Any marketer who’s been around for a while knows the importance of solid keyword research. And when creating products, getting a keyword into your title is certainly a good rule of thumb… Or is it?
I just read a great article by Marty Weintraub over at SearchEngineLand.com that outlines a very cool plan for naming and some of the research that Weintraub suggests is a little out of the norm.
For example, do you think like your customers? If you’re in the health business for example, are people actually searching more for health or wellness? Do they search “health wellness” or how about “health and wellness” or what about just health or wellness? Check out these differences:
Of course, health is the most popular but wellness comes up a close second with “health and wellness” a distant third. If I had a health-related product, I’d sure try to get “health” into my title, instead of the other two keywords.
But let’s say we want to call our product “Sarasota Health Secrets.” What kind of ugly information about Sarasota is out there? Weintraub says you should type “Sarasota sucks” or Sarasota Health Secrets horrible” and see what kind of negative information there is online. Hmm… Sarasota sucks has 154,000 results. I can’t help but wonder where they came from. I live just over the Sarasota county line and well… I don’t think it sucks. But that’s me. What happens when I type in the whole product name? Ah… There are only 11,000 results. Not so bad.
You get the idea here. If you type in your potential product name and find a bunch of bad stuff, using those “ugly” modifiers, it’s time to rethink your product name, no matter how good you think it is.
But I think you have to consider organic SEO, as well, and Weintraub agrees. Don’t come up with a name that is so competitive that you can’t possibly rank for it, no matter how many backlinks you have. That’s just dumb. Let’s go back to Google and find out what keywords might work with health that we can rank for. Go down the list until you come to words that are around 10,000 searches a month.
Health is just really competitive, but what about “ideal health” or “lifetime health”? You could probably work at either of those keywords and eventually rank for them.
That’s the tip of the article. It’s a very well-written piece, and if you want to see the whole thing, just go to:
http://searchengineland.com/think-search-before-you-name-your-next-product-26606
I guarantee you’ll learn something you haven’t thought about before. Bravo, Mr. Weintraub! Well done!
