Blogging « Kristeen Bullwinkle

Mine your search logs for content ideas and direction

Your search logs provide great information for developing new content, clarifying and improving current content, and refining your pay per click campaigns. This is true for a blog or a website.

Where to find your search logs

Any analytics program will have a report on terms visitors used to find your site. In Google Analytics you’ll find the terms people used to find your site under Traffic Sources | Keywords. Some programs will also report on terms searched using your site search tool. If you’re using the Google site search engine on your site, uou’ll find those queries under Content | Site Search. Google Webmaster Tools will also give you a list of search queries. Bing Webmaster Center does not (although it provides information on backlinks, which is nice.)

Google Webmaster Tool provides this helpful summary of what it finds to be your top keywords. You’ll want to pay attention to it, too.

Google Webmaster Tools

If you’re in a large organization you might have to speak with someone in IT to get access to search reports for your site. If your subdomain or section of the larger site has its own search function, be sure to ask for searches on your section of the site and for any section related to yours. You want to know if people in a related section are actually wanting your content and just got lost. For example, if you’re a college within a university, you might want to see searches on the admissions or library sites.

Content ideas

If you write a blog, you need as many content ideas as possible and you’re bound to find a few in your logs. Look for the longer set of terms. These are often long tail searches that don’t produce a lot of search results. I found an odd one on my personal blog site: age 32 eyelashes growing gray. I’m not sure why my site turned up for those terms, but if I wrote on topics about health or aging I’d know I could write a post about premature graying (or perceived premature graying.)

Search queries are also often written as complete questions to which you can respond. An example: does cutting holes in a shipping container weaken them. You might want to watch for these type of question queries if you’re creating or editing an FAQ.

The next step is to look at how people using these search terms behaved. For the eyelash example above I see a 100% bounce rate. I know that the searcher didn’t find anything of interest on my site. I’m a little concerned that the searcher for amount 0f liquid morphine to overdose did stay on my site. I might want to go back and re-read my postings on outdated medical advice to be sure I don’t have anything posted that would assist with a suicide.

Look at search terms where you have low bounce rates, high pages per visit, and high time on site numbers. This can give you a sense of what content is sticky enough to engage your visitors. You might want to expand on the concepts that surround these search terms.

It will also give you an idea of terms bringing you visitors, but where you don’t have the quality of content to keep them on your site. In the example above, if I wanted to sell videos featuring children’s rhymes, I might want to consider writing new copy. But first I’d run that search myself, locate the page that comes up in results, and then check on the overall performance of that page. It could be that people searching for choosing rhymes just wanted the words to “One Potato Two.” In that case I might want to consider adding a new section to my site that features words or lyrics to common children’s poems and rhymes. Or adding something similar to my Facebook page or adding a space where people could vote for favorite rhymes they sang as a child.

Look for interesting topics showing up. You can use these insights to guide your social media discussions. If people are searching for something unexpected, ask your community for their thoughts. Are the searches you’re seeing for pink outdoor paint reflecting a trend among designers, for example?

Site search terms are a great place to locate synonyms you might want to use in your copy. They might even give you an idea of what type of people are not seeing the terms they expect. For example, someone might be searching for plantain lily when you always refer to that plant as a hosta.

Site fixes

You have a few choices to make when you see synonyms you’re not using in your content turn up in your logs.

If you have access to the search appliance, add that term and your preferred synonym to the thesaurus or create a keymatch term. Or ask your IT staff if they can make this update to your search tool for you. You want to be sure that someone searching for plantain lily sees search results as if they searched for hosta.
Review your navigation. If people are using your site search to find pages that should be easily accessible from your navigation, you know you need to do some user testing. If you’re in an industry which uses a lot of jargon and you might find these synonyms to be worth testing with your desired audiences to see if they are better recognized or understood. Using your audience’s language is always preferred.
Look at your page headings and titles in terms of terms that are showing up. Are you using these same terms or keywords? How about in your meta descriptions?

Search engine marketing

Google AdWords report option

If you are seeing terms in a search query report that have absolutely nothing to do with your product or service, add them to your keywords as negative keywords. That way you won’t be paying for clicks on hickory switch when you only sell hickory nuts.

Check your keyword reports to see which keywords are showing good conversions and consider expanding your content around those terms. Again, look at those long search phrases for the long tail keywords to exploit.

You might also spot a few keywords in your logs that you’ll want to add to the keywords you bid on in your advertising.

You might even find a clue to a small niche market under-served by you or your competitors.

Plus, looking through these logs can be entertaining. You might be surprised by the odd things people search for. Just remember that if you’re looking at your own site’s search logs, there will always be a few searches by people thinking they are searching the entire web universe. They didn’t really think you’d have world cup soccer scores on your farm equipment sales site. But the search for bunny fur hair dye remover might be legitimate.

Why your writers need to see your analytics reports

Would you like your editorial meetings more focused on your audience interests? Analytics can give them specific information to act upon.

Writers love feedback and will be fascinated by all this data, especially if they are more used to working in print media. Sometimes they are further removed from their audiences than they’d like and need to rely on internal resources for content ideas. Luckily it’s pretty easy to give them data they can trust more than opinions from higher ranking staff or executives.

Web analytics program like Google Analytics or Yahoo! Web Analytics—both free—provide insights into your readers’ interests.

What are people already reading on your site?

Keywords

Look at your organic keywords and not those from your paid advertising campaigns. Review the most popular keywords and look for surprises. Are there words missing?

Now that you’ve dug a little deeper and you might discover that “linens for crafts” is a fairly popular keyword phrase. Maybe you want to add a new page with craft patterns using old bed sheets and link to it from your popular recycled bedding page. Or maybe you’re seeing “bamboo cloth” rating highly and you could write something on linens and other items made from bamboo fabrics.

Make a list of the poorly performing keywords. Is “recycled bedding” as a search phrase showing high bounce rates? Do your own Web search and you might discover that many of your visitors were probably looking for pet bedding and not how to recycle old sheets. Maybe you want to add an article for pet owners.

Now look at the terms in the middle. You’ll find many useful keywords on down the list that you can assemble into new topic areas to write about. Or you’ll find opportunities for capturing traffic from searchers who use a long string of keywords because know exactly what they want (and will be happy to find that you have it) or who keep adding terms because their previous searches haven’t been fruitful (and will be grateful to find you have what they seek.)

Referring pages and sites

See how bloggers and other sites owners are linking to your pages. These links are explicit votes for your content. Are links coming to the pages you already knew were popular? Or are many linking to more specialized pages that you thought weren’t performing well? Is that page on large steel storage containers showing up on farming blogs when you hadn’t even considered farmers as one of your target markets?

Are you seeing people coming to your pages from an image search engine? Maybe you should spend a bit more time considering your image and graphic choices.

Are you seeing traffic from Twitter? Maybe it’s time to spend more time writing content for it or other social media.

What are people searching for on your site?

If you have an internal search engine then you have a profitable mine to go digging around in. If you’re writing about student housing but seeing lots of searches for “room and board” then you know that there’s an audience out there using terminology you aren’t. This is a great place to go searching for synonyms you should be employing in your writing (and even navigation.)

Perhaps you’re finding people searching for “recipes” when your site is just about food safety issues. Perhaps adding a few recipes will draw in more readers and keep them engaged with your site. Or you’re finding people searching for your product “Mmmyummies” as “Yummers.” You’ll want to create a new page for those searches with a title like “Mmmyummies are yummers.” It might sound corny, but it’s better than giving them a “no page found” message.

What are people commenting on or sharing?

You probably won’t find this type of data from your regular analytics packages. However, your blogging tool might provide you with a listing of your most recent comments or entries with the most comments. Those comments can be mined for new content ideas.

Setting up a report from socialmention.com, bit.ly, Facebook Insights, Google Alerts or other similar tools will give you an idea of what’s being shared. These will also give you a great sense for how your product or service is being talked about. You might find that an article is needed to clarify an issue in your industry or to address a general concern expressed by your intended audiences.

Commenting and responding: Catch them being good

What good things are people saying about you?

How do you find out if people are already talking about you or your products? That’s fairly easy because there are so many good free tools to help you.

You can begin with Google and its tools. If you type in your key terms (or the key terms for competitors) you can refine and filter your search to include blogs, videos, and forums; posts in the last hour, day or week; and sort the results. Try their wonder wheel, too, to discover other terms to search on.

hickory Other tools for searching blogs: Technorati or Blog Search Engine.

Tools for searching other social media: Social Mention (allows you to search for a string of words, such as “BBQ sauce” instead of searching for BBQ and/or sauce), Same Point (includes Twitter posts and podcasts), Icerocket (includes Twitter and video)

Don’t forget to search Q&A sites: Yahoo! Answers, Askville, LinkedIn Answers

Searches on social sites: Facebook’s Public Search, Twitter Search, Back Tweets, Digg Search

Video: Truveo Video

Some of these tools provide you with RSS feeds with your search results to be sent to you every day or week. Others will send you an email with updated results. Google Alerts and Giga Alerts are two services like this.

Saying thanks

Sometimes it's hard to know how to respond.

Now that you know what people are saying and where, you want to respond, right? You want to say thanks, argue with, or add to almost every posted item.

Don’t worry too much about saying thank-you; just do it. No one is ever really put off by a thank-you. And until you really get a feeling for the rules of a forum or how a blogger writes, this is probably the only safe immediate response.

Responding and engaging

After you’ve found something you really feel compelled to respond to, get some context. Read more about the person who you want to respond to. Sometimes you can tell that the person wants nothing more than to engage in heated battles. You might learn that his postings seem to overflow with praise for all sorts of things in hopes of being rewarded with a gift or dollars. You might find that she tweest constantly but has only three followers. The posts by these people probably aren’t worth a response.

But if you find that someone has honest praise, send a thank-you and perhaps a little additional information or an offer for anyone viewing your comment. You need to decide if you want to send the author/creator a message directly (it can be pretty easy these days to find an email address) or if you want to make a public reply. If you think you might want to ask the person for a testimonial or to be a guest blogger or engage with him or her directly at some point, I suggest posting something simple publicly and then sending a direct message or email a few hours later. That gives the author time to notice your reply and your name so he or she doesn’t think you’re a spammer.

If you are responding to something negative I suggest you prepare a response in Word or someplace other than the site where you want to post. This will let you take some time in editing your response and it’ll include a spell check. Be direct and specific and try to smile as you write. I once wrote a complaint email, received an immediate thankful response, kept up a conversation and became friends with the person I wanted to throttle weeks earlier. Being responsive allows a person to feel heard and understood. Being defensive makes the other party want to increase the offensive game. So be respectful and maybe make a friend. You’re making your customer service process public, so keep that in mind.

Keep an eye open for people posting about problems that you can help them solve. They might not know about you or your product, so you can introduce yourself. Keep the public posting brief and make direct contact. I have a client who called to follow up on a tweet, was hung up on, got a call back in apology, and made an immediate sale on a product that usually has a sales cycle of several months. As long as you only make the offer of assistance only once, your risk of being seen as a spammer is low.

Whenever you post a comment anywhere, be sure your signature line after your name provides a link to your own blog or web site. Make sure the link is relevant and perhaps re-write the link text to make it more obviously relevant. Provide the actual URL as some blogs and other sites won’t allow you to encode the link.

Keep following any discussion that ensues online. That might means checking back for several weeks. That might mean sending a message directly to the original author to check if everything is still good or has been resolved.

Expand the conversation

Let more people in on the discussion. Tweet a link to anything particularly flattering. Or retweet a tweet. Or write an entire blog post in response if you’re feeling like you have a lot to say. Or start a discussion in one of your own social sites, rephrase the original comments or link to the video, and ask for stories about similar experiences by others. Or if you found a story about something cool one of your clients did or wrote about, act like a proud grandparent and brag on them a bit in your own space, then invite their response.

Carve out a half hour a week or so to check on what’s being said about your topics. You’ll learn a lot about your customers or industry even if you seldom decide respond to anything directly.

Don’t be afraid to give

Giving away your content can seem counter intuitive. You sell this information. Or you’ve kept this information for only your best clients. Let’s consider how others have made money by giving content away.

Avinash Kaushik published a book that has been translated into six languages. He’s the analytics evangelist for Google. That’s not what sold the book. The source of the book’s content and one major reason it’s sold so well was Avinash’s blog, Occam’s Razor. I recently attended a webinar where he expressed his initial surprise that people would purchase what they could get for free. And they have.

I’ve attended and recommended seminars by the folks at Adaptive Path because I’ve read their blogs. Do I feel ripped off if they talk about something I’ve already read? No. I feel lucky to dig a little further into a topic or get it in another context.

I listen to This American Life for free via a podcast. And I’ve paid for a CD of past programs that are also available for free. I paid because I love their work, I want to support them, I wanted stories available to me in another format, and because a CD means more as a gift than does a link to a podcast.

Companies are even successfully selling content they’ve collected from their own customers. A local craft store in my neighborhood collected ideas for craft projects using no more than a yard of fabric. The store owners selected the best ideas submitted, added a few of their own, and are now successfully selling a book with 101 craft ideas. Are their customers angry? No, they’re buying their own copies.

Taking the risk to give away content you’ve always seen as a tradeable commodity often pays off.

It’s a little like sharing on a playground. If you want the other kids to play with you, sometimes you have to let them play with your toys for a while. The other kids are tempted by the free trial, watch how you behave, and then offer their friendship. If you hoard your toys around you, afraid of the bully who might try to take them from you, you’ll never get to play with the other kids. If you don’t share, you appear to be hiding something or just weird and unfriendly. No business today can afford to appear unfriendly.

Kristeen Bullwinkle

Online marketing, content strategy and site optimization