The Art & Science of Keywords & Conversions

What does a tag cloud say about your business blog? Quite a lot, actually.  Remember… marketing is now publishing, and publishing is sales.  And within those disciplines lie the realm of both Art and Science.

Good Publishers will always tell you there is much art in what they do. Marketers often point to the science rooted nowadays in Analytics as the guide for their tactics. Looking at both gives you a one-two punch that’s hard to beat. We’ll take a look at both here for our site plus the blogs of three colleagues we often work with as collaborators in a content marketing cabal.  You can follow this whole cabal, and other SEO/SEM gurus on a Twitter list at:  Seo-Sem-cabal

“you should no longer be relying on standard reports in Google Analytics to plumb out what is going on at your sites…”

THE ART: Symbols in a Cloud

First, let’s take a fun visual look at the tag cloud that Wordle.net generates for the blogs from Junta42.com, ContentMarketingToday.com, acSellerant.com, along with our own here at WebFadds.com. Each company is a web development and marketing firm focused on creating compelling content driven solutions. Each company develops CMS solutions on the seo-savvy WordPress platform.  The tag clouds below give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text at the blogs.

Cloud for Junta42.com, “The Content Marketing Revolution Blog“, with Joe Pulizzi:

What immediately pops here is Content, Marketers, Marketing, Social, Media, and Brand. Joe, along with Newt Barret (next cloud) wrote the book, “Get Content, Get Customers“.

Cloud for ContentMarketingToday.com, “How to turn prospects into buyers with Content Marketing,” with Newt Barrett

Here, Newt Barrett (co-author of “Get Content, Get Customers“) writes an insightful blog where the words Marketing, Content, Customers, and Click stand out.

Cloud for acSellerant.com – “Profitable Growth for IT Providers,” with Bob Leonard

Bob runs a marketing agency focused on a particular niche — IT Vendors & Providers. His cloud reveals the terms Content, Information, Prospects, Sales, People, and Clients.

Cloud for WebFadds.com – “Tactics & Strategies for Success Online,” with Scott Frangos

Scott (that’s me) is Managing Director for WebFadds.com, a firm offering SEO-smart CMS solutions built in WordPress, Social Media and Optimization services.  Here, the words, New, Marketing, Google, and Test stand out.

Ok, there’s a quick look at the visual poetry — the art of what is being presented at these marketing tactics blogs, in the form of a word cloud. As we move now to the science, some key questions are:

• How do the words emphasized sync up with the keywords people search on to reach those sites?
• Does analytics — the science within the art — tell us of other keywords that are valuable and so should be included more often to serve readers first, and then SEO — second?

THE SCIENCE: What’s Actionable About These Keywords?

To keep this article at a workable length, we’ll take a brief look at some Analytics science relating to the word cloud you just saw for WebFadds.com — watch here for more on related tactics and strategies.

First, I looked for the major four keywords from the WebFadds.com cloud — New, Marketing, Google, and Test — in the keywords reports for analytics.  Guess what?  Not a lot going on.  There were two visits for terms containing “Google”, for example when I had written about Google Wave, and CMS ranking in Google.  I’ll give you a conclusion about this below.  Next I moved on to the term “WordPress”, and found some actionable information — a good thing, since we are focused on WordPress as a CMS development platform.

To learn more, I went beyond the simple keyword reporting in Analytics, using a filter technique.  If you get anything from the science part of this post, it is that you should no longer be relying on standard reports in Google Analytics to plumb out what is going on at your sites. Instead take advantage of advanced filters and custom reporting features to get a good handle on the order in the chaos of your site.

Filter for a particular keyword in your cloud:

Above, I used the new Keyword Filter to go beyond what Google Analytics shows in its standard reports, and take a look at how people entered using the word “WordPress” in a search phrase. More, I wanted to learn what key phrases a visitor used turned out to cause them to visit more than one page at our site — the second part of the filter. This “data mining” provided the following result…

I see four key phrases containing the term “WordPress”, but one stands out in terms of new visits, time on site, bounce rate, and pages per visit — “wordpress installation service.”

Actionable Conclusions:

• Using “wordpress installation service” in new blog posts should help us gather more visitors seeking the WordPress installation service we offer.
• We need to use another smart filter technique in Analytics to study how visitors on this key term are converting to leads
• The major keywords in our cloud — New, Marketing, Google, and Test — are not yet yielding any trackable visitor behavior of value to WebFadds.com — probably too general.

Of course there’s much more you can review from the science end, and then apply it back to the art in your publishing. What art? Copywriting, design, and the art of engagement itself which involves new social media techniques, along with good old human social skills. The important thing is to stay focused on serving your visitors in such a way that it inspires them to help you meet your business goals.  Contact us today, and I’ll work with you to develop a successful campaign for your web business.