online research

using research to guide digital strategy
Lecturer Monika Skaržauskaitė

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

Showing up in the top 3rd of the SERPs for a keyword phrase is critical for driving traffic
to your website.

The long tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any
given day, but, when taken together, they comprise the majority of the world's demand for information
through search engines.

Lesson for marketers
LONG
TAIL
KEYWORDS
OFTEN
CONVERT
BETTER, BECAUSE THEY CATCH PEOPLE LATER IN THE
BUYING/CONVERSION CYCLE.

keyword research
IT'S NOT ALWAYS ABOUT GETTING VISITORS TO
YOUR SITE, BUT ABOUT GETTING THE RIGHT
KIND OF VISITORS.
Why you need that?
If you don’t know the ways people are seeking your
content, it’s pretty hard to ensure that your content “speaks”
to
them
using
the
words
they
search
for.

The first stage in SEO keyword strategy
development is to create an exhaustive list of
potential keywords and keyword phrases. In this
activity, the focus is on thinking broadly to ensure
as many candidate keywords as possible are
considered. The goal is to be overly inclusive so as
not to miss any high potential keywords.
set of working hypotheses

Thinking like a customer
When generating keywords it is important to think like
a customer, and in particular, to think like a new
customer. When people begin their search for your
goods or services, they are typically at the beginning of
their education process
Example: hearing aids, not electroacoustic devices.

Remember: target audiences +
personas
• What do they want?
• What needs are not met?
Why we need these?
Content strategy – provide content that us useful
and relevant (example: eco cosmetics)
Targeted keyword discovery – base keywords on
what audience wants not on what you have on your
site

Your personas
MRU

Rinno hotel

1.

1.

2.

3.
4.

Prospective International
Student for Bachelors’ Degree
(Business Informatics)
Prospective International
Student for Masters’ Degree
(Electronic Business
Management)
Prospective Student for
Bachelors’ Degree- Lithuanians
(Financial Economics)
Prospective Student for Masters’
Degree- Lithuanians
(Communication and Creative
Technologies)

Belarusian persona

??? visitors from other countries
coming for business
??? visitors from other countries
coming for touristic reasons

Hotels in Vilnius

Study in Lithuania

Consumer behavior in choosing four star hotels in
Vilnius http://vddb.laba.lt/fedora/get/LT-eLABa0001:E.02~2010~D_20100903_12423924109/DS.005.0.01.ETD

Number of international students in Lithuania went
up by third over four years
http://www.15min.lt/en/article/culturesociety/number-of-international-students-inlithuania-went-up-by-third-over-four-years-528286396#ixzz2QYap0iKT

In 2012, according to the Lithuanian State
Department of Tourism, 400,000 Belarusian
guests visited Lithuania.
http://belarusdigest.com/story/vilnius-newmecca-belarusian-shoppers-and-activists-13258
Overnights of non-residents by country in all paid
accommodation in 2007. Germany 17,0%, Poland
15,4%, Belarus 11,7%, Russia
10,2%
http://www.tourism.lt/upload/VTD%20statistika
%202007_2.pdf

What is stopping students from studying abroad?
http://chronicle.com/article/Dearth-of-InformationKeeps/137707/
Best places to study abroad
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/her-campus/6-bestplaces-to-study-ab_b_2823871.html
Factors Influencing the Students' Decision-Making to
Study Abroad
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnum
ber=5578491&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.o
rg%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D5578491

brainstorming
method # 1

“Affliction vs. Aspiration”
helps us get creative around potential topics for
content.

1.
2.
3.
4.

5.
6.
7.
8.

9.

Lay down your personas on sheets I distributed. Read it over and adopt this
user’s mindset.
Make two columns with the headings: “Aspirations” and “Afflictions”
Tape your user persona in the upper left hand corner.
Under the “Aspiration” column, write down everything you feel your user
persona is aspiring to do in life. Remember people buy on emotion and backfill
with logic. Defer any judgment on whether your product or service fits these
desires. Just go for quantity.
Take a break
Under the “Affliction” column, do the same thing. Focus on how the existing
reality is not working for your user persona and seek to tie it into emotional
responses. “No time for the gym” or “long commute”.
Look over your two columns. Do common themes start to emerge? Are there any
good fits where your product or service can help make the user persona’s life
easier or better? Jot these down and stick it to the whiteboard.
From these two simple categories of Afflictions and Aspirations, we can work out
our keyword phrase strategy. Tackling each one of these phrases, we can create a
blog post, video, photos or a specific page on our website that deals with this
and optimize it around that targeted keyword phrase
Build a simple spreadsheet with the content categories listed on the left and the
split of Afflictions and Aspirations across the top. Dump your keywords into here
and add rows as needed below the categories

Why it is important?
• it provides another chance to empathize with
our user by reacquainting ourselves with their
persona
• it forces us to think through and identify why
they are going to a search page to get
answers. Both of these make it easier for us to
feed the content beast.

brainstorming
method # 2

The following three categories are good jumping off points for
brainstorming:
Product – brainstorm keywords directly describing your product. Start
with the official name and brand of the product. Then consider less
formal names and the name of the category. Then think about
synonyms. There are usually many different ways to describe a product
category.
Problem – list keywords that describe the problem that your product
solves. While many people search directly for your product, a
significant segment searches instead for solutions to problems that
your product solves.
Complements – consider keywords that are tangential to your product
and describe complementary topics.

COMPETITOR KEYWORD RECONNAISSANCE

– Competitor On-Page Keywords
– Competitor Keyword Rankings

Begin by identifying the leading competitor
websites. Use Google to locate the top ranking
sites in the industry. And use your industry
knowledge to identify the top companies in the
industry. Then navigate to these sites and begin
your scouting.

Competitor On-Page Keywords
1. Review competitor websites and observe
their use of keywords in the page title, metatags, navigation, page headings and text.
2. Take group of keywords, discard the ones
that seem irrelevant and expand upon the
ones that seem most promising.

brand first impressions research
Customers form their opinion not on your website
or print ad
How you look on SERP?
Allow to engage people online
• Poor product reviews, negative comments, lack of
credible 3rd party sources all send social proof of
what your brand is all about.

brand first impressions: step 1
Autocomplete on a search engine
• Does your site or brand appear in the top third of the
first results page for these searches?
• If present, does your brand show up in the ratings and
reviews for your category?
• If you brand is local, be sure to enter a geography
qualifier into the query (Ex. “best hair salon in
Pasadena”). This is particular powerful for seeing user
reviews and ratings.

Brand Image Search Exercise:
Enter “Your Brand Name” – what do the results say?
Enter “Your Brand Name” Review – what does it say?
Best “Your Category” – who shows up?

Look at Paid Search Ads
• Do you see a lot of ads above the results and off to the
side? This means the keyword is pretty valuable and
likely to generate a click-thru. It will also likely be tough
to rank on.
• What type of content and calls to action are they
using?
• Any ideas pop up? Create a separate tab called
“Opportunities” in your spreadsheet and list anything
you see that sparks an opportunity.

What is an opportunity?
• These might be blogs you see for Your Category search that you could
approach for possibly guest-blogging or coverage of your brand.
• Reviews or ratings on your brand that need to be addressed in the
conversation.
• Ideas for content creation around forums or questions. Yahoo!
Answers, Quora, and even Wikipedia is great for this.
• Major competitors not yet identified through traditional competitive
audits.

CROSS-CHECK THIS WITH YOUR FIRST TAB ON YOUR
KEYWORD PHRASES THAT YOU BRAINSTORMED OFF THE
USER PERSONA. WHAT HOLDS TRUE? WHAT NEEDS TO BE
ADDED?

Machine Generation
Go to Google Keyword Tool and enter Starting
Keyword Set. Then – collect and curate keywords.

OTHER TOOLS
1.
2.
3.
4.

Google Insights for Search
Google Trends Keyword Demand Prediction
Microsoft Advertising Intelligence
Wordtracker’s Free Basic Keyword Demand

Keyword research: google keyword tool
• goal is to try and understand the ways people will search for
our product or service.
• Google’s Keyword Tool - allows us to research the rough
volume of keyword phrases and how popular those searches
are. We can enter various search terms and get ideas on what
other terms users may be searching for.

1. Enter your keyword phrase
2. Look at the Keyword
3. Remember if it’s a generic term and the competition is
high, it will be tough to rank in the “organic” results. An
example would be “ipad 2 cases”.
4. Sift through the results and look for ways to match High
Competition keyword phrases with Low Competition. An
example might be something like “reviews for best ipad
2 cases for business travelers”. Looking for the Long Tail.
5. Enter this keyword phrase into your spreadsheet under
the appropriate category.
6. Pick another phrase and enter it into the tool.

Think content that educates
their Aspirations and Afflictions.

and

helps

solve

• Terms that are highly competitive with a high
Cost-Per-Click (CPC) will most likely be tough
to rank on. However, they are also very likely
to convert traffic

how keywords perform over time?
Using Google Trends for SEO:
• Gives a glimpse of how keywords perform over
time – often several years back
• provides information around geography and
related terms
• assessing keyword phrases over each other for
getting a quick sense of volume

Adding in a second phrase like “Ski Resort
Vacations” as the red line we see:

Choosing advertising messages
car manufacturer

Creating brand associations
computer hardware company

• When comparing laptops or notebook, it's useful to apply
the Category filter, whereby the data will be narrowed
down to just Computers & Electronics.

• Carefully examining the resulting top related searches and
the rising searches can help the marketer to better
understand competitors' offers, thereby creating a
campaign to differentiate their client's brand.

At the same time when you identify phrases that
differ dramatically in volume and are trending
up and to the right over time you can zero in on
topics that are worth creating content around
because there is proof of a market demand.

Customer Interactions
Because they are less familiar with your
products, customers often use different words
and phrases than industry insiders.
CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVES
CUSTOMER COMMENTS
SEARCH BOX
FORUMS

WHEN SHOULD I STOP COLLECTING KEYWORDS?

When you start coming across the same
keywords again and again, and are no longer
running into new keywords, it is a good
indication that you have touched on most of the
relevant keywords for your niche

COMPETITIVE SITE TRAFFIC AND SOCIAL
ENGAGEMENT RESEARCH
What your peers are experiencing?
Free tools to use:
–
–
–
–
–

Alexa.com
Compete.com
Open site explorer
SEOmoz toolbar
Social media

Alexa.com
• service ranks the world’s most visited websites
based on a variety factors. Helpful for getting
a sense of inbound links to the site and where
a site ranks across all websites online.
• This is good for a big picture view.

Mruni.eu's three-month global Alexa traffic rank is 55,422. The site has a bounce rate of
roughly 21% (i.e., 21% of visits consist of only one pageview). Search engines refer
approximately 5% of visits to this site. It is relatively popular among users in the cities of
Kaunas (where it is ranked #70) and Panevezys (#85). Relative to the overall population of
internet users, Mruni.eu's users tend to be under the age of 25, and they are
disproportionately less affluent, childless women browsing from school and home who have
postgraduate educations.

Compete.com
• Free for basic information
• Gives you a sense of overall unique visitors to
a website broken down by month.
• only an approximation
• But helpful for setting traffic goals when
you’re starting out or relaunching a web
property.
• For small sites, there might not be enough
traffic to generate a report.

Open Site Explorer + SEOmoz toolbar
• inbound links are a critical part for ranking
better. SEOmoz has put together a free tool
that helps you explore a variety of SEO factors,
• Find out what type of sites are discussing and
linking to your and competitors website.

Social Media
Knowing your target market, you can select the right
social channels they most likely engage with. Facebook
and YouTube is usually a given and increasingly so is
Twitter. Emerging channels like Pinterest or foursquare
can be worth looking into as well. Spend some time
looking
through
your
competitors’
Likes, Followers, Subscribers but also dig deeper and
see if they are getting good engagement with their
online community (Retweets, Comments, etc).

Why research should guide the
strategy?
Our next section will deal with Strategy and by
doing our Research first, we’re in a great position to
make calculated guesses for acquiring people’s
attention and hopefully converting it into revenue
(the whole goal of marketing, same as it ever was
regardless of the technology involved).

STRATEGY
The digital marketer’s job is to take their
understanding of the foundations of the online
world, mix in research, and find a bridge
between the current business reality and the
desired future revenue goals.

Note
• no amount of smart digital marketing can
make up for a poor product or service
experience.
Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare are all just
a click or swipe away for the customer and
they will let the world know their thoughts at
or even before the time of purchase.

Build Trust Online with Your Website
1.
2.
3.

Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site
Show that there's a real organization behind your site.
Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and
services you provide.
4. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.
5. Make it easy to contact you.
6. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your
purpose).
7. Make your site easy to use -- and useful.
8. Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed
recently).
9. Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).
10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

http://credibility.stanford.edu/guidelines/index.html

How to evaluate social and digital
technology - POST
• People. What are your customers ready for?
• Objectives. What are your goals? Are you more interested in talking
with the groundswell for marketing or in generating sales by
energizing your best customers? The clarity of your objectives will
make or break your strategy.
• Strategy. How do you want your relationships with your customers
to change? Do you want customers to help carry messages to
others in your market? Become more engaged with your company?
• Technology. What applications should you build? After having
decided on the first three, you can move on to pick appropriate
technologies (blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.).

Strategy forming processes
1. Study our customer
2. Work with management or company founders
to identify where the business needs to go and
how to maintain or increase profitability.
3. The strategy flows out of these discussions and
goals – clarity is a must here.
4. Finally, apply all these filters to the technology
tools available and only pick ones that line up
and can deliver results.

Using SMART
evaluating goals and objectives

• just a simple checklist
• Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Resultsfocused, and Timebound.

“marketing needs to increase overall sales for
the company”
Specific: Think of POST framework
“We’ll increase sales and profitability by
increasing site traffic to our most profitable
product through a blend of social
media, content creation, and search engine
rankings.”

the company”
Measurable: By what percentage points?
Know what you’ll be measuring and how you’ll
do it before you commit. You might need to
bump up website traffic by 300% over the year
to drive 5% in sales.

the company”
Achievable: Is this goal realistic given our brand’s
trajectory, resources, and time?
If the company has experienced year over year sales
growth of 5% and suddenly the goal is 20% with no
other change in the product mix or budget, it is likely
that marketing is getting setup for a spectacular failure

the company”
Results-focused: How will we know we’re making
progress?
Closely following conversions and sales on a weekly
basis can be very helpful to tweak the marketing efforts
versus waiting til the very end. Small corrections done
on a regular basis are much easier than giant shifts.

the company”

Timebound: how much time you have to achieve the
objective?

what factors will drive performance
and thus deliver results?
key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that
helps you understand how you are doing against
your objectives
Could be: conversion rate, visitor loyalty, search

how website traffic can originate?

Where to start?
1. Owned. Ensure you have a great digital experience on
Owned.
2. Earned Media requires a solid dedication to listening
to the conversation. Whether it’s earning shares on
social media, in blog comments on a press site, or in
user’s reviews on ecommerce sites, the digital
marketer has to be ready to listen and then
participate in the conversation.
3. Paid Media can be a dependable source for bumping
traffic. These campaigns to perform requires rigorous
monitoring, testing, and tweaking with a solid
understanding of online analytics.

Executing Online Campaigns

Owned Media
• We want traffic to our digital property
• We can measure traffic
Developing a great experience on your own
digital property means you can control and
ultimately reap the rewards of that engagement.

Suggested workflow
1. Starting with our User Persona (creating content that
our target market will want to engage with)
2. build a user-friendly sitemap and design that allows
users to efficiently move through our website
3. Review your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). What
are we striving to achieve for engagement with this
audience?
4. Constantly adding fresh content
5. Develop weekly or daily cadence – for keeping
customers loyal and coming back (ex – email
marketing)

Executing Online Campaigns

Earned Media
• User Generated Content (UGC)
• Social media shares of your content
Earned is powerful influencer online. Yet, brands
have very little control over the message. The
best approach is to be humble, transparent, and
do your best to put your brand in service to
others.

Suggested workflow
1. Creating valuable content
2. PR (bloggers, news media,
3. Use technology to listen to the online
conversation (Google alerts)
4. When someone
retweets, shares, mentions, or otherwise
gives you free exposure be sure to express
some gratitude.

AdWords management process
1. Continuous keyword research to build and grow PPC
keyword lists
2. Strategic keyword grouping and organization to build
effective ad groups
3. Constant monitoring and analysis of your campaign's
progress
4. Filtering negative keywords from your list so you
won’t waste money bidding on irrelevant terms
5. Delegating your ad budget through careful AdWords
bidding
6. Writing ad text that will draw qualified visitors to click
on your ads

online research

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