Keyword Discovery helps us understand how people are searching for your company, your products and services; your executives, your location, and your jobs openings. The keyword discovery process includes brainstorming with sales, marketing, and support personnel; evaluating PR, sales, training and other current company materials; analysis of competitor’s search visibility; and searching, searching, searching the web to inform us as to what words and phrases are being used to find your industry products and services. And then we start balancing. Using the WebMama methodology we balance between trendy, brand, category, and legacy words to find the critical short list of keywords and phrases.
The Legacy of Call Center But The New Category of Contact Center
Take an example of one of the several aspects of a keyword research and discovery process: if your product or service includes what your messaging calls a contact center but your customers and prospects are still using the legacy term call center, then both might make the short list that drives content optimization.
Choosing Which Keywords for the Short List
Keyword Selection Criteria
We use several key criteria to choose the key phrases that make the final list including relevancy to your company and the industry, product and solutions, volume of searches, and conversion. At one large multinational diversified technology company there were 20 key phrases that were critical – only 20.
Keyword Research Requires Listening Skills
Understanding and predicting human behavior is hard. Keyword Discovery is part detective work, part behavioral psychology, and part data mining exercise. Data mining is critical for about 60% of available search result data. However, increasingly about 40% of Google’s search results are coming back “not provided” – meaning that no referring keyword is being provided – keyword discovery via data mining alone is insufficient, and must be complemented by other sources including listening to the words that sales and support personnel use in their day to day world of talking to customers.