Chasing down the bogus leads

Spiderman 3, American Idol winner, Britney Spears.

These are the keywords that brought you here. This is something any online communication manager or web strategist learns first. But what’s often overlooked is the importance of knowing which keywords to avoid to keep unwanted traffic away.

For those who landed here by accident, this is a blog about online content writing and marketing communication. You were brought here because of the combination of words at the start of this article (generated by Google trends/zeitgeist, as current top searches). My apologies for wasting your time.

The subject of my post for today is keywords search relevancy. Most online communicators understand search relevancy as how a search engine determines whether a Web page or site is important for a particular search query. But I’m looking at it from an online business perspective.

These days, with the numerous online tools available, most business websites can quickly figure out the basic set of keywords that will drive traffic towards them. Once regular traffic has been established, the next step is in ensuring that a higher percentage of traffic results in sales. This means focusing on the quality of your traffic, rather than quantity.

As always, the first step is measurement. Which of your keywords are resulting in sales and which are not? Most good web analytical tools will tell you this, once you’ve set your conversion goals. But they won’t tell you what percentage of each keyword is bringing in people who have no interest in your product or offering.

For example, if you’re selling the Volkswagen Beetle, you may be driving a large number of naturalists to your site, who may be more than happy to fill a form for a free-test drive. But as a target they are unlikely, if ever to make a purchase. And if you’re paying for every naturalist who clicks on your Beetle ad, that’s just money down the drain. This gets further compounded when multiple teams are involved in following each lead up.

You will therefore need to track backwards (from your sales team, registration page or whatever your conversion goal), every bogus lead based on the keyword search. And then identify which keywords are resulting in the highest misses.

This is basically the opposite of lead conversion. By tracing bogus conversions and knowing which keywords are resulting in high misses, you can then take action.

Unfortunately, once you find the problem there’s really no single way to solve it. For me, it’s a combination of trial, error, fine-tuning and getting specific with negative keywords.

If you know of another way, do let me know.

Freshness guaranteed!

One of the most common refrains you hear from clients in India, while working on their website content or marketing material is this: “Have your writer take a look at this content and make it fresh.”

If you’re not from India that basically means “do a rewrite”.

This used to be the source of endless frustration for me as a writer, because if I think the content has been well-written, I prefer to use it exactly as it has been given.

In India, that could be a problem, because:

1. The content is not client-original, meaning they’ve ripped it off competitor sites.
2. The content has been written by the CEO, CTO, VP-whatever for a completely different purpose and your client is actively recycling.
3. The client wants his money’s worth out of the writer.

The above cynical view developed over my time with agencies. However, now that I’m on the other side of the table, I not only see it was remarkably accurate, but I now have a few more reasons to add:

1. The content was written in 1987 when the company was founded. It was never updated and by “making it fresh” they want YOU to get their sales material up-to-date.
2. The content has been used so many, many times in multiple formats across group websites, intranet pages and newsletters, that they are just sick of seeing it, and want to “repackage” it in a way that’s “fresh and new”.
3. SEO is the flavor of month and so the client wants content to be constantly updated. Unfortunately, there’s no new information.

If you have a tone or theme for your content, this issue of new content usually sorts itself out. Or if you understand what’s going on behind the curtains, you can usually get a general idea of what the client expects to see in the rewrite. However, if all you’ve heard is “make it fresh” without the knowing the reason why, you’re in for a long rally of submissions and rejections.

So as always, I encourage you to pick up the phone and ask.