Forum Moderators: phranque
The study focused on the travel industry and gave a well-educated test group the same destination (San Diego) and then measured the group’s success or failure when planning their trips. The study took a count of the search terms used by the participants while searching for San Diego travel info and compared those terms to the keyword densities of the various travel sites they surfed. The results were pretty revealing. (see below)
Top words for marketers – hotels, book, member, new, visitor
Top words for users – beaches (#1 by a long shot), museum, food, walk
The conclusion of the study was that marketers (web designers) are using different language and semantics when trying to communicate/sell to the end user and thereby frustrating the search for pertinent information. Obvious reason for this is that we don’t care about “beaches” or “walk” but we definitely care about “hotels”$$$. Soooo ultimately the question is ….. Does a marketer need to change his semantics to more closely match a user’s search interests and will this result in more cash?
One school of thought says No. Most successful e-commerce operations really have a laser focus on their core product and on closing the sale. Ala, do NOT bring in unnecessary elements such as “beaches” if you are selling hotels. See expedia.
On the other hand is the client always right? Will peripheral “beach” content get a marketer closer to closing more sales?
Very curious if anyone has thoughts or even direct experiences that relate to the question.
Give people some information they can use - and through some relevant product & service ads along with it and you will make money.
Same with hotels, but it is MUCH more competitive.
There is always going to be a balance between people trying to get info on something - and people being sold stuff as well. Provide the info and you can sell stuff along with it.
When they did search for "beaches," were they really expecting to find "hotels"? If I were marketing vacation properties - which I am - I would not be ready to throw away my favorite keywords just yet.
Curious to hear what others think...
Welcome to WebmasterWorld, hsmit!
Yes, they want hotels near the beach, they want to know what restaurants are within walking distance, if museums are nearby, if they can walk to the beach, take long walks along the beach, if their room faces the beach, if there are restaurants on the beach. They want to know how good the food is, where the food is and whether or not their kids can visit the museum without driving 50 miles away from the beach. People taking vacations don't plan on spending all their time in their rooms. It's the attractions at the destination they plan on visiting.
>>I would not be ready to throw away my favorite keywords just yet
And you shouldn't. Just create more pages and target more phrases. ;)
I can't imagine people searching for "food" by itself or something like that, but then again - I can't imagine people searching for half the stuff I see in real searches - my favorite being - I think it was "My girlfriend has a contact lens in her left eye"
What exactly were they looking for?
It would be useful to know if the subjects were actually motivated buyers. From the summary it seems not, and i think there may have been differences if they were not. Certainly fromthe survey design, it seems that it is highly oriented to "information seeking" responses anyway.
That said we find major differences between what we used to optimize our sites keywords for and simple tests where we ask groups of targeted potential clients to sit in front of a monitor and try to find a service like ours in response to a certain company need for the service. They can choose any search engines and their keystrokes are recorded. These tests now inform a lot of our keyword optmization efforts.
Just to underline- these are often different from what we thought!
So I do understand what you are saying.
hotels near widget beach
restaurants near widget hotel
best food in widgetville
hotels near widget museum
rooms near widget cliff walk
widget beach motels
widget beach restaurants
beach access for widget hotel
cheap rooms in widget beach
and "walk to the beach from widget hotel" came in at #17 on the referral list of phrases for one of the sites.
Forget about "motivated buyers" and listen to people talk when they plan a trip. Many of the same phrases they use in casual conversation appear in logs as search engine referrals.
Then ask yourself why "book" and "member" are important keywords. Sounds more like library keywords... ;)
Why? They are the ones that are more likely to buy and filters out the information seekers, researchers, and student projects.
I agree very much however with your advice to listen to naturalistic discussions between people planning trips. One great poor-boy method of doing this is to go to traveler discussion boards such as Lonely Planet and many others - also the usenet, though you get a very highly biased high tech demographic there - try the usenet rec-travel discussions... (chiyo's hard earned tip of the day!)
Sometimes it helps to think in terms of "people" and not "buyers". If you can remember that while you're writing your copy the copy seems to connect better with the reader.
>>>>It would be useful to know if the subjects were actually motivated buyers.
Test group were definitely "buyers". The study was set up to where one person in the group would win the trip that they planned to San Diego. The terms beaches, museum were probably entered on various reputable portal site that the study discussed ex. San Diego Chamber of Commerce site or might have been combined with the destination words San Diego beaches, San Diego walks ect.
>>>Throw away my keywords ..... And you shouldn't. Just create more pages and target more phrases. ;)
I agree with targeting more phrases but it still begs the balancing question of the webpage providing too much content/too many possible directions thereby unintentionally misdirecting the user from the Most Wanted Response goal of a sale. Seth Godin wrote a very simple but good book about this issues that stressed that each page should have only one MWR (most wanted response). And as always the MWR is the sale.
I really believe that it is correct to provide more content and mirroring the users semantics and desires but still Why aren’t the big booking sites Expedia, hotels.com etc not doing this?
Even at their size seems there would be value in this endeavor.
I think many people labor under the assumption that people land on the index page and travel through the site in some linear fashion. It rarely works that way.
If you create individual pages targeting phrases people searching for those phrases will land on the page that they targeted when they keyed in their search phrase. You can maintain MWR for a page and the issue only becomes muddy when you talk about MWR for an entire site.
I don't know why the big boys aren't going after all the phrases they can target. I can only go by what I know works for some of the small to mid-range players. As long as I can keep increasing their sales they stay happy.
