My social media journey - Week 4

Andy Hatcher of The Mapp continues charting his Social Media journey.

(Andy is the MD of  The MAPP Ltd., a company that provides simple visual planning solutions)

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”  Rudyard Kipling

 

Listen to Andy’s interview on Show 20 

I have committed the cardinal sin of ‘content slip’ – a concept, which if not already coined, I am laying claim to. Ann Hawkins reminded me that this sequence of articles is advertised as a weekly event and it seems this is only the fourth one in five weeks. So as part of my journey I hereby claim ‘content slip’ as mine and define it as the process of gradually and imperceptibly missing content submission deadlines. Every cloud…

Producing engaging and valuable content

Visitor numbers are still rising although only up to 159 from 120 – I am confidently told that these numbers mean nothing at this stage but I do like to measure so I will use them as a guide – only 5 new free account sign ups but if I’m getting more than zero then I’m happy.

So this week my attention has been focused on developing the elusive e&vc (engaging and valuable content) but was again stopped in my tracks when told that there is little point in writing anything unless it includes ‘keywords’ that will be found by people using search engines – primarily Google. This has now opened up yet another micro universe of activity populated by systems and companies that are addressing small problems you encounter along the way to solving large ones – i.e. attracting traffic to your site.

Finding keywords

So my task was set – find the best keywords.  Easy I thought.  There are loads of ways to describe what we do; visual planning, online collaboration, team engagement and so on. Job done I thought until Andy Bargery of Klaxon Marketing showed me that in reality no one was using any of my ‘ideal’ terms on the web to look for planning systems – how can that be? I’ll be talking more about Andy in subsequent posts but he showed me how to start developing a better list of keywords that seem to match what people actually search for.

So with my initial list lying in tatters on the floor, I turned to using a few tools like Optify and Google’s interestingly-named Wonder Wheel to try and create a more effective list. What I learned is that what you really need is a keyword (not necessarily a single word) that is searched on a lot but for which there is less competition – meaning that proportionately fewer results are returned when your search for it on Google. Yes, it took a while for me to work it out but I found that this document from submityourarticle.com explained it pretty well.

This process also uncovered a couple of neat tricks which were not obvious to me.

1. If you have a successful competitor find out what keywords they use and use them too – I am assuming this is ethical but if anyone knows differently then please do tell.
2. Using the tilda character “~‟ (I thought that was rice…) before a word on Google will bring back synonyms of that word, highlighted in bold within the search results.

And yes, with reference to that new micro industry, there are even services that will help you do this with reduced effort such as Wordtracker, Keywordeye and Keywordspy to name but three.

Long tail keywords

So with a bit of work I have now created a list of 20 keywords that seem to reflect what we do as a company, are searched on a good amount by the general public and seem to be fairly uncompetitive. I felt accomplished until I then read that the job is only half done – what do you mean you haven’t created you long-tail key word list yet?

The stats of the week for me was that in my research I found out that 14,800 people search for ‘simple plan’ each month and 9,900 look for ‘getting things done’ – better have a look to see what comes up…

Follow the progress of The Mapp on Twitter  

Week 3 of Andy’s journey is here