasis is always greater, words always more grandiose and the impact of what we do for a living far more strategic. As the boys from Red Dwarf would say, it’s ‘better than life’.

So there’s a not unnatural tendency to create website content that is more than a little adrift from how customers think and talk.

These factors also come very much into play when considering keywords. It’s easy to pick the wrong words, because we think that terms that are familiar to us are also familiar to others – and because we think that impressive words are the ones other people use too.

Thankfully, there are some pretty good, easy-to-use tools that can enable you to do some quick sanity checks on various keywords and key-phrases.

A good choice is the slightly rough and ready, but ever so capable, Google Trends. Fairly recently launched (at the back end of last year), and still in Google Labs (so not an ‘officially supported’ product), Google Trends lets you see very quickly the rough differences between the popularity of different keywords. You do need to create a Google Account in order to use it; fair enough.

Google Trends is ‘really’ for spotting and tracking – well, trends. You can type in a key phrase and see how the volume of searching for that is changing over time. Useful – and its primary use is for following the popularity of things like global news stories as they break.

But Google Trends allows you to do something very useful: type in multiple phrases, separated by a comma, and see the difference in search volumes between them. There is one big caveat: Google Trends only works where there is a decent enough volume of searches for a key phrase. So, it’s fine for ‘Barack Obama, George Bush’ but pretty useless for ‘Peter Labrow, Stewart Twynham’. Well, we know our place in the world.

For demonstration purposes, let’s find out which are the most popular Doctor Who monsters: Daleks or Cybermen. What Google Trends tells us is that Daleks win hands-down, except for some reason in France. You live and learn.

Daleks trump Cybermen, although the results from France skew the totals – in England, there’s a clear lead.

As you can see from the charts, we don’t get actual numbers, but we can see quite clearly the difference between the two search volumes. This kind of information is essential when you’re choosing the right keywords to use – effectively, we can see – not guess – which terms people use when searching. You can also see how these search volumes differ from country to country – it’s no surprise (Doctor Who being a British – OK, Welsh these days – programme) that the biggest search volumes are in the UK. So Google Trends is also useful for tweaking translated website content for different countries.

The title of this blog showed some indecision about whether to choose  ‘keywords, key words, key-words’ – but I can see that the best choice from a Google perspective is ‘keywords’. Job done.

Keywords, key words or key-words – keywords apparently

So, I’m a hardware store and I want to know what people are searching for so I can plan an on-line campaign. A quick search for ‘spanner, hammer, ratchet, drill’ tells me that hammers and drills are the way to go, ratchets aren’t too shabby and spanners are an also-ran product. We want to sell what people are buying, so we can adjust our website, campaigns, offers and AdWords pretty quickly to take advantage of any shift in these volumes.

Looks like hammers and drill are the way to go for our campaign.

Let’s say I want to be more specific. I want to know which brand of drill to create a promotion for. A search for ‘black and decker drill, bosch drill’ tells me that Bosch drills are more in demand overall – and considerably so in the UK. So there’s my campaign: Bosch drills. No guessing, no hunches – just a little research.

And now we’re narrowing our campaign down to Bosch drills.

To do a bit more in-depth work, Google AdWords is a good choice. The primary use of Google AdWords is to manage your on-line campaigns – but to help you do this, it provides a pretty good keyword analysis tool.

From our perspective, the most interesting difference between AdWords and Trends is that AdWords goes that helpful step further: type in a keyword/phrase and it will not only show you how that word/phrase is trending – it will also suggest some other, related searches (and, where possible, use synonyms)  and show you their search volumes.

So if we repeat our search for ‘black and decker drill, bosch drill’ we find that we get lots of useful optimisation suggestions, complete with information on search volumes. In this case, it inspires us to think about phrases such as:

• Bosch cordless drill
• Bosch cordless drills (OK, we need to add some plurals in our copy if we don’t want to miss those searchers)
• Bosch drill battery (mmm, yes, people need spares)
• 12v, 24v and 14.v drills (lower search volumes, but with a bit of extra optimisation we can mop up some of those searches easily – many companies will miss optimising for those)

Drilling down (excuse the pun, sorry) reveals some more common searches, giving us inspiration for how to optimise our copy and campaigns

One thing that is very striking about these search terms is how ordinary and direct they are. Compare these to much website copy where the text is sprinkled with aspirational adjectives. So, if we do a search in Google Trends for ‘awesome drill, world’s best drill, leading drill, outstanding drill’ which do you think comes out top? Sadly, none of these even have enough of a search volume globally, on the most-used search engine in the world, to even create any graphs. Yep – all of those grand-sounding words are, from a search engine (or, put another way, customer magnet) perspective a waste of pixels.

So, not only can we do some research to find out what people are actually searching for, and adjust our website copy and campaigns to suit, we can find out for sure which words are not pulling their weight. They sound grand, but they are what everyone has always said: hot air.

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On 4 August 2009, Laura Whitworth said:

Thanks Peter, that's really useful.