Session 3: Collapsed Lungs & Micro-hoo: SES London

[Luis]

Session 3: Search Term Research and Targeting

The third session of the day has a pretty big crowd, due no doubt to the inclusion of SEOChick Lisa on the panel. Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance is the first speaker (or at least I think she is - it's so dark in here that it's hard to tell) and gives a personal example of how assuming that the language and jargon that are used within a company are the same ones that a customer will be using can be a very dangerous one. It's a basic point but one that deserves constant repetition, as so many people still assume that they know what words their customers are using.

Christine goes through some of the basics of how to go about keyword research, which I won't go into here, as they've been covered elsewhere on SEOmoz (and other sites). I'd have to disagree with her suggestion that journalists are good sources of keywords because they understand their customers/readers. They do, but when they're writing in print they're able to get away with using jargon due to the context which print brings, which doesn't exist online. In other words, I can read a word in a magazine article and understand it, but it still might not be a word I'd use when looking for information on that subject. Read this if you don't agree.

However, her suggestions of mining forums, blogs, and even customer services teams, to discover how people are describing your company, products or industry, are great ones.

Maxime Grandchamp of Trellian also covers off a lot of the basics of keyword research: how to build up a list, targeting typos, etc. However, he does it in the form of a (very good) sales pitch for the KeywordDiscovery tool which Trellian sells, so I'm afraid to say that I drifted off a bit. If I want to buy a product, I'll come to your booth - please don't try to sell to me in a conference where the tickets cost the best part of £1,000 (even if mine was free).

Lisa comes on next, and she moves on from how to carry out keyword research to how to make use of that data. She points out that carrying out keyword research can bring up sites or companies that you wouldn't even have thought of as being competition; your offline competition may not necessarily be the same people that you need to worry about online (and, in fact, it's often nimble little start-ups that take ownership of competitive sectors online). She also demonstrates how keyword research can be wasted if care isn't taken over how they are used in description and title tags. After all, these tend to make up the main body of a listing in the SERPS and are, to all intent and purposes, a free ad, so make sure that they are unique and crafted with the user in mind.

The final speaker is Tor Crockatt from Microsoft adCenter, who I recognised from her time at Espotting/MIVA; she's ridiculously intelligent and always gives good PowerPoint presentations. She soon covers the reasons that keyword research is important, but in such a way that she makes it seem entirely different to what's been said by the other speakers. Equating relevance to the fact that search is, by its very nature, a pull medium, is a great way of putting everything into context. Her keyword algebra, on the other hand, is something that makes perfect sense, but is way too complicated for me to try and explain here. You really need to hear it in person.

She also covers the dangers of not being aware of how your keywords might cross into other industries (with a lovely example of how a hotelier in Bergerac had been confused when he received traffic from people looking for a British TV show) as well as things such as the use of multiple elements in a single search phrase, all of which have meanings of their own and so need to be carefully considered when using keyword insert tools. Whilst I understand that SES has to appeal to a variety of different skill and experience levels, Tor's presentation was on such a different scale of complexity (and quality) that I would have liked to have seen her have a session to herself, and think that the audience of such a session would have benefited from her being allowed to spend more time going over the topics she covered.

As the session moderator says following her presentation, "Who here doesn't wish that Tor was their grammar teacher when they were at school?" I certainly do, and think that there are a lot of people here who could do with Tor as their teacher now.

Ciarán