SMX Live: What Search Data Reveals About Customer Needs & Desires – And How To Use It

Mar 1, 2012 - 1:40 pm 0 by
Filed Under SMX West 2012

Live Blogging Coverage SMXBelow is live coverage of the What Search Data Reveals About Customer Needs & Desires – And How To Use It panel from the SMX West conference. This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.

Disclaimer: The coverage is brought to you in real time, using a custom live blogging tool. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments for inclusion into the live coverage. During the live event, live notes will auto-scroll with newest entries at top. After the session is complete the archive version will have the oldest entries at the top. We ask you to please excuse any typos, as these are live notes.

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Keri Morgret: 10:48:04 am
We've got Mike King up first for this session.
Keri Morgret: 10:49:05 am
He's going to show us tools to look at the intersection of search and social.
Keri Morgret: 10:49:47 am
Right now search is too impersonal. You can't get to intent from just this. You need to build personas.
Keri Morgret: 10:51:10 am
Look at need states and use that for keyword research. Next on to how to develop personas. Mike is going really fast, and I missed the URL for his presentation, so I'm only getting a fraction of what he's saying.
Keri Morgret: 10:51:31 am
You need to figure out what the real goal of the client is, not necessarily what they say their goal is, because that might not be a true goal.
Keri Morgret: 10:51:50 am
Facebook Ad Planner is the personas version of the adwords keyword tool.
Keri Morgret: 10:52:29 am
Social Mention, Topsy, Amplicate are free social listening tools.
Keri Morgret: 10:55:36 am
Mike is referencing a couple of posts he made on SEOmoz at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-new-seo-process-quit-being-kanye and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/just-how-smart-are-search-robots
Keri Morgret: 10:56:24 am
He's describing keyword-level demographic data. Some good stuff here.
Keri Morgret: 10:57:24 am
You can figure out conversion rates per persona after you do all of this, do dynamic targeting.
Keri Morgret: 10:58:26 am
He's talking about the Target example now.
Keri Morgret: 10:59:08 am
Other data sources. Pzyche.com, LinkedIn, Google+.
Keri Morgret: 11:00:15 am
Track what social networks your visitors are logged in to when they visit your site. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/visitor-social-network-login-status-google-analytics
Keri Morgret: 11:00:42 am
Examples of using dynamic messaging based on ranking.
Keri Morgret: 11:01:43 am
Mike doesn't care about (not provided). He cares if search as a channel is converting. He knows what keywords he targets for a landing page, the target audience, etc. You know from conversions what's happening.
Keri Morgret: 11:02:52 am
Now Bill Hunt is up.
Keri Morgret: 11:03:41 am
It's his 27th wedding anniversary, and one of the few times he has missed his anniversary. He was also in the Marine Corps, been in search for 17 years.
Keri Morgret: 11:03:59 am
He's releasing a software tool that does a lot of what Mike talks about.
Keri Morgret: 11:04:34 am
You're wanting to find voice of your customer.
Keri Morgret: 11:05:04 am
Use your search keywords for your social media monitoring.
Keri Morgret: 11:05:15 am
Query intent. The persona side here is important.
Keri Morgret: 11:06:08 am
He shows several types of keyword models.
- Missed Opportunity Matrix
- Needle in Haystack Model
- Co-Optimization Modeling
- High Ranking / Underperforming
- Searcher Intent Modeling
- EOL Product Opportunity
- Keyword Cluster and Authority Modeling
- and more
Keri Morgret: 11:06:43 am
The keyword qualifier helps us understand the audience.
Keri Morgret: 11:08:47 am
Good example of showing what a manufacturer calls an item but what people search on. Highest search volume is lowest keyword competition.
Keri Morgret: 11:10:38 am
71% of keyword variations with SAT wasn't involved in SAT test prep -- they wanted to know the day of the test, how to get their results, etc. Lots of negative opportunities there.
Keri Morgret: 11:11:58 am
They got taxonomy from search data, went into social media to see how people talked about it.
Keri Morgret: 11:14:25 am
Keyword and Content mis-match. UK travel site matched keywords to top ranking pages. They swapped that page to the page with "best chance for conversion". They had a site with great CTR with no conversion. What happened is page was going to last year's Easter travel with no conversion action. 301'd to current year, got huge lift in conversions.
Keri Morgret: 11:15:15 am
66% of searches related to "pet food" are dog related.
Searches on dog food are nearly 2.5 times higher than searches for cat food.
Keri Morgret: 11:16:10 am
Getting searches for "how to"? Make a video!
Keri Morgret: 11:17:18 am
For outdated products, replacing PDFs with actionable landing pages delivered additional 50,000 visitors per month. Nearly $400k in incremental revenue over six months.
Keri Morgret: 11:18:57 am
click for full size
Keri Morgret: 11:19:06 am
Putting paid and organic data together.
Keri Morgret: 11:20:14 am
Next example is cloud computing.
Keri Morgret: 11:20:49 am
Matched role with keyword. Found they weren't reaching the people they thought they were reaching. Leads and conversions went up when they changed their messaging.
Keri Morgret: 11:21:32 am
Wrapping up:

Understand "real intent" of user queries
Understand the "real" performance of keywords
Understand the context of keywords
Classify keywords in logical segments
Keri Morgret: 11:22:52 am
Next up is Hamid Saify.
Keri Morgret: 11:24:53 am
click for full size
Keri Morgret: 11:25:33 am
I'm thrilled that someone else loves search query data!
Keri Morgret: 11:25:49 am
In search queries, HTC found demand for phones in different colors.
Keri Morgret: 11:26:30 am
9-12 million color-related HTC searches annually.
Keri Morgret: 11:27:19 am
The searches help validate to Sprint that there was demand.
Keri Morgret: 11:28:49 am
Look at how people are behaving once they come to the site, based on keywords, even on a branding campaign.
Keri Morgret: 11:29:19 am
Use social conversation to update messaging.
Keri Morgret: 11:31:15 am
This has been talked about in several sessions and is important -- you've got some great free market research in your social data. LISTEN to what people are already telling you.
Keri Morgret: 11:31:31 am
It's not just about keywords, but also interests.
Keri Morgret: 11:31:58 am
click for full size
Keri Morgret: 11:33:00 am
Interest targeting through search and content stimulates other media.
Keri Morgret: 11:33:28 am
Advertising for a game that had sci-fi fans, advertised on sci-fi shows.
Keri Morgret: 11:34:04 am
'We need more of those "oh shit that's cool" moment in search'
Keri Morgret: 11:36:39 am
They found two minutes of game footage did better than the 30 second produced commercial. Had a difficult time breaking it to the creative team. But they can tell by search which is doing better. Search gives good insight.
Keri Morgret: 11:38:43 am
They had a landing page that wasn't converting well. Did some testing on image ads, found image that performed way better, took this back to website team.
Keri Morgret: 11:39:23 am
What Matters?
Get early buy in, prove it, wow them.
Be adventurous
Your audience aren't zombies, treat them as humans.
Raid your mom's cabinets for cookies.
Keri Morgret: 11:40:38 am
We're all sitting on actionable data. Break in, look at that data, you've got wonderful stuff there.
Keri Morgret: 11:41:17 am
Q&A time now. All three presentations were great!
Keri Morgret: 11:46:13 am
You can have a hard time convincing a company outright to give you the time to mine your data. Go and see what nuggets you can find, start off with a small finding and go from there.
Keri Morgret: 11:47:03 am
Don't call it SEO data. Give it a name like consumer intents. Stop being the meek little SEO, says Bill Hunt.
Keri Morgret: 11:48:57 am
Hamid: changing an ad-agency mindset is like turning the titanic.
Keri Morgret: 11:59:27 am
If you have a really niche keyword, maybe take a step back and look at slightly more broad keywords.
Keri Morgret: 12:01:37 pm
And we're done with the session!
 

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