Do you know what’s weird? The English language. There are so many quirks, inconsistencies and exceptions.
The language we use to chat to each other is, more often than not, the same language we use when we do other things, like search for stuff online.
In digital marketing, we only have a certain amount of words we can use to target our ideal demographic, which makes the words we use even more important.
But how do we choose what words to include in our targeting?
There’s lots to choose from and the same words are used differently across users, companies and contexts. You may feel confident you know what your customers are searching for in relation to your business however as per the examples below, sometimes reality is a little different.
But, I use Keyword research tools……..
That’s great! Keyword Research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and others are very valuable tools and you wouldn’t be doing right by your Campaigns if you didn’t use them. But are you sure people are searching for the same things you think they would search for?
EXAMPLE TIME!
Lets pretend you’re running a Campaign for a company who sells equipment for use in and around the home. In your ad copy, will you use the word house – because the house is the physical entity that the equipment will be used in/on? Or will you use the word home to embody the more emotional aspect of it being a place to live your life? You could even go as far as using residential.
Do people look for heaters for their house or their home? In New Zealand, there are an average of 101 – 200 monthly searches for home heating and only 11 – 50 for house heating. This could be because the contents of your “home” i.e your family are more important than the house itself.
We see a similar pattern with security –
Perhaps there is a relationship between how we phrase things and our emotional connection to using the word home, I want to keep my family warm and secure, not my house.
Following on from this we would assume that, when it comes to cleaning, users would search more home cleaning instead of house cleaning because a clean home is a happy home, right? WRONG.
See how it can get tricky? There is no right or wrong answer but, while Google takes into consideration plural forms, common misspellings, acronyms, stemmings etc. you do need to consider how people search for things and it is definitely worth using Keyword Planning tools to explore other phrasing and Keyword options.
If you need any help or a brain to pick about your specific Keywords, give the team at Conversion Marketing a call on (09) 950 5320.
