Keyword creativity in web design by Ken McGaffin, 5 October 2006

"Keyword Creativity" is the process of understanding customer behavior through keyword research and using the insights gained to drive the creative process.

Is "Keyword Creativity" a contradiction in terms?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Keyword research improves customer understanding

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.

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.

Creating customer personas is an established strategy in design and usability circles. But how often is a picture of the customer's search behavior included in such personas? Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs 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.

According to Thurow (writing in ClickZ), "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."

"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."

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.

Keyword Creativity - the process

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?" Draw up a seed list for each persona, made up of keyword phrases and individual keywords.
2. Now for each persona, go to the keyword Universe on Wordtracker and use the 'related terms' feature to expand your keyword lists. (For this you'll need an account, which you can sign up for on the (Wordtracker Keyword Tools homepage](/) 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.
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 - you'll find pricing details at (/reports.html).
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.
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:
   • Use them to generate ideas for campaigns and programs
   • Use them in all your advertising copy online and offline (people will often use the words they read offline in an online search)
   • Use them in the titles and content of articles that you write on your site and on external sites.
   • Use them in the titles of any whitepapers, research reports or guides that you may publish
   • Use them in product and service names wherever you can
   • Include them in press releases that you distribute

Keyword research brings business advantages

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 even happier.