Rethink Keyword Research & Broaden Your Market Knowledge

Keyword Research, the analysis of finding the actual search terms consumers use to find products/services or information via search engines, has traditionally been used to find the most appropriate keywords to rank for within search engines.

For example, let’s say Company A is selling cars online. They want to know what keywords they should rank for in search engines.

Should they rank for: Car, Cars, Autos, Automobiles or Auto Reviews?

Keyword research finds variations of keywords for Autos, gives search volumes for each keyword and identifies the online competitiveness of each keyword. The result being a list of relevant keywords to company A’s products/services with high traffic and low online competition.

This information in and of itself is priceless and can bring a lot of traffic to websites. However, the benefits of keyword research can and should go far beyond website optimization.

Uses of Keyword Research

New Product Development

Thinking of building or selling a new product? How crowded is the market space? Are there lots of companies selling the same or similar products? Would it be hard to sell this product online? Keyword research can help find new products which might serve a particular niche where demands have not been met by the market place or too few companies have succeeded in doing well.

Improving Existing Products

Should you be producing those black cars in other colours? Keyword research can give insight into what consumers want. It might just be pink cars are in high demand…….

Analyzing Online Market Size

Do you have 2 products you need to push online but only have budget to push 1? Keyword research allows us to analyze the market size and the competition level before making that decision.

Competitor Reach

How much are your competitors being searched for online? What’s their brand exposure?

The above are just a few uses of keyword research. Consideration should be given to involving keyword research not just at the website optimization level but as an overall market research activity and at the strategic level of product development.

There are a few different ways to integrate external content in Sitecore – what you choose is dependent on the way the CMS is set up to access the content, including any controls that might exist on the data.

When you have direct access to data…

It’s best to use data providers. They’re designed to convert the information from a custom database into Sitecore content, which allows you to set versioning and workflow(s) for the database content (essentially turning it into a Sitecore repository). The only downside to this is that it can take significant development effort to get it up & running. This is not for the technologically faint of heart – you will need to be quite familiar with Sitecore to implement data providers properly. If you set it up wrong, it creates an arduous process for content authors and generally slows the system down.

That caveat aside, there are a few key things to watch out for during implementation:

1. Make sure that the data providers are properly chained. Which is to say, ensure they are chained in a top-down hierarchy in terms of which provider controls the most content. Likely, the default Sitecore provider would be the first in your chain because it controls the most content.
2. Build in tolerance to address database availability. This will mean that when the database is down, it won’t pull the whole Sitecore system down.
3. If you’ve implemented a write data provider, take into account that someone may be editing from another database application (and not within Sitecore). Be sure to create a lock control so that only one person can edit at a time within the program. If this isn’t in place, it will be a case of “last rights wins”, meaning that whoever hits save last will have their changes saved and the other edits will be over-ridden.

When you don’t have direct access to data…

It’s best to go with web services. The most common example of this is when you have indirect access to content through a legacy mainframe system or a non-Microsoft system – essentially, a program whose native interface isn’t .NET compatible, or which restricts user access because of security considerations. In these cases, web services can allow you to pull in legacy content (or systems) that are not under your direct control.

The considerations here are:

1. Did you take into account that web services may be accessing unrestricted external applications? If not, you may be sending confidential content like login credentials over the web for anyone to see.
2. Have you planned for the performance characteristics of the source system? If you know that you’ll have varying performance – in that pages may load at varying speeds depending on what users are doing on the site – how will you let them know that their request is being processed? A good example of this would be a travel site that takes more or less time depending on flight availability or complexity.

When your site accesses data you don’t control…

You will need to go with some sort of feed aggregator, which allows sites to consume publicly available information that’s probably hosted elsewhere. The caveat here is that, while aggregators are simple to implement, you need to take into account what happens if the feed changes or is not available.
Luckily, the solutions to this are just as simple:

1. Incorporate a built-in function that displays an error message telling users the feed is currently unavailable
2. If the content is not critical to your site, blank out the area when the feed is not available.

Make sure, also, that any failures are logged internally so someone within your organization has the chance to respond to the issue.

Every CMS product requires that certain mundane yet essential tasks be completed on a regular basis to ensure your system is operating at peak performance. When you think about the maintenance that’s central to the healthy functioning of any CMS, several tasks come to mind. Below, we’ve outlined the three most common maintenance tasks and ways to troubleshoot these processes:

1. Removal or archival of old versions of web pages and content items. Site performance is swiftly and seriously impacted if more then 10 versions of the same content exist on a site.   A custom web service allows administrators to schedule the archival of unneeded versions, allowing them to automate the maintenance and proactively address the issue before it arises.
2. Timed publication of content. It’s important to set appropriate times for when content is published. Often, Sitecore will automatically publish content at timed intervals, which can be problematic because the timing of the publication depends on when the system was re-booted last, rather than the time of day. This could cause a large publication to be deployed in the middle of the workday, causing issues for users and a potentially problematic system load. It’s better to set defined times for content publication and take the guesswork out of this process.
3. Content approval. Many organizations face the problem that content approvers are bombarded with a steady stream of individual requests for content approval. Approvers can start to feel spammed and overwhelmed by this. Creating a “digest” format for these emails does a lot to improve the approval process. These request digests can be sent on a daily or weekly basis, depending on what your organization requires.

By using custom web services, you can enjoy an automated, hands-off approach. Essentially, you install the applications, configure them and schedule times for each type of maintenance task. Then the whole maintenance process runs itself.

The WYSIWYG (“What you see is what you get”) editors found in the current versions of many CMS products are a definite improvement over previous generations, but the claim that these WYSIWYG tools actually provide users with a simple, easy and consistent experience to work within is a bit of a myth.

Most CMS users are familiar with Microsoft Word, and to accommodate this audience, WYSIWYG editing interfaces tend to closely resemble Word in terms of appearance and menu options.

The downside to this is that users then expect the WYSIWYG editor to behave the same as their trusty Microsoft Word documents. They do not – as most of us know from experience. This is as a result of many things, but the basic crux of the matter is that web content is not print content. What works in your word processor makes no sense for web formats because there is no concept of pagination, margins, etc. A Word-style editor (in practice and function) would not account for the myriad variants and nuances of HTML and XHTML that are required for a tier-one web browser.

While the current generation of WYSIWYG editors is not perfect, there are many things that we can do to greatly increase the chances of our users having a positive experience when authoring content in the CMS.

Here are some tips (outlined in detail below):

1. Train on real content and allow for practice
2. Learn about Copy, paste and the legacy of Microsoft Word
3. Eliminate options that are not needed
4. Plan style sheets
5. Make snippets your best friend
6. Give power to your “power users”

Train on real content

A mistake I see again and again is the assumption that you can just hand over the shiny new CMS to an end-user and expect them to be able to use it right away. Almost all vendors provide some level of content author training – use this as an opportunity to cover basics like formatting text, inserting images and multimedia content, creating links and other basic web editing actions.

This is best done by using real world examples of your own content in a lab setting where users can try things out. An instructor can do short demonstrations then assist the students as they create content. This provides relevant experience that is more likely to stick. When selecting the content you would like to use for this session, keep in mind which pages are most updated by the most people – starting there will pay the greatest dividends in terms of saved time and effort.

Copy, paste and Microsoft Word

Many of the newer WYSIWYG editors include functionality that helps to clean up the HTML produced by Microsoft Word, but this is far from perfect. It doesn’t account for differences in the tag hierarchy of the Word document or the functions a user might need to work with cascading style sheets.

In general, I don’t recommend that users copy information from Word and attempt to paste it into the CMS. Instead, I normally suggest the “old-school” method of copying from Word, pasting to Notepad, copying from Notepad and pasting to the CMS. I know this is not ideal, but at the end of the day, this method produces the most compatible HTML – meaning it renders correctly and is search engine friendly.

Eliminate options that are not needed

Most Rich Text Editors can be adjusted to display a variety of options to the content authors. In almost all CMS products, these options can be configured based on a template, on specific users or more globally. Understanding which functions are actually needed by your users and which are not can help simplify choices and remove the potential for mistakes and inconsistencies (i.e. maybe you want to disable the font color button, as someone might think bright pink text looks great).

Style sheets need to be planned

Because most websites are driven by cascading style sheets, it is important to clearly think through not only how you will tweak the CMS to support myriad browsers, but also how the content authors will be able to make use of those styles in authoring their content.

When a style sheet is assigned to the Rich Text Editor for use by content authors, it is critical that the selectable styles are appropriate and make for easy choices for content authors.

Make Snippets your best friend

The “Insert Code” snippet of most WYSIWYG editors allows administrators to define small portions of HTML to be inserted into the rich text editor, allowing content authors to create complex structures while also following best practices for html coding. Consider integrating snippets into the content authoring process in your organization to lessen the load on IT.

Give power to your “power users”

IT staff generally have a fear of giving users access to the actual HTML content of the site. While it’s advisable to restrict this capability based on skill and experience, there tend to be a number of trustworthy “power users” in any organization – those who can greatly alleviate support requests and eventually help pull other users onto the system. Identify who these users are in your organization and, where appropriate, bring them into the IT fold.

1. Focus on Measurability and Cost Effectiveness.

Pay per click is highly measurable; it is relatively easy to extract the return on investment of a campaign, cost per sale or cost per conversion.

For Example:

Media Budget = $10,000
Clicks Received: 50,000
Average Cost per click: $0.2
Conversions: 300
Cost per conversion: $33.33

Compare this to traditional media campaigns where it is generally harder to measure and thus harder to justify expenditure.

2. Focus on Optimization

With constant feedback of campaigns through use of analytics or variable testing, it is common practice to measure and optimize campaigns. It only takes a matter of days, some times hours (depends on traffic levels), to gather statistically significant data and make improvements on ad copy or campaign landing pages.

Compare this to print ads, once a news paper or magazine ad is out, all you can do is cross your fingers and hope you get the marketing message right or that the product or service offering doesn’t change while the ad is in circulation.

Pay per click campaigns can change to meet consumer demands on the switch of a button, no need to wait for the next publication.

3. Focus on Segmentation

Pay per click campaigns can be segmented by:

• By Location – Geo-targeting works well, you can segment message to a regional audience and better address consumer needs in ad, landing page and product or service offering.

• By Browser language – If you target a niche minority group like the Hispanic community in the United States, targeting by browser language and location allows you to reach your audience effectively.

• By Gender –Gender targeting is somewhat inconsistent and produces varied results for different products, testing is recommended before using this feature as a main focus of any campaign.

• By Time of Day – Day parting allows ads to be shown by week day or between time intervals. i.e. Mon-Fri 8am-5pm. Many clients find sales peak during certain business hours or week days. This feature enables us to focus your ad message during the time and days that convert best for your business.

Effectively reaching your target market via traditional advertising mediums can be costly and time consuming. Pay per click is quick and simplifies this process, allowing for a more efficient spend of your marketing dollar.

4. Focus on Data Gathering

Pay per click findings can integrate well with other marketing initiatives:

• Successful ad copy and tag lines can be used in other marketing initiatives online and offline.

• Keywords with highest conversion rates can be isolated and used in search engine optimization or offline advertising.

• Keywords findings might result in new niche market findings or product development ideas.

• i.e. Shoe company finding high search volumes for “women shoes for men”.

non~linear clients often request information from us on how to manage SEO-friendly URLs, both for general website pages and for time-sensitive marketing campaigns.

The questions that concern most of our clients are:

1. How do I find the complete list of aliased URLs that are currently running on my site?
2. How can I find out how many visitors have accessed a specific, aliased URL?
3. I have a marketing campaign running, how can I set up a scheduled alias?

Most CMS products offer a URL alias feature; however, very few mid-market offerings can address all of the above requests. But with minimal configuration and some help from Google Analytics, Sitecore can offer these functions with surprising flexibility.

For the skeptics among you, let me outline how your marketing staff could easily create aliases for campaigns in Sitecore, on demand, without any intervention from IT:

John is a Marketing Manager for Acme. Acme is having a big sale on the 100 Rocket for the month of January, and John would like to set up a promotional URL at www.acme.com/rocket100 that takes any visitors to the main product page found at www.acme.com/products/rockets/100series/overview.aspx.

John would like to have this alias start operating on January 1 (the start date of the sale), and be disabled on February 2 (one day after the sale ends). At the end of the sale, John will need to know how many visitors accessed the promotional URL to gauge effectiveness of the marketing campaign.

This is what John should do:

1. Logging into Sitecore, John will access the Marketing Manager’s area of the site. Here, he can see all the existing aliases and create a new one using the floating toolbar – which he does.
2. Entering “rocket100” as the name of the alias, John then selects the main product page for the Acme 100 rocket as the destination for the alias.
3. John only wants this alias to be effective from January 1 to February 1, so he uses Sitecore’s “publication date control” to specify the date range.
4. When John hits the save button, Sitecore takes over and creates a new URL on the site that will activate on January 1 and include all the necessary Google Analytics code to track the URL’s activity.
5. At midnight on February 2, Sitecore will automatically deactivate the alias.

While I used Sitecore and Google Analytics as the example in this post, the same approach could be applied in Ektron, RedDot or OpenCMS-based sites, using almost any comprehensive analytics package.

Yammer, winner of this year’s Techcrunch 50, is “Twitter for the enterprise”. Simply put, it is a microblogging tool that limits users to a single email domain and is not accessible to the public. I’ve become a great fan of Twitter, so when a co-worker set this up for NLC yesterday, I was intrigued.

At first, participants were the usual suspects – a small group of social media enthusiasts within our company. But then, it took off like wildfire. By the end of the day, we had 16 participants and over 100 posts. A week later, we’re seeing ~70% company-wide adoption and daily participation.

What’s really neat is that the post value has stayed consistently high. Our free-wheeling discussion included Sharepoint behaviour in Chrome, various client projects we were working on and how we liked the service itself. Nobody got too silly;  perhaps because Yammer has the feel of a lunch table discussion where the whole company is present.

Although Yammer has been criticized for being a Twitter clone, they’re doing things right in these early days. They seem to have an almost instantaneous response rate to tweets and forum posts, probably due to the massive publicity off TC50,  and an API is due out soon. Also, their AIR-based desktop client is great.

All that being said, it remains to be seen if the tool will persist in value over the coming weeks.  A question was raised about why adoption at NLC was so fast, compared to some other tools we’ve tried out.

What we came up with was:

• instant collaboration, especially between our two offices
• minimal commitment (it’s quick and easy to participate)
• audience is limited to a private network
• the feel of a round-table discussion
• novelty

I hope these reasons can make it last, even just for a while.

In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed four types of internal blogging strategies:

• Executive blogs
• Blogging by subject matter experts
• Facilitated blogging
• Spontaneous or ad hoc blogging

This post, the last in our series, discusses a fifth internal blogging strategy – bringing the public blogs of employees home.

Blogs in the Wild

People blog.  Many of these people are employed.  Some of them may be employed at your corporation.  To some executives this is terrifying.  To some lawyer-types, external blog content may be inappropriate or even actionable.  One legitimate strategy for dealing with these external blogs is to repatriate them – bring them inside the corporation and limit concerns over liability and disclosure of corporate secrets.

Business Benefits of Blog Repatriation

If you can convince employees to bring their blogs within the firewall, your company receives s several significant benefits:

• You stop educating your competitors.  With blogs inside your firewall, only your organization benefits from knowledgeable insights published by your employees.
• You can control and limit any brand or liability issues that might arise when disgruntled or well-meaning but less-than-competent employees start publishing blogs
• You significantly reduce the visibility of your best and brightest employees to head hunters, recruiters and competitors.

Authors

An effective social media monitoring plan may allow you to identify employees authoring external blogs, particularly if you tune it (or work with your provider) to tune it for this purpose.

Associated Risks

You can’t stop employees from writing public blogs. At most, you can limit the information they share about corporate activities and culture.  In asking employees to bring their thoughts inside the firewall you face two risks:

• Leaving your most articulate, most internet-savvy employees with the impression that your firm simply doesn’t “get” the new world of user generated content.  This is probably not going to help retain millennial employees.
• Employees may perceive the corporation as attempting to infringe on their right to free speech.  Employees can easily react to a perception of the corporation as “big brother” by adopting pseudonyms. It may even drive the writers to more damaging observations.

Additional Thoughts

There is an alternative approach, one pursued by Microsoft and Dell.  Identify effective external bloggers, then assign them responsibility for writing corporate external blogs.  If you minimize the involvement of lawyers and the marketing team in the blog authoring process, this may allow you to gain some of the benefits of repatriation without the potential risks.