We all know the drill on how to research our search keywords, right? You probably start by entering into the search engines some words that you “just know” will be relevant. Then, looking at the pages that come up, you extend your list with words that you see on those pages; then you enter those words, and iterate the process until it’s clear that you’re getting too far afield.
You then take that carefully-built list and run it through a keyword-research tool, which will show you which words are searched on enough to be valuable, plus show you other useful variations. And then you’re done! …for all time, right?
Wrong, says common sense; and wrong, says Mike Moran, posting on Search Engine Guide. The longer your site or campaign is oriented around that original set of keywords, the greater the chances that your market is drifting away from them …for any of several reasons, including:
- technological change (cell phone becomes smart phone)
- evolution of customer needs (low price becomes total cost of ownership)
- basic shifts in the language (energy-efficient becomes green)
Of course, the way to become aware of such changes is to listen to your customers. In the old days, that meant costly focus groups or surveys; nowadays, you can listen via social media …either by subscribing to a listening service (such as that offered by Mike’s company, Converseon) or on your own, with help from Google Alerts. Just load up Alerts with a bunch of your existing keywords, then start reading the docs it locates and compiling keywords from them.
But wait: why do all that reading, when all that’s needed is word tabulation …which machines are so much better at, anyway? So here’s the shortcut that makes Mike’s post totally worth the price of admission: use a word cloud! You know, those funky images with lots of different-size words that are cropping up in blogs and elsewhere? (You can view a few zillion examples here.) The clouds simply give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
To generate a word cloud directly from your Google Alerts, set up an RSS feed out of Google Alerts, rather than the usual e-mail notification. Then enter the URL for that RSS feed into Wordle, which creates a word cloud from any RSS feed.
That’s it! Do this every once in awhile, and your market should never obsolete your keywords …and your customers will think you’re super-smart for actually listening to them.
