Expand Your Market By Optimizing Your Content

Gerry McGovern, author of Killer Web Content, recently wrote in his newsletter about the need to consider every day speech when writing web content. As an example he gives the two interchangeable phrases, Climate Change and Global Warming. The former is the official correct term while the latter is what has generally been accepted by the public and what has made its way into the public’s consciousness.

Here is an excerpt taken from McGovern‘s article:

According to Google, every month an average of 300,000 people search for climate change, while 2.2 million search for global warming. Yet the official term on most government and media websites is climate change. And climate change is the correct overall name. But is it the right phrase to use on the Web?

The climate is changing. It’s getting warmer. And it’s probably going to keep getting warmer for quite a while. So why not use the phrase “global warming” because that’s what’s actually happening? Why be vague and say climate change, when that begs the question: what sort of climate change are we talking about?

The Web is the land of concrete, specific language. It doesn’t work well for fuzzy, official language. People want you to get
to the point, and describe the essence of what is happening.

McGovern goes on to make the point that much of this type of “technically driven” content does not get as widely read for the simple reason that the majority of people search using natural language keywords rather than official terms.

Reflecting on this, I think a lot of companies fall into this tunnel vision trap when writing content for the web. For example, Web analytics providers and practitioners go to great lengths to explain that web analytics is more than just measuring web traffic or gathering website statistics. The industry as a whole insists that web analytics is a way to measure the effectiveness of web marketing, track visitor behavior and generate action-oriented insights based on key performance indicators.

While this is certainly true, it is also evident that the vast majority of people have not heard of web analytics. For many, web analytics is still a simple stat counter counting the number of hits on the page. Therefore, when the need for measuring web traffic arises, that is presumably exactly what people search for.

Google’s Keyword Tool shows that there may be something to this. According to the tool, approximately 60,500 searches were carried out in September for the phrase “Web Analytics”. Not bad, but not much in comparison to the 301,000 searches for “Web Traffic”. Performing a search with this phrase on Google did not yield one result about a web analytics provider in the first few pages of results. Clearly there is potential!

Search results for the term “web analytics”

Search results for the term “web traffic”

By expanding the content on a website to include such terms, you will make your site more visible to a large group of people. They are perhaps not the immediate target market, but at the same time, these are the people you want to target in order to grow the market. Otherwise, you run the risk of spending your resources defending your piece of a small pie while ignoring the bigger pie outside!