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Keyword creativity in web design 5: Time to make amends Posted by Neil Davidson on 11 November 2009
Bob has followed Laura into Buck’s, his local restaurant, to confront her about her deception and found her with Carl Carter. It ended in a fight with Carl Carter.
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Previous episodes…
- Episode one: Keyword creativity in web design
- Episode two: Using keyword research to tackle new business
- Episode three: Secrets and lies
- Episode four: Big brother is watching you
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- Laura confesses.
- Mike tells Bob how to use keywords to create better strategies for websites and to transform the web design process.
I was back in Buck’s on Monday, with Laura again. I was glad that a weekend had passed between my confrontation with Laura and Carl Carter. I was also glad that I was still allowed in Buck’s and that Laura and I were still friends.
We had both said harsh things on Friday. I had told Laura that I couldn’t believe she had betrayed my trust in her and she said that she couldn’t believe that I thought she would do such a thing. We had our stand-up argument as Carl Carter nursed a sore jaw, although my right hand didn’t feel great either.
Jamis, the owner of Buck’s, had known us for years, and he stepped into the middle of the argument and told us to calm down. He told us to go off and enjoy our weekends and then come back to Buck’s on Monday morning, as usual, and try to sort things out. He told us that if we did that breakfast would be on him. Then Carl Carter stood up. He told me that he wasn’t going to call the police, but that he would have his revenge when he won the WRC pitch. Then he told Jamis that he should ban me from Buck’s for punching one of his customers. Jamis doesn’t like to be told what to do, so he told Carl that he was banned.
That was the only good thing that happened last Friday evening. Now Laura and I were trying to pick up the pieces.
"I never told Carl Carter anything, Bob. He’d been pestering me since the day you went away on vacation, saying that I should come and work for him. He said that he knew all about the real Bob Arden from all those years ago, and that you would do to me what you had done to him. He told me not to trust you. You never talk about those days, so I didn’t know what he meant.
"I was going to tell you that the day you came back, but when you told me about your baby news I didn’t want to spoil it. He must have followed me here on Friday too, weirdo." She smiled. "When you came in, I was waiting for a friend, but Carl had just sat down and asked me why I wasn’t returning his calls. Didn’t I want to hear about the real Bob Arden? You do believe me, don’t you Bob? You'd better."
Carl had told a different story last Friday. He said that Laura was going to join him, straight after they had won the WRC pitch. So, there were three versions of the story, Laura’s, Carl’s and Mike’s. I had spoken to Mike over the weekend and had asked him if his reliable source could tell the difference between someone meeting a rival because they wanted to and being seen with that rival because he was following them.
It was one of the few times I had ever heard Mike sound unsure of himself, but he still wouldn’t quite admit that he might be wrong. Now all I had was my own judgment. What were all those years working together worth, when I had trusted her with everything and she had never let me down? I had to trust her.
"Laura, I’m sorry. I’ve just been so obsessed with getting things perfect with the business. Maybe I’ve been getting things out of proportion. Maybe I’ve been listening to the wrong people too much."
"Let me guess. Mike?"
"He only told me what he’d heard because he cares about me. I’m sorry."
The silence was broken by the appearance of Jamis at the table.
"So, how about those two breakfasts that I promised if you two idiots made up?"
It was down to Laura now, whether she forgave me.
"Alright, Jamis," she said. "Eggs florentine for me."
Using keyword research to transform the business
We had finished breakfast and started to talk about the WRC pitch. I told Laura about everything she had missed and now I had the creative ideas on my laptop screen. The creatives had come up with decent content ideas for the three different target audiences, corporate, experienced and inexperienced individuals, and had mapped out different journeys through the new website for each audience. The team had written some sample copy as well, using the keywords we had discovered, both as a stimulus and as content.
Over the weekend, they had taken some photographs to demonstrate the sort of imagery they thought would work for all the audiences. They had done a lot and I had put a lot into the briefing, especially the keyword research work. So why was I still unsure whether it was right or not?
"You’re still not convinced we’ll win this, are you?"
Laura always could read my mind.
"I’ve done enough pitches to know when we’ve got some good work, but that never guarantees how the client’s going to react, especially not when we’re pitching to a client who wants to see us slip up. How many pitches have we lost, even when we were still sure we had the right solution for the client, even when we still thought so after the pitch?"
We were both quiet amidst the usual noises in Buck’s at breakfast time, shouts from the waitresses, the clattering of plates in the kitchen and the excited chatter from people at the other tables, all of them sure that this would be the week when they would change everything, just as I had been sure last week. Then a new message popped up on my screen. I had mail, from Mike of all people. I had to show Laura that I trusted her again, so I turned round the screen and we read the email together. Here is what we read:
Done a bit more thinking about your pitch, and your business as well. I’ve typed the next part in capitals, to make sure you understand:
YOU CAN USE KEYWORD RESEARCH TO TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS
You can do a lot more with keyword research, and not just to sort out clients’ SEO strategies. It’s like getting your hands on the sort of data that the advertising and marketing agencies that I used to worked for spent millions of dollars to get their hands on. I know you’re a bit slower than me, so let me explain. I’ve even show you how you can use it to win this WRC pitch.
* All this keyword data gives you scores on different search terms. Right? Well, a lot of these scores are exactly what we try to do in advertising all the time. We try to find out what a product’s relevant differentiation is. It’s all about finding out something that your customers want, but that no one else is giving them. These scores don’t just tell you what terms people are using to search online, it can tell you what they want, from products and communications, and it quantifies it. I cannot believe how much time and money this data could save you, as well as making your business smarter – use it! Keyword research tells you what your customers want.
* Use keywords to tell you what you need to know about how different customer groups are thinking, what they want from your clients, and what sorts of web designs will connect with them, not just for keywords. This data helps you to think like your client’s customers, not like your client. That’s really important – some clients think in terms of their business, not their customers. So you can be a step ahead of them! Looking down the keyword list, words like ‘wilderness’, ‘wild water’, ‘adventure’ and ‘extreme’ jump out. So, are people seeking thrills outdoors? They seem to be and that’s something that WRC can offer, and in spades. So, web pages devoted to ideas around ‘outdoor thrill seeking’ could pull in customers who hadn’t even thought about whitewater rafting when they started searching. Great!
* Use keyword research to give you quick data on most markets online. Here’s a good example that’ll impress Larry. Look at the number of searches for Californian whitewater rafting every day, multiply it by 365 and take away 20%, for duplication. That’s the minimum number of people searching for what he offers over a year. Using just a few place names, I came up with a count of over 600 per day – that adds up to about 200,000 a year. How many of those do you think Larry is getting at the moment? Why don’t you ask him at the pitch?
* Use keyword research to help your website strategy. Everyone is searching ‘whitewater rafting’ with a destination in mind. So what could that mean? It probably means that they’ve done a lot of research beforehand elsewhere, or that they’ve been before, so they are quite specific in what they are looking for. Make it easy for them to get to what they want quickly, starting with a destination, and don’t throw lots of unnecessary details about other locations at them. Maybe even have different websites to deal with this as well. You’re the expert, supposedly. Go figure. You can see from the list of keywords that people include destinations in their searches – Grand Canyon rafting, Alaskan whitewater rafting, whitewater rafting California. Any SEO would optimize on these keywords, but why not go further? What variations on place names do people use? Southern California, Northern California, Sunshine State etc. Each of these variations could give you more powerful keyword combinations.
* Use this data to help understand different target audiences and judge the right website designs. Even with a little bit of digging I found out something really interesting about this audience. There’s a really high score for ‘team building adventures’, and that’s something your client can deliver! Go and do your SEO stuff around that, but make sure that’s part of the brief for whatever the website will deliver for that audience. Place names should affect your SEO, but they should also affect your designs. If people are looking for destinations, show them destinations. It’s that simple – give potential customers what they want. Yes, I know. I am a genius.
* Use the data to take the subjectivity out of briefing and judging whatever your team comes up with, even out of what the client thinks of the creative work. End the squabbling over what’s the right idea, the right color or the right way to communicate something. Take the corporate audience - if I know that they are looking for team building adventures, any idea or design that doesn’t give that to them is off brief, and you can prove it to the creative teams and to the client! The popularity scores are a great guide to the sorts of things that web designs should and shouldn’t be reinforcing. And don’t forget about whitewater rafting newbies – ‘what is whitewater rafting?’ and ‘learn whitewater rafting’ will work for them.
That’s more than enough. Do you want me to run your agency as well? By the way, how’s the hand, Tyson? I hope that you’re having breakfast with the lovely Laura, and that everything’s OK again. Ask her, when can I take her out for dinner to make up for the damage my unreliable source caused?
Cheers, Mike
I knew by Laura’s smile that she must have got to the end of the email. Mike really was the most arrogant man I had ever known, but he was smart and good-looking as well. He’d come up with ideas around some of the things I had been thinking about, but he’d gone further than I had. Thanks to him I probably had twice as much insight about WRC as Carl Carter had. We would win this pitch, I was sure of it, and after that everything else in my business would change as well.
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* Bob finally meets Larry Mackay again. Will Bob win the pitch?
* Can he heal the wounds in his relationship with Laura?
* Mike gives Bob some final tips on using keyword research data, including how to use it to help him market his own agency.
* Go to episode 6: Making the perfect pitch
About Neil Davidson
Neil Davidson is a marketing communications consultant and writer with fifteen years experience in advertising and direct marketing at a senior level, in client and agency organisations, managing several major agencies and his own companies. He now works with several partners in the areas of advertising, direct marketing, digital marketing, narrative marketing and writing. He also teaches creative writing from time-to-time. Read his blog at Silver Darlings
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