"Keyword Creativity" is the process of understanding customer behaviour through keyword research and using the insights gained to drive the creative process. <strong>Ken McGaffin</strong> explains.
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<p><strong>"Keyword Creativity" is the process of
understanding customer behaviour through keyword research and
using the insights gained to drive the creative process. Ken
McGaffin explains.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Is 'Keyword Creativity' a contradiction in
terms?</strong></p>
<p>Keywords and keyword research would seem to belong to the
technical world of search engine optimization, algorithm
engineering and word density analysis. Surely a million miles
away from the slick, creative world of brand image, advertising
and design?</p>
<p>But an analysis of the customer base of Wordtracker, the
web's leading keyword research tool, shows that web design
agencies, copywriters and traditional advertising, marketing and
public relations companies are among the fastest growing
sectors.</p>
<p>For many people, search engine optimization is done after all
the creative work is complete. A concept is created, a look and
feel developed, copy written and finally the pages are
optimized.</p>
<p>Now, there is nothing inherently bad about this approach,
it's just that the productivity of such a process is bound
to be low. Content is squeezed into a search engine friendly
framework after it has been created. It means that work that has
already been done has to be redone, and this leads inevitably to
a bottleneck of pages waiting to be optimized.</p>
<p><strong>Keyword research improves customer
understanding</strong></p>
<p>According to Wordtracker, keyword research is not just a tool
used by search engine optimization experts. It is also a
marketing research tool that marketers and designers can use to
better understand their target customers. It allows them to see
exactly what these customers are searching for.</p>
<p>So a company researching "whitewater rafting" might
find that the term "team building adventures" was both
relevant and high scoring. They can then develop their designs
accordingly.</p>
<p>Creating customer personas is an established strategy in
design and usability circles. But how often is a picture of the
customer's search behaviour included in such personas? Shari
Thurow of <a href="http://www.grantasticdesigns.com/">Grantastic
Designs</a> and author of 'Search Engine Visibility' has
long been a proponent of the power of integrating search engine
optimization insights into the web design process.</p>
<p>According to Thurow (writing in <a
href="http://www.clickz.com/">ClickZ</a>), "Whenever I
create a persona, I want to know the types of search behavior
that persona typically uses... I highly encourage all
information architects to gain a greater understanding of the
entire SEO process and add search behaviors to persona
descriptions."</p>
<p>"Not only will products and services be easier to find
once users arrive at your Web sites, content on your Web sites
will be easier to find via the Web search engines as
well."</p>
<p>Keyword research improves customer understanding and customer
understanding leads to better creative work: therefore, keyword
research should be one of the tools that is used at the very
start of any creative project.</p>
<p><strong>Keyword Creativity - the process</strong></p>
<p>1. Creative teams should start by developing their customer
personas. Then for each persona, ask the questions, "What
is this persona searching for?", "What words are they
likely to use when they're searching?"</p>
<p>Draw up a seed list for each persona, made up of keyword
phrases and individual keywords.</p>
<p>2. Now for each persona, go to the keyword Universe on
Wordtracker and use the 'related terms' feature to
expand your keyword lists. Just enter a search term and
Wordtracker searches the web for that phrase and extracts
related terms from the high ranking pages that are returned.
This brainstorming function allows you to see the words that
your competitors are using. You can also use the thesaurus
feature to expand your lists.</p>
<p>3. Check the most popular terms on the web and see if there
are any popular phrases that are relevant to your business.
Wordtracker provides the top 1,000 as part of a subscription but
you can also buy the top 20,000, top 50,000 keywords and so
on.</p>
<p>4. Now your seed list for each persona will be much bigger.
Paste each list into Wordtracker's exact search to find the
most popular keywords for each persona.</p>
<p>5. Finally, incorporate these popular terms into your
thinking. Of course, at the very least you'll want to
incorporate these keywords into your page titles, descriptions,
headings and links. But also:</p>
<ul>
<li>Use them to generate ideas for campaigns and programs</li>
<li>Use them in all your advertising copy online and offline
(people will often use the words they read offline in an
online search)</li>
<li>Use them in the titles and content of articles that you
write on your site and on external sites.</li>
<li>Use them in the titles of any whitepapers, research
reports or guides that you may publish</li>
<li>Use them in product and service names wherever you
can</li>
</ul>
<p>Include them in press releases that you distribute.</p>
<p><strong>Keyword research brings business
advantages</strong></p>
<p>We believe that keyword research is underused in the creative
industries. Furthermore, we see great opportunities for
creatives who invest time getting to understand search engine
optimization. They will not only produce more customer centric
creative work, but they will produce web projects that rank well
on search engines - and that is something that should make their
clients very happy.</p>
<p><strong><em>About the Author</em></strong></p>
<p>Ken McGaffin is Chief Marketing Officer for <a
href="http://www.wordtracker.com">Wordtracker.com</a>, a company
designed to help website owners and search engine marketers
identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or
their client's business and most likely to be used as
queries by search engine visitors.</p>
<p>LEARN MORE: Ken will be leading <a
href="http://www.nmk.co.uk/event/2007/05/17/Keyword-Creativity">an
afternoon session on improving your keyword creativity</a> on
May 17.</p>
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2007-03-28T14:50:40+01:00
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2007/3/28/keyword-creativity-in-web-design
keyword creativity in web design
Keyword Creativity in Web Design
2007-11-19T09:18:44+00:00
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