When you look at the type schema you see close to 300 metadata elements that can describe various entities (called Things here).

There is lot of specificity in a few categories such as Local Businesses, Civic Structures and Events. Two of these categories have real implications for local and mobile SEO because of the richness of the metadata.

Below you see the high-level organizational taxonomy for the MicroData entities. It has up to five levels depending upon which category you are looking at. Here you see that three levels are associated with Local Business, while the Persons and Product groups have no subcategories.

Things

The high-level property elements for Things include Name, URL, Image and Description. These properties are applied to all of the following seven subcategories.

1. Creative Work — Text and metadata include ratings, reviews and offers.
2. Events — Metadata elements includes time, who, place and related events.
3. Intangibles — This is dynamic metadata about quantities and values.
4. Organizations — Metadata to include location, founders, employees and contact info.
5. Persons — Metadata includes title, awards, affiliations, family relationships, personal information and contact information.
6. Places — Metadata about photos, maps, addresses and contact information
7. Products — Metadata about brand, model, manufacturer and reviews.

Let’s take a look at each of these seven categories in a little more detail to see what might be valuable to a B2B marketing executive. Not all will be useful; some will be pure media plays, while others will be B2C oriented.

Creative Works

The properties available in the Creative Works category are metadata elements used to describe all the elements of a piece of creative work. This includes things like identifying headlines, the editor, genre and author. Many more properties are described at the creative works link above.

The properties apply to all the subcategories in the Creative Works group, which include the following types:

Events

Eleven properties are available in the Events category for describing web pages that contain event information. Events can also be broken into super or subevents. For example, if you are putting on several presentations at trades shows, these can be called out individually. Subcategories for events include:

Intangibles

The four properties available in the Intangibles category describe dynamic or intangible data. Examples include the format of a book, the condition of an item, the price, the availability and the seller of the item. Sub-categories include:

Organizations

The 16 properties available in the Organizations category are for classifying data elements that deal with common company information. A large number of the properties focus on contact information, company facts and employees. There are also ratings and review properties.

Person

There are 27 properties available in the Persons category for classifying data elements about a person. You find properties that describe organizational affiliations, alumni status, job title, nationality and the name of the person’s spouse.

There are no subcategories for the Persons group, which is surprising. When you review business websites in any number you see a handful of very defined groups of people. Almost every website has a listing for their Board of Directors, C-level executive, advisory / technical boards and other named teams.

Often, the names of investors are provided as well. You could tag a person with the job title property. If you have a board with seven members you would have to do this seven times. Having a named subgroup that includes more than one individual makes more sense because this reflects current common practice on the Internet.

Place

The 12 properties in the Places category describe unique locations such as a building or a landform. You can specify that a place is part of a larger geographic location. Beyond this the properties are what you would expect: maps, photos, address and telephone numbers.

The Local Business subgroup below is the same one found in the Organizations category.

Products

The seven properties in the Products category are for describing the elements of a product. These properties include specifying a brand name, the manufacturer’s name and product identification numbers, to name a few.

Given the prominent role that products play in Internet commerce, I was surprised at how few properties there are, and I think this will be an issue for successfully deploying the MicroData standard.

Here are some of the elements that I think are missing:

• High-level designation: is it a B2B product or a B2C product.
• Age range for the intended product.
• Industry target: e.g., healthcare, entertainment, financial and technology.
• Product category: e.g., books, clothing, garden, grocery and sports.
• Gender: shoes for example.
• Price or price range.

To be fair, some of these properties are found in the Intangibles category, such as price and seller property. But why these properties are there instead of in Products is a real mystery.

The second problem with this category is there are no subcategories at all for the Products group. It’s almost impossible to find a shopping site that does not have a product taxonomy that is used to navigationally organize company’s wares.

These taxonomies exist for a reason: They work for both the website owner and the consumer. This section really needs to be expanded in the next version of the MicroData specification.

Local Business

I mentioned earlier that a couple of categories had lot of subcategories in its hierarchy. Local Business (part of Organizations) is one example with 27 subgroups that break down into 120 categories.

One of the Local Businesses subcategories called Stores has 30 subcategories in its group alone.

Business names could be used to complement what is missing in the Product category, but it’s far from optimal. For example there is no Internet, Software or Technology categories in the existing taxonomy. The subcategories for Local Business include:

• Animal Shelter
• Automotive Business (ten subcategories)
• Child Care
• Dry Cleaning / Laundry
• Emergency Service (three subcategories)
• Employment Agency
• Entertainment Business (seven subcategories)
• Financial Service (four subcategories)
• Food Establishment (eight subcategories)
• Government Office (one subcategories)
• Health And Beauty Business (five subcategories)
• Home And Construction Business (eight subcategories)
• Internet Cafe
• Library
• Lodging Business (four subcategories)
• Medical Organization (seven subcategories)
• Professional Service (ten subcategories)
• Radio Station
• Real Estate Agent
• Recycling Center
• Self-Storage
• Shopping Center
• Sports Activity Location
• Store (30 subcategories)
• Television Station
• Tourist Information Center
• Travel Agency

Data Type

The Data Type feels like it is unfinished. Sometimes it’s useful to describe content at a high-level as structured (e.g., numbers) or unstructured data (e.g., text). There is value in specifying a structured data element if you have complex web pages with tables, graphs and text.

For example, being able to define a table, having it survive the indexing process intact as a single entity and returning it as a single search result is certainly valuable. Being able to define an image as a chart or an Excel table would also be useful, but these data types are not supported.

• Boolean
• Date
• Number
• Text

Summary

When you look at the subcategories for most of the above groups, it’s easy to see how the MicroData specification is of value, especially the Local Business category. For example, the properties in Local Business provide more markup opportunities for your local SEO strategy.

However, the lack of definition in the Product category makes this a less-than-compelling tool for those firms that sell brick and mortar products through their websites.

Enterprise search engines are well-versed with named entity extraction tools and techniques, which is how this information has been generated in the past decade.

The major search engines are essentially telling content providers that if they name all their entities in their content, they can do a better job of extracting meaning from them to help improve search results. This is a win-win proposition, right? Maybe!

Other similar initiatives known as the Semantic Web and RDFa have not made much inroads in the mindshare of business owners yet. In fact, business owners have a hard time staying on top of current SEO markup practices associated with standard HTML tags.

Will this format gain traction among businesses? I hope so, but there are a number of hurdles that stand in the way at the moment.

Here are some challenges for moving this technology forward. Some are technical, some are not.

• This technology represents a real cost to implement, and the decision to spend those dollars are usually made by the senior marketing executive. In fact, it is very likely that most marketers at any level do not understand the relationship between the various micro-tag technologies and improved search results. There is no real educational strategy in place to promote this specification, and the PR machine is not going to get the job done.

• A second hurdle is the enormous amount of content that is currently deployed on the Web. It would be a herculean task to go back and reprocess this content. Since the value proposition is not well understood by marketing executives, this reprocessing is not going to happen in any meaningful way for some time. In fact, even if the value proposition was well understood, it’s not clear that the cost of processing hundreds of millions of documents is worth the cost.

• The presentation of information at Schema.Org was written by technologist for technologists. Nowhere is there a clear statement of benefits, or a call to action targeted at the real decision maker who happens to be the CMO – not the CTO.

• The hierarchal presentation of entities and related information is hard to review at Schema.org – it’s not apparent that there are only two parent nodes (level-1) with seven child nodes (level-2) at first glance. This information really needs to be repurposed to make it easy to access, and understood by non-technologist decision makers.

• The sale of products and services is at the heart of every B2B/B2C website doing business on Internet. I was surprised at how few product properties there are and that there are no sub-categories at all for the Products category. Maybe this is being worked on, but it is a serious flaw in the MicroData specification. There is a well developed set of business categories, but in most cases these will be too high-level.

For example, a site tagged as an Office Equipment Store implies that it sells office equipment, but this category does not have properties to describe a primary product or multiple products.

Further, the Product category does not have a defined product taxonomy such as those found in the office supplies category at Amazon.

Going forward, I think business owners can be motivated to start marking up new content if they are presented with real examples of why this format is important. But first, the product category needs to be fleshed out to meet the needs of business owners.

Both Yahoo and Google are using similar in-house technology (SearchMonkey and Rich Snippets) to enhance search results in very meaningful ways – this is an excellent use of the technology, but most marketing professionals do not make the connection between these enhanced search results and the new Microdata initiative.

The bottomline is that businesses sell products and they want to sell more products. Their ability to markup their products is limited with the current specification.

I think this is a great idea, the specification needs to be fleshed out, and the sponsors of this initiative need to do a better job of explaining this technology and its benefits to marketing executives. Perhaps these are improvements that are in the works.

Next time, in part two of this article, I will provide a detailed review of the functionality, and how the MicroData specification can be of practical use to marketing executives when thinking about their website strategies.

This analysis of AdWords data suggests that business people are really still trying to learn and sort out what Social Media is all about. But when you look specifically at user intent, you can plainly see what aspects are important to them. Consider the intent in following categories of behavior.

Behavioral Highlights

• There are 24 queries with 66K monthly searches that deal with learning about Social Media. These are not about reading primers – they are about attending educational classes.
• There are 19 queries with 96K monthly searches concerning How To. These are searches for guides, tips and best practices.
• There are 14 queries with 67K monthly searches asking questions about the What and Why of social media. Consumers are asking very direct, and easy to answer questions.
• There are 42K searches each month by consumers asking for a definition of social media.
• There are 22 queries with 80K monthly searches that are all about research. The interest is studies, reports and trends. These consumers are in serious research mode.
• There are 16 queries with 49K monthly searches about social media policy and governance.
• To complement the research category there are 16 queries with 39K monthly searches about finding statistics.
• There are 22 queries with 94K searches about managing and monitoring requirements for communities.
• There are 47 queries with 148K monthly searches about social media strategy and planning.
• There are 14 queries with 59K searches that are about optimizing (SEO) for social media.

Most of this behavior suggests that business people are still struggling with the concept of social media. They don’t fully understand it, and they are trying to sort it out by asking educational questions in a dozen different ways.

When you look at the ROI (14.5K searches) and Branded (56.6K) search categories we see two things. First, there is not much interest in ROI yet, I think this reflects that most businesses are still trying to get their head around what social media is all about.

Secondly, the light numbers associated with brand-related searches suggests an industry that is still maturing. Consider the contrast in the monthly brand searches in the following market segments.

1. Family Restaurants – 12.7M brand searches
2. Restaurant – 1.2M brand searches
3. Home improvement – 208K brand searches
4. Self Publishing – 98K brand searches
5. SEO services – 82K brand searches
6. Interactive Agencies – 82K brand searches

Self-publishing, SEO and Interactive Agencies are industries that are fairly young, and it’s no surprise that they are not dominated by multi-million-dollar branded conglomerates. Aside from the major social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, most business people could not name a well known social media service provider. This means you have to compete for business on the content front.

Low brand awareness, coupled with the large number of educational-oriented queries provides an information architectural opportunity to develop a robust content strategy to service these searchers needs. Each bullet in the Behavioral Highlights list can be a menu item on any Social Media 101 web page, for example.

High-Level Categories

If you’re interested in looking for opportunity in the following high-level categories, I suggest that you start your research in the Informational, Content and Type areas – there is a lot going on there, but it does require that you spend time reviewing each category within its own context, and reviewing the unique terms that are associated with each category.

Sub-Categories

In the following list, there are plenty of sub-categories worth exploring. When you look at the top categories you see that Marketing, Advertising and PR top the list – no surprise here.

However, a careful review of the remaining sub-categories shows that there is considerable consumer interest in educational information, specific content types and industry-specific services. There are a lot of content landing page opportunities to experiment with here.

Selected Categories In More Detail

When you look at queries by category, you find that consumers are often very consistent with the terms they use to modify the primary Social Media phrase. These provide focus around labeling and copy for web pages. There are many examples in the following categories.

Advertising – 679.3K Queries

Looking further into the data the advertising category is pretty straight forward. Social media is the dominant two-word phrase used in this category, but you do see two variants where the term media is dropped:

• Social advertising
• Social network advertising

These two phrases account for 33,000 searches each month.

Brands – 58.2K Queries

There are four themes in this category:

1. Business people are searching for branded social media news outlets.
2. They are searching for a brand, but don’t know the name of the brand. You see searches like brands using social media and social media brands.
3. Users are searching for information and specify either Twitter or Google. Interestingly, there is five times more search traffic for Twitter than Google.
4. They are searching for a social media company by name, unfortunately these companies cluster at the bottom (by search volume) of the brand category.

Community – 18.2K Queries

When the focus is on community, consumers slightly favor the term community, however they are using the terms group and forums interchangeably. This implies that any content that is about community should have the terms group and forums worked into the web copy narrative.

Company – 68.8K Queries

In this category, business people are searching for an unnamed social media company. By a 50% margin, searchers are using the term firm over the term company. I think there’s some opportunity to be exploited here.

Most companies when writing ad copy will refer to themselves by their brand name – this is pretty normal. In this case it would make sense to occasionally work these two terms into the ad copy narrative. After all, the keyword phrase social media firms accounts for 18,000 searches each and every month.

Consultant – 117.2K Queries

Business people search for a consultant to meet their social media expertise needs by a two to one margin over searches for branded or unknown companies. The most common secondary terms in this category are consultant, consulting and consultancy.

Consumers do however, use a large number of terms interchangeably to specify a consultant. You see consultants referred to as gurus, coaches, professionals, advisers and mavens.

The two most common are:

• Experts – 13,000 queries
• Specialist – 6000 queries

Content – 435K Queries

The content category is very rich with six subgroups that reflect very specific informational needs. These categories by traffic in descending order are:

• Content, non specific request: 111,500 queries
• Content-graphics: 110,000 queries
• Content-research: 81,000 queries
• Content-blogs: 55,000 queries
• Content-statistics 40,000 queries
• Content-video: 23,000 queries
• Content-books: 12,000 queries

A lot of the nonspecific content category is a grab bag of specific content requests, but there’s not enough critical mass to warrant putting them in a category.

For example, you see requests for news, articles, theory, stories, questionnaires, music, presentations and history.

Education – 75.8K Queries

When it comes to social media education consumers use about a half-dozen terms to express their intent. The most common term is training with 21,000 queries. The remaining terms include:

• Courses: 13,200 queries
• Workshops: 6,500 queries
• Seminars: 6,000 queries
• Webinars: 3,200 queries
• Classes: 2,900 queries

You would think with the extraordinary explosion in webinars recently that there would be more traffic associated with that term, but it turns out that consumers are expressing their intent using traditional educational terminology such as training, courses and workshops.

Webinar users should take note, I’m willing to bet that this search behavior holds true for other non-social media businesses as well.

How To – 95.8K Queries

This category reflects the consumers desire to obtain educational primers. You see phrases such as social media 101 and other terms such as best practices, checklist and learn. The most common secondary terms are:

• How to: 47,000 queries
• Guidelines / Guides: 10,200 queries
• Tips: 8,800 queries

Informational – 10.9M Queries

As always, the large majority of the informational queries are vague in nature. It’s hard to hone in on any specific intent, other than that consumers are interested in some aspect of social media.

For example, what do the keyword phrases social web, through social media and social networking tell us about the consumer? Not much.

There are a number of informational sub-categories that provide good landing page opportunities for content. These include:

• Questions: 67,300 queries
• Policy: 48,600 queries
• Definitions: 42,500 queries

When it comes down to it, consumers are primarily asking what and why, as in what is social media and why social media. The search for definitions is a perfect companion to the questions category, and it would make sense to provide a definition as part of a “what is social media” landing page.

The search for policy information is somewhat informational, but it’s also tactical. You see terms like ethics, governance, compliance, etiquette and rules of engagement in the search strings. Again, this is a good landing page opportunity where you could work the terms into a landing page title and tagline.

For example, “Social Media Policy: your guide to ethics, etiquette, governance, compliance and rules of engagement.” With this simple title and tagline you can cover all the queries in the policy category.

Location – 38.6K Queries

While 38,000 searches a month may seem like a lot, but it’s not really. When you look at the searches that include a city name, you never see more than a couple of thousand queries a month in the largest cities like New York and Chicago, and the traffic falls off dramatically as the cities get demographically smaller.

If you’re an agency in Chicago you’re going to view those 2,400 monthly queries as very important- but so will the other 500 social media agencies doing business in Chicago. Bummer.

Management – 94.1K Queries

This category, of course, is all about managing a community. The most common term in this category is monitoring, and is closely followed by the term management. You do see a few other terms that could be worked into the page copy narrative – these are coordinator, relations, and support.

Marketing – 2.4M Queries

In this category the term marketing appears in every keyword phrase. With 2.4 million queries you would think that there would be a number of well developed sub-categories, but this is not the case. What you do see is a wide variety of terms that describe various aspects of what they’re looking for in marketing. This includes consultants, an agency, books, software, strategy, education, content and statistics.

There is just not a lot of critical mass around any of these terms to create sub-categories in marketing. One anomaly though, is the two word phrase social marketing - it appears in 25% of the search traffic. I think this phrase has caught the imagination of Marketers.

Public Relations – 260K Queries

Business people prefer using the term PR over public relations when they are searching for services by a three to one margin. You do see the term communications used over 13,000 times a month as a synonym for PR, and you see the term release used about 17,000 times a month – as in social media release.

The important thing here is that if you’re positioning yourself as a social media PR firm you have just four terms that you have to concentrate on when developing webpage copy or PPC ads.

Quality – 37.6K Queries

It’s always interesting to look at the adjectives that are being used in search queries. In this case the adjectives are quality indicators. When consumers specify a quality or a value in their searches they are fairly focused in the terminology they use, and that is the case here. They are using just two terms and those are top and best.

• Top: 20,500 queries
• Best: 17,100 queries

Note: Adjectives account for just 7% of terms in search queries, which make them rare, and sometimes more valuable during relevancy calculations.

SEO – 44.4K Queries

Searchers use the word optimization over SEO when searching for social media optimization services by a two to one margin. This is the same behavior we saw in the SEO search behavior model that was published a couple months ago. SEO is a great acronym, but you have to make sure when you are using an acronym that it is the preferred way for business people to search for services – in this case it’s not.

Software – 150.6K Queries

The search for software tools is divided into three distinct categories.

• The search for social platforms (93.8K queries).
• The search for social apps (43.9K queries).
• The search for social reporting tools (12.8K queries).

The most common terms used in the search for social platform software are tools, followed by platforms and then solutions. The term “tools” is the preferred word of choice in the software category.

Social media apps are the one trick ponies of this software category. The searches are looking for buttons, widgets and share (buttons). There are others but these three dominate the category.

The two most common terms in the reporting category are analytics and tracking. This can be a complicated area because reporting tools can be obtained in three different ways, depending upon your needs.

For example:

1. Reporting tools are part of any white-label social media platform that you can license.
2. Companies mostly have web analytics tools installed for their website, and want to use these to track their social media campaigns (e.g., Coremetrics and Webtrends).
3. Over the past couple of years there have been a number of one-off tools come to market that track activity around a single platform – such as Twitter.

Given the variability of how many reporting tool options business people have, the content opportunity here is to provide a white paper that helps people navigate the reporting tools landscape.

Strategy – 169.3K Queries

The strategy category is an excellent landing page opportunity where you can create content and services across several dimensions. At the highest level these business people are clearly looking for a social media strategy, and they are expressing it in a number of different ways using terms such as tactics, campaigns, programs and playbooks. These searches are somewhat generalized.

The second dimension is more focused, and it’s about planning social media campaigns. The third dimension is about templates - they are looking for a fill-in-the-blanks approach to developing their social media strategy.

• Strategy: 110,000 queries
• Strategic planning: 29,300 queries
• Strategy-templates: 8,900 queries

A “How To” white paper for developing a social media strategy would make a good link bait opportunity.

Type – 357K Queries

In the type category, business people are looking for social media services by the type of industry, department, organization or market segment. You see this expressed as a green social media, social media HR, automotive social media and social media nonprofits. There is not a lot of critical mass around any of these search queries, but they are valuable long-tail opportunities.

There is critical mass in at least six types, and I expect this number to grow over time as social media becomes more ubiquitous in the business community. The following types have enough traffic to be of interest to a social media agency.

• Company: 247,000 queries
• Type-general: 38,800 queries
• Healthcare: 20,700 queries
• Education: 18,100 queries
• B2B: 70,500 queries
• Hospitality: 9,200 queries
• Banking: 5,300 queries

All these sub-categories are straightforward with the exception of the company category. Here, the industry is not specified. What you have are people searching, in very large numbers, for social media for businesses.

You do see some variations in these queries where searchers are substituting the word business with the terms corporate, company, and workplace.

Where Does Insight Come From?

Let’s take a look at the data in the Type-Company category in more detail (the table below). When you look at the queries you see that the term Business has critical mass. The second thing you notice right away is the use of the terms for and small. Are these important? Potentially, and here is why.

The term for is a stop-word and has no weighting or relevancy value. However, it does have value in an exact match calculation. Statistically, consumers favor the term for over the term in when constructing queries. The term is therefore important when writing webpage copy (for an exact match), even though it has no relevancy value.

If you are looking at this table from a statistical point of view what would the most important keyword phrases be? My choices would be:

1. Social Media for Business
2. Social Media for Small Business

Why?

1. You are picking up the search terms that appear in 90% of the traffic for this category.
2. There is the proximity calculation used by search engines.

In the second keyword phrase the terms Social media and business are separated by the two-word phrase for small, which means that social media and business are in close proximity to each other.

The implication is that if a consumer does a search using the phrase Social Media Business, both of the above phrases can theoretically appear in the search results because the terms appear in both the phrases, and are in close proximity.

Finally, there is critical mass around the term small. This term provides an excellent long-tail opportunity worth exploring. It would also make a good candidate for use in a secondary tagline.

Summary

If you want to understand consumer intent, there is no substitute for doing exhaustive keyword research as I’ve shown in the previous example. When you aggregate keyword phrases by subject, source or type you often find interesting, and very consistent use of terminology.

For example, the Marketing category has a lot of complexity, and can provide more insight – you simply have to spend the time with the spreadsheet data.

Review the observations in the Behavioral Highlights at the beginning of this article – there are a dozen content / landing page opportunities worth exploring. Business people don’t understand social media very well, and are groping for information and answers – if you don’t provide this information someone else will.

The emergence of social media and mobile platforms are providing thousands of start-up opportunities, and you can see them showcased at “network and launch” events such as the Web Innovators Group and Mass Innovation Nights. Most of these start-ups will start life as virtual companies, but at some point they will have to lease space, and acquire office furniture for their growing company.

Search Behavior Categories

So, how do these companies go about finding a source for office furniture? A thorough examination of the data shows that there are 21 categories of search behavior in the office furniture data set. Understanding what’s going on in these categories is very valuable, because it provides opportunities to develop custom landing pages that mirror user intent.

Several of the high-level search behavior categories have numerous sub-categories; the most prominent is the type category, which has 11 sub-categories of search behavior.

The type category with 23 million monthly searches is very prominent, and should be a major focus for information architectural design. The next largest category reflects searches for home-office products and services – coming in at 2.5 million searches a month this is certainly a landing page opportunity.

Noise

There is a lot noise in the office furniture AdWords data. This noise is primarily in the information and software categories. Because the word “office” is somewhat generic, and has multiple meanings, it can be somewhat problematic for search engines. For example, it is widely used by Microsoft to describe its suite of business software, and it’s also a very popular TV program.

The 22 million searches in the software category are almost entirely for Microsoft office products. If you do a search on the term office you will see that both the TV show and Microsoft products dominate the results set, however there are results for an open office design website, and for an office furniture website.

Informational searches account for 76 million queries each month even though there are only 17 keyword phrases in this group. 80% of the traffic is associated with the term office. As noted before, the single-term query office has many meanings, and can be problematic for an office furniture vendor.

Sub-Categories

When you review all the sub-categories you see that there are actually 36 distinct categories of behavior, with the type group dominating the list. This list illustrates what behavior is most important when consumers search for office furniture.

Search Behavior Model

The following model reflects category traffic in descending order with Information having the most, and Content having the least. Most of the categories are one dimensional, however there is a lot of complexity in the Type category.

Categories in More Detail

Let’s take a look at each of the high-level categories in more detail.

Information

76,399,720 searches. The informational category is largely noise, but there are a handful queries that are somewhat vague in intent, but probably valuable. For example, you have business furniture and business office furniture, which have enough volume that you can target those phrases in PPC ad campaigns.

Type

23,403,650 searches. Consumers search for furniture by a wide variety of types. For example, they specify the type of furniture they want or the type of wood that it’s made from. They may also search for office furniture by specifying the area it will be used, or by the material that the furniture is manufactured from. The following list details in descending order all the types used by consumers in search.

Now, let’s take a look at each type in more detail.

Type by Function

In this category consumers are specifying a piece of furniture without any secondary attributes. They are simply naming a piece of furniture by function such as office armoire or corner desk. In this category just four pieces of furniture account for 80% of the traffic.

• Desk: 4,832,190
• Chairs: 3,727,240
• Cabinets: 119,500
• Credenza: 117,800
• Bookcase: 23,600
• Tables: 37,300

Type by Area

For whatever reason, there is a fair amount of traffic for dining room, living room and kitchen furniture. My guess is that most of this is probably not valuable traffic, but a certain amount may very well be related to servicing temporary quarters for mobile executives. There are three major clusters in the area sub-category and they are searches for furniture for boardrooms, conference rooms and reception area.

• Reception: 109,800
• Conference: 50,000
• Boardroom: 12,500

Types-General

These are generalized searches for furniture using a wide variety of terms. You have consumers searching for unfinished office furniture or flatpack office furniture. No single term stands out in this category.

Types-Cubicle

With 1.3 million searches in this category, consumers are primarily searching for workstations or cubicles. Workstation is clearly the dominant term. They are also searching in significant numbers for partitions, dividers, panels and screens. This would make a good landing page called: workstation cubicles “your source for partitions and dividers.”

• Workstation: 1,239,300
• Partitions and dividers: 41,210
• Cubical: 35,700

Type by Special Purpose

In this category, consumers are searching for furniture that has special attributes such as adjustable office chairs or armless office chairs. In order of importance consumers are looking for chairs and tables that have the following attributes.

• Folding: 437,900
• Rocking: 301,000
• Stackable: 118,900
• Swivel: 79,400
• Kneeling: 24,100

Type by Species of Wood

50% of the time consumers use either the terms wood or wooden to specify the materials the furniture is made from. When consumers specify a specific wood the three most popular species are oak, pine and rattan. You do see requests for other specialty woods such as mahogany, maple, beech and teak, but these are much smaller numbers.

• Wooden: 551,120
• Oak: 259,600
• Pine: 111,300
• Rattan: 110,000 (not really a wood, but wood-like)
• Cherry: 9,880

Type by Style

When consumers look for a style of furniture, they use a variety of terms to describe what they’re looking for. You see terms like antique, classic, commercial, European, retro and mission. However, the most common style of furniture consumers are interested in is modern furniture, followed by contemporary and modular.

• Modern: 421,490
• Contemporary: 226,700
• Modular: 91,620
• Italian: 75,600

Type by Computer

In this category the keyword phrases are compound queries that couple a computer term with a type of functional furniture. An example of this would be laptop workstation. The top terms in this category include:

• Desk: 379,900
• Laptop: 173,100
• Armoire: 60,500
• Workstation: 51,900
• Chair: 35,500

Type by Person

There are only five search queries in this category, but it accounts for nearly 600,000 searches a month. Here consumers are searching for furniture for their children using the term kid, but they more commonly use the term student.

• Student: 401,100
• Kids: 181,500

Type by Material

Consumers are also interested in furniture manufactured from non-organic materials, and they use terms such as metal, mesh and fabric. The most common non-organic material specified is glass. The most common organic material specified is leather.

• Leather: 351,900
• Glass: 128,700

Type by Color

When consumers search for furniture by color, they overwhelmingly prefer white furniture, followed by black furniture. You do see searches for brown, pink and red furniture but these are fairly small search numbers.

• White: 202,940
• Black: 65,600

Each one of these sub-groupings in the type category provides excellent opportunities for experimenting with micro-sites or custom landing pages.

Software

22,577,000 searches. All this search traffic is useless to an office furniture vendor. The term office does appear in each of the queries in this group so you have to be careful not inadvertently target this traffic in your advertising campaigns.

Home Office

2,505,210 searches. 1.5 million of these searches are for the single two word phrase home office. In this particular case it’s difficult to say what the user’s intent is. They could be looking for furniture, design ideas, or they could be looking for office supplies.

The remaining million queries are clearly about furniture. The most common items consumers are looking for are desk followed by cabinets. There is a good micro-site opportunity in this home office category which is home office design ideas which generates over 75,000 searches each month.

• Desk: 179,080
• Design ideas: 77,720
• Cabinets: 19,380

Products

1,474,670 searches. In the product category consumers are searching for related accessories such as desk organizers, chair cushions, mats and lamps. 600,000 of these queries are somewhat vague in nature where consumers are using the terms office products and office accessories.

• Accessories: 59,200
• Lamps / lighting: 55,200
• Mats: 27,100

Leasing

1,367,460 searches. There are two things going on in this category, consumers are interested in renting office space or renting office furniture. The majority of this traffic is for office space.

Used

1,238,840 searches. There’s quite a bit of traffic for used furniture – business owners are using terms such as surplus office furniture, recycled office furniture or refurbished office furniture. But there are two high-level phrases that dominate this category of search behavior. These are:

• Second hand: 562,720
• Used office furniture: 143,700

Brand

1,090,340 searches. If consumers are specifically searching for your brand then you’ve got it made. The only real insight in this category of behavior is that the consumers will occasionally specify a type of furniture that they are looking for, and this tends to be either a desk or a chair.

Value

958,080 searches. Consumer intent is very focused when they use value-based terms. You see terms such as affordable, inexpensive or on sale in the general category, however the dominant sub-categories are discount and cheap. Cheap furniture and discount furniture are both excellent micro-site opportunities.

• Value using Discount: 346,110
• Value using Cheap: 318,080
• Value (general): 293,890

Company

752,460 searches. In this category consumers are searching for a company without specifying a brand. You see consumers using terms like showroom, suppliers and retailers interchangeably for the term company. The terms used to specify a company are variable, but the following are the most common.

• Outlet: 206,400
• Store: 128,000
• Wholesale: 124,700
• Shops: 126,380
• Manufactures: 83,700
• Companies: 43,300

Clearly the term outlet and store would be the preferred terms for website copy and PPC ads.

Supplies

631,400 searches. These searches are somewhat vague in that they do not specify any particular products. Nonetheless, they are transactional and therefore valuable. The most common two-word phrase in this group is office supplies.

Quality

593,060 searches. Consumers are using a wide variety of terms to describe a quality they are looking for in the furniture they want to purchase. You see them using terms such as comfortable, cool, funky and heavy-duty. The most common terms used to specify a quality include:

• Ergonomics: 393,200
• Fantastic: 74,000
• Small: 38,470
• Custom: 11,320
• Big and tall: 24,700
• Designer: 9,300

In this category, ergonomic furniture would be an excellent micro-site opportunity to experiment with.

Design

536,690 searches. In this category consumers are searching for information and services to help with design, planning and layout for their office. The three most common terms in these queries include:

• Planning: 37,890
• Layout: 31,580
• Ideas: 18,100

Design planning and layout would make a great service-oriented landing page.

Profession

498,000 searches. In this category consumers are searching for furniture by including professional terms. They are searching for furniture for a type of business, such as a doctor’s office. The second way consumers search is by professional title and the most common terms are executive followed by secretary.

Location

193,910 searches. Remarkably, when consumers search by location they do so in just three ways, and it’s always in the same order. Office furniture is the dominant two-word phrase in this category of search behavior, and accounts for close to 90% of search traffic.

• Office furniture [location]
• Office chairs [location]
• Office desk [location]

Source

187,791 searches. These are high-level searches where consumers are looking for a source for furniture. These can be websites, lists or directories. The dominant term here is online.

Services

101,080 searches. Though these searches are about office furniture, they are mostly off-topic if you sell used or new furniture. In this category you see consumers looking for furniture auctions, liquidators and installation services.

Transaction

15,740 searches. Transactional queries are very valuable. In these cases consumers are indicating their intent to transact with just the single term buy, as in buy office furniture.

Medical

7,500 searches. Though there’s not a lot of traffic in this category, it is valuable in that consumers are specifying a medical reason why they need a chair. They use the term lumbar support, back support and bad backs as part of their keyword phrase.

It would make sense to combine this medical category with the ergonomic category and develop a very focused micro-site.

Content

5,900 searches. This entire category is requests for office furniture catalogs and office-supply catalogs.

Term Density

Looking at how often a term appears across all searches in the data set is a very useful exercise. The following lists of 25 terms appear in about 80% of the search traffic. With this critical mass across so few terms, it provides a very focused textual pallet for writing page and ad copy. A second important significance of this list is that it reveals micro-site opportunities.

For example, the third most common two word phrase is open office which appears in 5 million searches every month. The concept of an open office is becoming very popular among start-ups today. I think this concept provides an excellent micro-site opportunity to position specialty furniture for the open office environment.

When examining the terms lower on the list you see three of four opportunities that could be developed into custom landing pages. Modern furniture, ergonomic furniture and design services should be considered.

Key Insights

• The type category is rich with micro-site opportunities. There are 11 sub-categories here that provide the office furniture vendor with plenty of options for developing very focused landing pages.
• Three categories dominate search traffic; these are type, home-office and products. These three should provide architectural focus for website design.
• There are two categories where consumers are searching for value; the used furniture category and the value category. The combination of these two categories account for 2.2 million searches a month. The opportunity here is to position high-quality, but inexpensive furniture as an alternative to purchasing used furniture.
• Each category of behavior has its particular set of terms. Each category also has a dominant term, for example if you look at the type by special purpose category you see consumers searching for tables and chairs that fold. Would a special landing page titled folding furniture be an interesting marketing tool? It would be worthy of an experiment.
• Statistically when a consumer searches for an office furniture company without specifying a brand name, they are using a little over a half a dozen synonyms to describe a company. The dominant synonym is outlet followed by store, wholesale and shops. So, do you have a rule of thumb for what your firm is called? Are you an outlet or would you call yourself a store?
• The quality category is interesting because consumers use a variety of quality-based terms to describe furniture that they’re interested in. This provides the option to develop custom copy for your website that exactly mirrors consumer intent. The dominant term in this category is ergonomics, and this provides the option to develop a focused micro-site.
• Consumers are clearly looking for help with ideas, planning and layout when it comes to designing their new office environment. If you can provide these services as well, you probably have a better chance of selling them furniture.

Parting Advice

Your office furniture company may be national, but most of your business is local. If you have not claimed your company in Google, Yahoo and Bing’s local search services, you should do so. You will not automatically get added to these local search indexes. There are local search requirements for being included. Make sure you understand what they are.

The data used in this analysis were extracted from AdWords.

Need To Know More?

A search behavior model is a data-driven process for classifying user intent for each search query to a specific source, type or subject. It’s a reflection of the total consumer search experience for products and services in any single market segment.

With such a short window of opportunity, what is the best way to exploit this traffic? The answer: understand how consumers search for your products and services.

Almost everybody gardens in one way or another. They may simply be buying houseplants, and caring for them. Or they may be buying exotic plants, shrubs and trees for a more formal backyard presentation. Regardless, consumers do exhibit a very defined set of search behaviors when looking for a garden center.

There are about 31 million global monthly searches (800 unique queries) associated with the Garden Center dataset. About half of these (15.8M) are considered local. When you classify user intent, you find 21 distinct categories of behavior. In the following table, you can see which categories interest consumers the most.

High Level Categories Of The Plant Family

One of the more interesting observations about this data is how few informational searches there are. Generally, informational searches generate the most traffic, and are usually the top category of behavior.

A second observation is that consumer behavior is far more focused which provides many great opportunities for developing custom landing pages. This data has important implications for your website’s information architecture. Let’s name two.

• Less than 1 percent of consumer searches are for a business brand name – their focus is on products and services, not on your specific business.
• The top three categories have consumers searching for products, plants by name and plants by type. This should be the focus for your website information architecture.

Sub-Categories In Garden & Landscape Searches

Often, high-level categories will have important sub-categories worth noting for architectural purposes. The next table shows that five of the high-level categories have interesting sub-groupings that provide options for experimenting with micro-sites.

Green Thumb Search Behavior Model Hierarchy

The following graph orders the search behavior categories from top to bottom by search volume. You will notice that the first category has the most traffic, but the Products category has the most complexity.

Garden Centers In More Detail

Let’s take a look at the categories in a little more detail.

Plant Name

With a total of 8,763,700 monthly searches, plant name is the most common category of search. It’s interesting that the top 10 names account for 90% of the traffic.

When you take a look at the top three names you see that bamboo, daisy and orchid alone account for 6 million queries each month. Certainly, the top five named plants merit special consideration in your website information architecture.

Type of Plant

The top ten searches for plants by type account for 2.2M of the 2,817,980 monthly searches in this category. Again, the top 3 to 4 types provide excellent landing page opportunities to develop information and content around herbs, perennials, garden plants and houseplants.

General Gardening Information

Informational searches tend to be vague. You can tell that they are about gardening, but in most cases it’s difficult to tell what their intent is (4,710,840 searches). For example, when consumers search on horticulture, it’s hard to know exactly what they are looking for.

Information Translates To Seeking Ideas

There is one pocket of behavior in the informational categories that is definitely worth paying attention to. Nearly 1.5 million consumers a year (127,791 monthly) are looking for ideas for their garden and landscaping needs.

They need help figuring out what to do, and they’re looking for your guidance and expertise to help them to create a pleasing garden experience. When you examine the data below, you notice that consumers are using the terms garden and landscaping interchangeably.

Searching For Landscaping & Gardening Products

When consumers search for product, they do so primarily in five ways. They look for containers, organic materials such as mulch, carts and tools. Product categories in order of volume are:

• Pots and containers – 663,970
• Organic materials – 584,320
• Products (general terms) – 445,763
• Tools – 284,290
• Supplies – 36,850
• Carts – 11,680

Product  Searches– Pots

In this category, consumers are searching for containers, and they use just three terms two modify their search phrases. These are planters, pots and boxes. The preferred term is planters (429K searches) followed by pots (87K searches) and boxes (65K searches). The top ten keyword phrases in this group account for 6.1K of the 663,970 monthly searches executed by consumers.

Product Searches – Organic

These searches for products seem to be more or less organic in nature. With 584,320 searches, mulch and topsoil dominate this group with organic fertilizers coming in third place.

Product Searches – General

These 445,763 searches are varied and numerous, but consumers are clearly looking for a specific manufactured product. Some of the searches are vague such as garden accessories and garden products. The rest are individually named such as retaining walls, garden edging, rubber mulch and railroad ties.

Product Searches – Tools

When it comes to the search for garden tools, consumers are searching at a high-level 50% of the time. Here they are not saying exactly what they are looking for. They use terms such as garden hand tools and garden equipment. When consumers do specify a tool, it’s just in three categories zero turn mowers, watering cans and sprinklers. There are 284,290 searches in this category.

Product Searches – Supplies

There is not a lot of search traffic in this group, but these are somewhat transactional queries since they are looking for supplies. Consumers are clearly looking for un-named products when they use keyword phrases such as greenhouse supplies and nurseries supplies. There are 36,850 searches in this category.

Trees

There are three primary categories of behavior when consumers search for trees. They search for a species, they search by the type of tree and they search for trees that are on sale.

In the first category (1,194,960 searches) consumers are searching for trees by species. The top 10 trees account for nearly 80% of the search traffic in this category (864K searches). Since dogwood is the most commonly searched for tree, it should be prominently placed on a landing page that features only trees.

Trees – General

There are a number of searches for trees that are vague in nature, but imply that they are looking for a particular type of tree. You see searches for small trees, indoor trees and potted trees. These particular searches do provide opportunity to experiment with custom landing pages. There are 327,500 searches this category.

Trees – For Sale

There’s not a ton of traffic here, it is however, very valuable traffic. Consumers are telling you that they want to buy products from you. This provides an opportunity to develop a custom “trees for sale” landing page featuring fruit, palm and bonsai trees for sale, which are the top three specified trees in this category.

Seeking Lawn & Garden Services

In this category, 50% of the search traffic is consumers searching for a specified service. The rest of the traffic is for maintenance services. Of the 728K queries in this category, 696K searches are in top ten keyword phrases.

You could make a case for the queries with architect / architecture in them that they should belong to the next Service-Design category. However, search engines being what they are, they do not associate the term architect to the term design.

Service – Design

Approximately 80% of this traffic is high-level. Consumers are using just two terms, landscape and garden. The remaining 20% is focused on specific design projects such as patio or Japanese gardens.

The specificity in these search queries provide opportunity to create landing pages where you can give consumers exactly what they’re looking for. Of the 687,280 search queries in this category 669K of them are in the top ten.

Garden Types

When consumers search for a garden by type they have very specific requirements for the types of plants, tools and accessories that that are to be used. This gives you the opportunity to develop a custom page that would detail the types of plants found in Japanese gardens, and feature tools and accessories that would make this garden complete.

This provides a very nice cross-sell opportunity. About 80% (873K) of the traffic (1,131,910 searches) is contained in the top ten keyword phrases.

Company

Though the term center dominates how people search for a garden supply business, there is a fair amount of variability in the terms used. The opportunity here is to ensure that you work the terms nursery, shop, stores and companies into your webpage ad copy. There are 988,769 searches in the company category.

Shrubs

In this category the term shrub accounts for 30% of the search traffic. This is fairly high-level traffic; however the rest is fairly focused, and could be developed into specific landing pages such as Azalea and Rhododendron. There are 954,600 searches in this category.

Content

When consumers search for content and your website can provide that you have launched the first critical step to generate a new customer. House and garden is very likely a search for the popular magazine and the traffic is not very useful to you. However, their request for plans, guides and catalogs provide a targeting opportunity.

Content – Pictures

People love pictures and videos. With 248,010 searches a month it is worth investing in high-quality photographs of gardens, plants and flowers for your website.

Value

Generally, when consumers search for products they deliberately use the terms cheap and discount to specify value. In this case they do not, instead they are using the terms sale, clearance and prices. It might make sense to think about a custom landing page that is focused upon sales and clearances during the September / October time frame.

Source

This is fairly high-level traffic and you cannot tell what is on the consumer’s mind, other than they’re looking for a source for garden supplies from an unknown source. 95% of the 172,121 searches are contained in the top ten keyword phrases in this category.

Transactional

These transactional queries are very valuable. The consumer is telling you that they want to purchase products from you, and the majority of this traffic uses just three keyword phrases: buy plants, buy garden and buy trees. There are 163,691 monthly searches in this category.

The following three categories speak for themselves and they don’t provide any particular advantage. You will certainly want to monitor your own brand, and you have to make sure that your website is properly marked up so that it gets included in local search indexes.

• Location: 294,723
• Brand: 201,763
• Event: 110,000

The following two categories have very little traffic, and this traffic is high-level. Consumers are searching for an unnamed company using terms like garden supply store or flower nursery.

• Company – Type: 21,860
• Company – Supply: 4,400

The next three categories are off-topic, and want to make sure that you are not inadvertently capturing some of this traffic, which is not consumer related.

• Software: 38,320
• Industry: 34,770
• Jobs: 33,320

Type – Grasses

There are only five search queries in this group of 2,360,300 searches. Clearly consumers prefer the term Turf over Sod by a two to one margin, therefore turf should be the preferred term in writing webpage copy.

Type – Seeds

When it comes to seeds, consumers are using a number of adjectives to specify interest. With the exception of Zoysia, the remaining terms are non-specific, and describe large numbers of species. With one million searches a year the term Seedling may provide a micro-site opportunity worth experimenting with. There are 403,340 searches in this group.

Term Density

Its always worth looking at how often terms appear across all search phrases. This allows you to review the list for possible custom landing page opportunities.

In the following list, Tree and Flowers are a little to high-level to be of much use, but the terms design and herbs suggest a broad category of interest. In addition to being a search category, the term design appears in 738K search strings each month.

To take this one step further, you can take the searches for ideas that are found in the information category (previously discussed) and combine it with the concept of design (from the list below) and fashion a custom landing page around Garden Ideas and Design Services.

The list below is also statistically important because it provides you with a focused short list of terms that consumers use over and over again, which should be in your website copy.

Key Insights For Garden Center Owners

• 250K consumers search for garden ideas, plans and tips every month. This is a micro-site opportunity.
• 50 percent of consumers, who search for content, want to see pictures of gardens. The second largest group is looking for catalogs.
• Less than 1 percent of consumer searches are for a company brand name. Their focus is on products and services, not on the name of your business.
• 80% of the 8.7 million searches for plants by name are for just four plants; bamboo, daisy, orchid and hibiscus.
• When a consumer specifies the type of garden they are interested in, it provides you with opportunities for cross-selling accessories (e.g., water gardens).
• Consumers are interested in purchasing trees over shrubs by a two to one margin.
• The term buy is the transactional term of choice. Consumers are not using any other terms to indicate their desire to purchase your products.

Need To Know More?

A search behavior model is a data-driven process for classifying user intent for each search query to a specific source, type or subject. It’s a reflection of the total business search experience for products and services in any single market segment.

In this case, informational searches are very small compared to the number of types that businesses specify when looking for an interactive agency. The type category is fairly complex with 13 sub-categories, which is the most I’ve ever seen in single high-level category. It’s interesting that businesses describe the type of agency they are looking for in about a dozen different ways that describe a single need.

There are 19 high-level categories of behavior across 7.2 million monthly searches in this search behavior model. The type category is 10 times larger than the next category (social) and I have broken it out into sub-categories later in this article to show in better detail what is going on there.

Besides type, there are three categories that suggest opportunities for information architectural focus. These are the social category, the quality category and the searches by location category.

High-Level Categories

Interactive Agency Sub-Categories

When you factor in the sub-categories, and sort them by volume, you end up with 34 distinct categories of search behavior. You will notice that the type sub-categories are the most varied, and that business people are using a dozen terms or phrases to specify the type of agency they’re looking for.

You also notice that these business people are much more interested in quality than they are in value. This list also suggests three conceptual constructs for developing a website message for an interactive agency. These are Social Media, Location and Type – they provide topical focus for a custom landing page and ad copy.

Search Behavior Model Hierarchy

The following graph orders the search behavior categories from top to bottom by search volume. You will notice in the first box that the most complexity and search volume appears in the Type category.

The Type Category

This is the motherload with 5.2 million searches. Business people are searching for an agency in 13 distinct ways.

Business people are also using a variety of interchangeable terms when naming a company. For example:

• Agency: 736,672
• Agencies: 645,673
• Firms: 209,283
• Companies: 137,211
• Business: 139,300
• Service: 97,529
• Company: 60,272
• Group: 36,700
• Studio: 1,558

They also modify many of these queries by specifying the kind of service they’re looking for at a fairly high-level. The four most common examples include:

• Strategy
• Solutions
• Promotions
• Planning

Now let’s look into each of the 13 type sub-categories shown above in more detail.

Marketing

When business people look for a company (1.8 million searches) they will most often use the term marketing coupled with the terms mentioned above, such as agency, promotions and strategy.

Advertising

When businesses search for an advertising agency, they are very specific in the terms that they use. They specify that they are looking for either a company or an agency, but numerous searchers also exclude any reference to a company. For example:

• Digital advertising
• Website advertising
• Interactive advertising
• Full service advertising
• Internet advertising

General

With 802K monthly searches, this is a significant category, but the terms that people are using to construct the type queries are all over the map. You see phrases such as Web agency, media agency, online agency, email agency, print agency and corporate web design.

Design

There are close to 400K queries a month where business people are looking for a design agency. There is almost no traffic associated with the term company. You do see a higher incidence of the term interactive being used in this group.

Graphic

When the term graphic is used to specify the type of company, the most common term used is firm, as in graphic design firm. You also see the terms company and agencies used in fairly significant numbers. There are 97K searches in this category.

Mobile

There are just five queries for mobile marketing services, but these five queries account for 124K searches a month.

Digital

Approximately 104K people a month specify the agency they’re looking for by using the word digital. Digital is exclusively used with the term agency/agencies. There is no search traffic in this category with the words company, firm or studio in the keyword phrases.

Branding

There are 57K searches a month that have the term brand or branding in the search string. People use the term branding by a margin of four to one over the term brand. These terms are exclusively associated with agency or company.

Creative

About 126K people search for a creative agency each month. Agency/agencies are the preferred terms in this category. You do not see any search traffic associated with the term company, and almost no traffic associated with the term firm.

B2B

The 10.5K searches in this category are fairly focused. They’re looking for marketing and advertising services, and the only company type specified is agency.

Interactive

There are just 8.3K searches a month for an interactive agency. In the marketplace, you see marketing and advertising firms describing themselves as an interactive agency, but business people are not searching on those terms in any meaningful numbers.

Full service

The 4.3K searches a month make this category similar to the Interactive category. You see a lot of companies describing themselves as a Full Service agency, thought not a lot of business people actually use the term Full Service when looking for an agency.

The Remaining Categories In More Detail

Brand

I was surprised at how few branded searches there were in the interactive agency AdWords data set. 81K searches strikes me as being a very small number for an industry that has been around for along time. The bottom line is that business people are searching in large numbers for a type of agency rather than by brand.

Buyer

This category is all about by buying media. They are mostly looking for a media buying agency, but they are also specifying the type of media (digital) or a source for buying media. There are 53K searches in this category,

Channel

There are just 7K searches in this category. They are specifying an agency or company by a media outlet or “channel” such as TV, radio or magazine.

Consultant

There are 138K search queries where businesses are looking for a marketing consultant. Interestingly, there are only 320 searches for an interactive marketing consultant. The two most common words in these searches are Internet and online, as in Internet marketing consultant and online marketing consultant.

Content

There are 20K searches where business people are looking for a company by stating the type of content they’re interested in. Video is the most common followed by rich media.

Information

There are 381K search queries in this category. The majority of this traffic is fairly high level and vague in nature. It’s not easy to guess what problem these people were trying to solve when they typed in the following three phrases:

• Advertising web
• Interactive media
• Advertising online

Are they interested in PPC campaigns? Flash development services? Developing new ads? It’s hard to tell, even though these three phrases account for over 300K of the searches in the information category.

International

This is a very small category with just 2.2K searches. They are either looking for a global agency or an international advertising agency.

Jobs

This is probably of no interest to you from a business standpoint unless you are hiring. With 68.4K searches a month, you don’t want to inadvertently target any of this traffic in your PPC campaigns.

Local

This is an ambiguous category with 14K searches. It’s hard to tell if the searchers are interested in finding a local agency, or if they are interested in local marketing and advertising.

Location

There are 297K monthly searches spread across 271 keyword phrases in this group. 249 of these keyword phrases specify a city name, while the remaining 22 include the name of the state. The most common two-word phrases used in this group are:

• Advertising agencies [city name]
• Marketing agency [city name]
• Interactive agency [city name]

Nationality

This is a small category with just 1.3K queries, but it’s likely to grow over time. Here you have people searching for an agency that caters to a nationality. Hispanic advertising agencies is a very good example.

Profession

There are 16.6K searches a month where a specific industry is used in the keyword phrase. In order of importance; healthcare, sports, automotive and financial are the four most common terms found in this category.

Quality

With 230K monthly searches, business people are specifying some sort of quality that is important to them in an agency. When it comes to excellence they are using just two terms and these are best and top.

• Top – 139K searches
• Best – 13K searches

There are other terms that are used to specify some desirable quality. You see searchers using the terms experimental, viral, boutique, leading, and small in significant numbers (75K searches).

Search Engine

With 43K searches, these queries are roughly split between the search for SEO services and search engine marketing services.

Social

There are 489K searches in this category. To no one’s surprise, the phrase social media is the most commonly used two-word phrase. There are several other combinations being used that should be noted.

• Social marketing
• Social advertising
• New media
• Social networks
• Social media

With just five two-word combinations in these keyword phrases across 489K searches, this category provides a set of interesting landing page opportunities to experiment with.

Software

In this group business people are looking for an unspecified software application. You see phrases like Internet marketing software and online marketing system. It’s difficult to know what problem these folks are trying to solve. There are 10K queries a month in this category.

Source

Here people are searching for a source of services. They use terms like directory, list, online and websites when looking for an advertising or marketing agency. With 117K monthly searches this category is worth thinking about when doing PPC ads. However, because of the vague nature of most of these search phrases, it would be difficult to optimize a targeted landing page.

Value

There are 33K searches a month for the query affordable web design which is not many. Generally, value is a fairly significant category when it comes to searches for products and services. I was very surprised to see that value is of little concern when searching for an agency.

Term Density

The top 25 terms appear 9.6 million times in queries each month. I’ve excluded the company-related terms I mentioned at the beginning of this article in the type discussion. Here is the list of secondary terms.

Though interactive is in the top ten terms, there are many more businesses searching for an agency using the term design followed by digital. With all the recent focus on mobile development platforms and mobile marketing, I was surprised that there was not more traffic associated with the term mobile.

An interesting thing you can do when compiling a list of top terms is to construct probabilistic phrases for website and ad copy, based on the most common terms. For example:

• Social media marketing design agency.
• Marketing and advertising digital design firm.

Collectively the terms in Social media marketing design agency appear 5.6M times each month in keyword searches.

Key Insights For Interactive Agencies

• Most businesses search for an agency by the type of service they are looking for, not by brand.
• Searching by type is where all the action is. Type should be one of the cornerstones for your website architecture when it comes to developing content and describing your services.
• Businesses search for an agency using over a dozen, often interchangeable, terms. Do you position your company as a B2B or Full Service agency? If so, you should reconsider because there is not a lot of traffic associated with those labels.
• Businesses are using nine different terms to search for a company. Agency is the most common, while Studio and Group have minimal traffic. If you position your company as an Interactive Marketing Studio you are limiting your organic search footprint.
• Are you a marketing consultant? Steer away from the term Interactive. There are only 320 searches a month for Interactive Marketing Consulting.
• How do you describe your agency when it comes to quality? Do you describe the company as the “best digital agency” in town? It turns out that businesses search for the Top agency by a ten to one margin over Best.
• How do you position your company geographically? 90 percent of location-based searches contain a city name, while 10 percent use a state name.

Need To Know More?

A search behavior model is a data-driven process for classifying user intent for each search query to a specific source, type or subject. It’s a reflection of the total business search experience for products and services in any single market segment.

It turns out that there is much more variable traffic in the search engine optimization data by a 4-to-1 margin over an SEO search.

• Search engine optimization: 125 million monthly searches.
• SEO: 30 million monthly searches.

The Search Engine Optimization group has 25 categories of behavior. The SEO group has three fewer search behavior categories.

For example, there is no traffic for the advertising, business and search engines categories.

Category Comparison

So, what do these differences mean? I’ll start by comparing the search traffic head-to-head.

For example, in this view you will notice that location-based searches are much more prominent in the SEO group, while product development queries are almost non-existent.

Search Behavior Model Hierarchy

The following two graphs order the search behavior categories for both groups from top to bottom by search volume. You will notice that each model has a different order and the sub categories are displayed where there is critical mass in search traffic.

The Search Engine Optimization Model

The SEO Model

Categories In More Detail

This analysis will be more focused on the search engine optimization group because it contains more data. As I work through the categories, I will lead with data about the search engine optimization group, and follow-up with observations about the SEO group data if it’s of interest.

Advertising

• 2,547,280 searches

These searches are mostly about finding advertising services. About 700,000 of these searches have the term promotion in them. There are a few cases where the word optimization is used in the keyword phrase, and the acronym SEO is not used at all.

In the SEO group, the term advertising appears just once.

Brand

• 11,239,780 searches

10.5 million of these searches have the brand name Google in them. These queries tend to be high level; business people use keyword phrases such as Google optimization, Google search engine marketing and Google search optimization. The majority of the remaining traffic is for Overtour. The term SEO appears only once in the brand category.

In the SEO group, Google appears in just under 50% of the searches. The rest of the branded searches are for named companies and named software products. The term SEO appears in every branded query in this group.

Business

• 902,000 searches.

This traffic is all noise, and it’s not clear to me why these queries are here. I would assume that these were captured as part of a multi-search session that had SEO related queries in them. The SEO group has no business related traffic.

Company

• 4,112,600 searches

Here marketing professionals are searching for a company without specifying a brand name. Two-thirds of the searches are high level, where you see people using terms like affiliate and design agency. There are two pockets of behavior here that are of interest. The following partial phrases appear in large numbers of company-related searches:

• Marketing services: 835,000 searches.
• Search engine optimization: 597,000 searches.

In the SEO group, you do have people looking for marketing services, but it represents much less traffic at about 100,000 queries. Most of these queries have the term SEO in them. Though the term company is the most common word used, you do see a lot of variability in how a company is described. They’re using terms like provider, firm, reseller, agency, service and partner interchangeably.

Consulting

• 662,200 searches

When business people look for a consultant, they’re looking for a combination of search engine optimization expertise and search engine marketing expertise. They are also looking for a broader set of tools and experiences from these consultants.

Consultant and consulting are the most common terms, however you do see a lot of variability in the words used, such as guru, expert, professionals, freelance, and specialist.

In the SEO group, there is only one query that contains the word marketing. The focus in this group is purely on finding search engine optimization consultants.

Content

• 4,435,030 searches

The content category has three very definable subgroups.

1. The first group of four million searches has consumers looking for SEO guidance, search engine optimization secrets and article marketing.
2. The second group of 390K searches has consumers looking for tips about optimization and search engine marketing.
3. The third group has business owners looking for books about search engine marketing and search engine optimization (37,500 searches).

SEO Tips would make a great landing page opportunity.

In the SEO group, you see the same categories, but without any traffic associated with marketing and advertising. The SEO group has one additional sub-category, reviews which is primarily focused on software.

• Searching for guides, advice and articles: 281,300 searches.
• Searching for books: 86,900 searches.
• Searching for reviews: 32,900 searches.

Education

• 1,145,906 searches

This category is dominated by queries for training. About 80% of this traffic is for search engine marketing training, while the rest is for search engine optimization training, tutorials and workshops.

The SEO group has 350,000 searches in this category, but instead of requests for training you see queries for seminars, tutorials and courses. You also see two other groupings not in the search engine optimizations data set, which are how to and learn about.

Events

• 2,490 searches.

All the traffic in this category is for search engine marketing/search engine optimization conferences. The SEO group has about 4,000 searches a month for event-based queries.

Information

• 38,899,740 searches

About 12 million of these queries actually have the three-word phrase search engine optimization in them. As in all informational searches these tend to be high level, and in many cases it’s hard to guess what the user was really looking for. For example, what exactly does search engine optimization results mean?

In the SEO group, the use of the phrase search engine optimization and the term SEO are evenly split in the 20 million searches in the information category.

International

• 305,080 searches

Searches for international or multilingual services are pretty high level. The SEO group, which has only 13,700 searches, is more focused. They are interested in international multilingual services, but they are also specifying SEO services by nationality. You see search requests for Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish SEO.

Jobs

• 1,000,190 searches.

There is a lot of noise in this category; just 175,000 of these searches are for search engine optimization/marketing jobs. In the SEO group the dominant job search phrase is SEO jobs.

Local

• 141,920 searches.

This is an interesting category because the term local can have two meanings.

1. People are interested in locating specific services but failed to specify a city or state name. They use search phrases such as local search marketing or local SEO. Are they looking for a local firm?
2. Owners have a regional business and want to optimize their website for local search results.

Location

• 190,440 searches

Business people search for SEO services in two primary ways; by state and city name. Searching by city name is the most common by a two to one margin.

The SEO group has many more location-based searches, 530,000 a month. You see much more specificity in this group as people are specifying the type of SEO they’re interested in. For example, link building, content optimization and page markup.

Paid search

• 3,197,170 searches.

All the action for paid search is in the search engine optimization group. The terminology they use and word order is very consistent here.

For example, you see these patterns 95% of the time:

• PPC [variable terms]. 2.5 million searches.
• Pay per click [variable term]. 625,000 search
• Paid search [variable term]. 65,000 searches.

In contrast, the SEO group has only 35,000 searches for paid search each month.

Product development

• 2,316,000 searches

The fact that product development related searches are showing up in this data suggests that many companies recognize the specific role that SEO plays in the web development process. This is spot on. You do see some keyword phrases that merge web development with SEO such as the phrase SEO Web development.

There is almost no traffic associated with product development in the SEO group – just 2.3K searches a month.

Profession

• 138,690 searches

Here, executives are searching for optimization services by profession. They do so in two distinct ways. First, they search at a high level using the primary term B2B. Secondly, they specify a specific industry such as automotive, hotel or legal.

There are only 14,000 monthly searches in the SEO group by profession, but they specify many more industries in this data such as dental, law firm and travel.

Quality

• 745,080 searches

When people specify a particular quality within their keyword phrase, they do so with very few specific terms.

For example:

• Best search engine [variable term]. 393,000 searches.
• Top search engine [variable term]. 194,000 searches.
• Improve/increase search engine [variable term]. 145,000 searches.

In the SEO group, there’s the same focus on the terms best and top, however there is no traffic associated with increase or improve.

• Best search engine [variable term]. 293,000 searches.
• Top search engine [variable term]. 97,000 searches.

Search engine

• 2,056,180 searches

These are fairly high-level queries and are clearly about search engines, but beyond that it’s hard to tell what the consumer was thinking when they typed in the following phrases; natural search engine and web search engines. You find none of these phrases in the SEO group data set.

Service

• 11,426,001 searches

This is a complex category with many sub-groupings. Most of these searches are fairly focused and the business owners are telling you exactly what they’re looking for. For example:

• Service – general: 5.6 million searches.
• Service – marketing: 3 million searches.
• Service – submission: 1.2 million searches.
• Service – page rank: 823,000 searches.
• Service – link building: 651,000 searches.
• Service – SEO page markup: 63,000 searches.
• Service – copywriting: 59,000 searches.

In the services-general category, the majority of the traffic is for search engine optimization without any references to terms like submissions or copywriting.

In the SEO group, you see the same categories, but with drastically reduced numbers. For example:

• Service – general: 2.9 million searches.
• Service – link building: 120,000 searches.
• Service – copywriting: 116,000 searches.
• Service – submission: 111,000 searches.
• Service – page rank: 80,600 searches.
• Service – SEO page markup: 51,000 searches.
• Service – marketing: 16,780 searches.

Software

• 9,087,000 searches

Over 8 million of these searches are for CMS and CRM services. About 99% of the searches are high level, and there is only one search query specifying a brand. You see keyword phrases such as search engine ranking software and SEO optimization software in this group.

The same behavior exists in the SEO group, but with a little more variability in term usage. For example, SEO blocking software and SEO shopping cart.

Source

• 1,175,000 searches

In the source category people are looking for directories, specialty websites and lists of search engine optimization sites. There’s quite a bit of noise in this category. For example, you see requests for lists of Internet search engines and advertising websites.

In the SEO group the searches for a source are far more focused, and 100% of the traffic is focused on finding SEO directories or SEO resources.

Tools

• 13,022,120 searches

These are searches for software tools, but the consumers did not use the term software when they did the search. Approximately 11 million of these searches are for AdSense, AdWords and analytical tools. The remaining traffic is for optimization, submission and ranking tools.

In the SEO group, people are using many more search phrases to find a wider variety of tools. They are using secondary terms such as analyzer, generator, suggestion, checker, and tracking to specify the type of tool they are looking for.

Transaction

• 166,100 searches

Consumers use very few transactional terms to specify their needs in this category. The most common are buy, get and quote. This behavior holds true for both groups.

Type

• 15,923,150 searches

Consumers search for a type of service in five different ways. In order of importance they are:

• Type-SEM: (7.9 million searches) e.g., SEO SEM.
• Type-general (6.8 million searches) e.g., mobile search engine optimization.
• Type-web: (1 million searches) e.g., web marketing search engine placement.
• Type-interactive: (134,000 searches) e.g., interactive advertising.
• Type-organic: (19,000 searches) e.g., organic search optimization.

Other examples of Type include video SEO and white hat SEO.

In the SEO group, you have an additional category where consumers are searching by development platforms such as flash and Joomla.

In this group, you also find no traffic for interactive services. The one anomaly in this comparison is that you find double the traffic for organic services than in the SEO group.

• Type-general (1 million searches) e.g., Internet marketing SEO.
• Type-platform: (341,000 searches) e.g., SEO Joomla.
• Type-web: (269,000 searches) e.g., web marketing search engine optimization.
• Type-SEM: (104,000 searches) e.g., SEM SEO.
• Type-organic: (47,000 searches) e.g., organic SEO services.

Value

• 683,420 searches

Of those, 457,000 of the searches are for free services. The most common secondary terms is cheap followed by affordable.

• Value-free: 457K searches.
• Value-cheap: 74K searches.
• Value-affordable: 50K searches.
• Value-price: 35K searches.
• Value-cost: 33K searches.

You see the same behavior reflected in the SEO group.

• Value-free: 366K searches.
• Value-cheap: 66K searches.
• Value-affordable: 29K searches.
• Value-cost: 17K searches.
• Value-price: 14K searches.

Term Density

The next table shows the top 25 secondary terms for each group. In the search engine optimization group, you see a much broader range of topics reflected in the terms while the SEO group reflects a much narrower range of interest.

Secondary Terms: Search Engine Optimization Group

The terminology used in the search engine optimization group shows that these business owners understand that SEO is just one part of a successful website strategy.

For example, you see interest in marketing, advertising and paid search. It’s not surprising to see the term SEM used three times as much as the term SEO (7.5M vs. 2.7M).

One surprise in this data is how often consumers actually take the trouble to spell out search engine optimization instead of using the acronym SEO.

Secondary Terms: SEO Group

In the SEO group, you don’t see a focus on product development, advertising and paid search.

Instead, you see terminology that is very closely associated with the nuts and bolts of search engine optimization such as searches for services, tools and software. Interestingly, these phrases do not show up in the top 25 list for the search engine optimization group.

High-level Differences

The search engine optimization group is far more inclusive and reflects the role that SEO plays within the entire website development, marketing and advertising business cycle. Not only are businesses looking for SEO services, they are equally interested in paid search and search engine marketing services.

There are several focuses within this data, with marketing being the most dominant, followed by advertising and product development. When it comes to marketing, business owners are using half a dozen interchangeable phrases to dictate what they’re looking for.

For example:

• Search engine marketing: 1,286,000
• Online marketing: 1,138,000
• Web marketing 487,000
• Internet marketing: 94,000
• Search marketing 98,000
• Interactive marketing: 65,000

You do not see this focus on marketing in the SEO AdWords data, where the term marketing appears only 754,000 times. There is not much focus on paid search in the SEO data as seen in the comparison below.

• Search engine optimization group: 3.2 million searches.
• SEO group: 35,000 searches.

In the search engine optimization group business owners use only three terms two modify advertising queries. These are:

• PPC: 2.5 million
• Pay per click: 625,000
• Paid search: 65,000

Brand Differences

Another noticeable difference between the two groups is the brand category.

In the search engine optimization group, there are over 11 million brand related queries, most of them having the word Google in them. There are a few other brands in the data, but not many. You do see queries for Overture, Brad Callen, MSN and SEO Inc. These brands represent less than 600,000 queries a month.

In the SEO group, brand accounts for just over 1 million searches a month. Google does not dominate this category. Instead, you see queries by brand name for software that is used in managing SEO platforms, such as elite 4.0.

Location Differences

Another major difference in category behavior is the search for SEO services by location. The SEO group has nearly triple (190K vs. 530K) the location-based searches than the search engine optimization group. All the queries in the SEO group are about locating SEO services in a particular city or state. While the search engine optimization group has a lot of SEM requests in the location category.

Key Insights For SEO firms

• If your business is primarily providing search engine optimization related services, then using the abbreviated form (SEO) is your best option.
• If you’re a full service marketing and advertising firm along with SEO services, then using search engine optimization fully spelled out is your best option.
• On balance, when businesses look for consultant they are looking for a broader array of expertise beyond that of SEO.
• There are very specific content opportunities in the area of training, seminars and reviews.
• In certain categories, there’s a lot of predictability in how consumers construct search queries (e.g., word order and terms used). You see this in the paid search and quality categories.
• When business owners search for a type of a firm there are big differences between the two groups. For example, there is 80 times more traffic in the search engine optimization group associated with the term SEM.
• You see a lot of variability in the terminology people use to specify a type of firm. For example, web, interactive, organic and Internet are used interchangeably when describing a company. You see this behavior in both groups.

If you take a step back to think about why there are such dramatic differences in the two groups, you can make a couple of observations.

Comfort level – The terminology used in the SEO Group suggests familiarity with the jargon commonly found in the search engine optimization community.

The search traffic in the SEO group suggests a higher level of sophistication and understanding by searchers.Their needs are narrowly defined, and they know exactly what they are looking for. I also wonder how much of the SEO group traffic is generated from within the industry.

Company size – It may be that a lot of the search engine optimization group traffic is coming from larger companies with complex website infrastructures and extensive marketing departments – hence all the traffic associated with CRM, CMS and SEM. This search traffic reflects the complete web development, marketing and advertising cycle. In this group, SEO plays a supporting role, not a dominating role.

Need To Know More?

A search behavior model is a data-driven process for classifying user intent for each search query to a specific source, type or subject. It’s a reflection of the total consumer search experience for products and services in any single market segment.

A search behavior model is a data-driven process for classifying user intent for each search query to a specific source, type or subject. It’s a reflection of the total consumer search experience for products and services in any single market segment. Read more about Search Behavior Models here.

The Self Publishing Industry As A Test Model For User Intent

The ubiquitous spread of the Internet and the decline in the cost of printing books in small volumes has given rise to a growing online vanity publishing business. Memoirs and family genealogies are now easily preserved for future generations at a very reasonable cost. Family photo books are easily created, and if you are a budding short-story or fiction writer you have more publishing options than you ever had before.

When you examine the full dataset of 800 queries (extracted from AdWords) for self publishing, you find that it accounts for about 20 million searches every month. The first thing you notice in this data is the relatively small numbers of keyword searches for a company brand name. In my opinion, this may reflect low brand awareness in consumers’ minds for self publishing services.

There is also potentially a lot of noise in this data – many of these queries are about mainstream publishing, and reflect interest in traditional products and services. However, I think consumers often start their search for self publishing services with the more traditional publishing houses because there is very little consumer brand awareness around the concept of self publishing.

Understanding Search Behavior By Hierarchy

There are 20 high-level categories of search behavior found in these queries. Usually, you can identify two or three top categories (by search volume) that provide potential for information architectural focus. This model is different. A couple of the sub-groups in the type and informational categories are useful to information architects (IA), but not all of them. The whole source and transactional categories are focused enough to be exploited by IAs as landing pages.

Sub-Categories Steer Behavioral Choices

When you look at sub-categories, the count rises to 29 behavioral patterns with type being the most interesting and varied. It’s worth looking at some of these sub-categories because they provide several landing page opportunities. In particular, How To and POD (print on demand) stand out.

Unique Assets In The Self Publishing Model

This is one of the more complex models I’ve ever seen. The large number of categories was a surprise, and many of them are not particularly useful in a self publishing context. However, there are a few off-topic categories that can be exploited. For example, when consumers are searching for a publishing company, (1.46 million searches) they are not specifying a genre, a type of book or even stating they are interested in self publishing.

These searchers are looking for an unnamed publishing company to provide an unknown service. It’s a good bet that these people are interested in publishing a book, but have not considered self publishing as an option. It is possible that some of this traffic can be converted with a “If you are looking for a publisher, consider Self Publishing” micro-site.

The following model is displayed in descending order by traffic volume with Information having the most, and Quality having the least. At a glance, you can see that consumer search complexity is focused in the information, type, transactional and value categories.

High-Level Categories In More Detail

Information: Informational queries account for 9,849,839 searches each month. Most of this traffic is vague in nature. It’s clearly publishing related, but it’s hard to tell if consumers are interested in “self publishing” or not. There are two sub-categories here that are focused in intent, and one of them will make a great landing page.

• Information: How to – 539,223
• Information: Specific information request – 14,851

When consumers make a specific request they are looking for a “guide.”  You also see advice, reviews and tips in smaller numbers. The how to category has about 45 queries with four distinct phrases being used that provide an opportunity for an architecturally (information) sound landing page. Consider the following phrases and how they can be fashioned into a page label, a tagline and a lead-in sentence.

• How to publish [book(s)] – 149,080
• Publish your [book, work] – 21,180
• How to self publish – 9,520
• Publish my [book, novel or story] – 6,080

These two categories of behavior suggest that the process of self publishing is not well understood by the average person and they are clearly asking for advice and help.

Type: Consumers search for a type of publisher 1,912,145 times a month. There are five distinct categories of search behavior in this group, and some of the sub-categories are fairly focused and valuable.

1. Type (general) – 554,040
2. Type, self publishing – 473,676
3. Type, not a book – 407,154
4. Type by genre – 240,610
5. Type by book (subject matter) – 236,665

Let’s take a look at some of the type sub-categories in a little more detail.

Types (general): Though many of these types in the general category are somewhat vague, such as in “personal publishing”, there are three distinct phrase clusters that generate 500K searches a year that are related to “self publishing.” These partial phrases provide textual focus and should be worked into your website page copy.

• Custom book printing / publishing
• Short run books / printing
• Vanity publishing

Types (self publishing): These searches are right on the money, consumers are clearly specifying what they are looking for. Though the phrase “self publishing” is the most ubiquitous, they are using a variety of term combinations (with significant traffic) to say the same thing. For example:

• Self publishing – 165.9K searches
• Self publishers – 121K searches
• Self publish – 94.4K searches
• Self book publishing – 37.5K searches
• Self published – 19.8K searches

This is a page copy challenge, but it’s also an opportunity.

Types (not a book): This traffic is all noise, and of no value to you if you publish only books. Consumers are trying to find publishers of catalogues, comic books and postcards etc. Some of this traffic has the phrase self publishing in it, so you need to be aware of this when doing PPC campaigns. With 407K searches a month this may present opportunities to branch out into new areas. For example, there is consumer interest in publishing comic books!

Types (by genre): In this traffic, consumers are looking for a publisher by specifying a broad genre such as non-fiction or paperback publishers. Though these people have not specified interest in self publishing, they are telling you what their interest is. This provides opportunities to target this interest with custom landing pages and ad copy. The most common genres that would be interesting to a self publishing company include:

• Christian publishers
• Fiction publishers
• Kids publishing

Type (by book): This traffic is all over the map, but focused in intent. They’re searching for a publisher by specifying the type of book they are interested in such as business books, graphic novels and travel. Though very few searches in this category specify interest in self publishing, they do tell you the type of books they want to publish. The most common phrases contain:

• Romance – 113.9 searches
• Photo books – 33.9K searches
• Coffee table books – 33.7 searches
• Poetry publishers – 22.1 searches
• Cookbooks – 8K searches

These are the topics people are interested in, and therefore provide excellent landing page opportunities. They should also be templates within your software publishing platform.

Company: In this category consumers are searching for a publishing company without specifying a brand name or a genre. In this data you see that people are freely using a variety of terms interchangeably to specify a company. These terms include printer, firm, house, services and agents. The top three descriptions are:

• Publishing houses – 370K
• Publishing companies – 235K
• Publishing company – 144K

By a wide margin consumers clearly like the phrase publishing houses over publishing company. I think all three should be used in website copy – however, the preferred term should be publishing houses.

Source: In this category searchers are looking to source a publishing firm using broad-based terms such as list of and directories. The most common term in this category is “online” which appears in 1.2 of the 1.3 million searches in this group.

Service: Here consumers are looking for specific aspects of the book publishing business. Some of this traffic is not of value to the self publishing company (e.g., typesetting and binding).  However, there are targeting opportunities in this data. Of the 1,134,700 searches done each month for publishing services, the following three could be provided by a self publishing company.

• Book design – 305,660 searches
• Book editing – 75,300 searches
• Book distributors – 37,110 searches

Product: This traffic is of little value. Consumers are looking for physical products such as printing equipment, books and magazines. There is a lot of traffic here that you want to avoid in PPC campaigns (1,133,990 searches a month).

Software: About 85% of this traffic is about desktop and magazine publishing. Of the 776,170 searches done each month, about 80K can be targeted by the self publishing companies. The keyword phrase that will be of interest to you includes:

• Publishing software
• Book writing software
• Book publishing template

Transactional: These 692,583 queries are on target and roughly fall into two distinct groups.

• Transaction with various terms – 433,733 searches.
• Transaction with single concept – 258,850 searches.

Let’s take a look at each of these groups in a little more detail.

Transactional (various terms): In this group consumers are indicating their transactional intent by using four distinct transactional terms. These are getting, make, write and print. For example:

• Make, as in: Make a book – 339K searches
• Getting, as in: Getting a book published – 27K searches
• Print, as in: Print your own book – 8.7K searches
• Write, as in: Write your own book – 7.7K searches

Transactional (single concept): The second transaction category is the “on demand” group. There are two distinct patterns of behavior here.

• On demand [third term] – 108K searches
• Print on demand [fourth term] – 90K searches

Digital: This traffic (689,570 searches) certainly presents an opportunity for the self publishing company. 60% if this traffic is interested in digital printing and publishing. A smaller subset of consumers express their digital needs using the terms “electronic” or “ebook.”  The remaining 40% are interested in PDF publishing, which is probably low value traffic.

Industry: This traffic is about the publishing business, and is of no value to you. The 225,900 searches are about deals, business and the publishing market.

Marketing: This traffic is about selling, distribution, PR, and marketing. One could imagine a recently published author would be interested in these services. With 214,382 searches a month it may make sense to think about offering some of these services.

Location: The 211,830 location-based searches are almost entirely based on country names or major cities. About 2% of the traffic mentions a language, product or a type (e.g., poetry).  Since publishing a book does not have to be a face-to-face experience it’s unclear what value there is in targeting consumers by location. All this traffic should be open to exploitation by self publishing firms.

Education: The search traffic in this category falls into two groups; interest in publishing in general, and interest in writing courses. 107K of the 139,280 searches are about writing.

Value: The interest in value is usually fairly pronounced in most search behavior, but it is not the case here. 90K of the 127,239 searches is concerned with cheap printing, but this could mean booklets and postcards. There is likely no value-based opportunity to be exploited here.

Brand: The real surprise in this data is the general lack of consumer searches by brand name. At 98,632 searches a month, this is extremely low traffic for an industry. This would suggest that consumers do not have a grasp of who the top companies are in the self publishing industry. This is reinforced when you consider that 1.7 million consumers are searching for self publishing services by company and source – both groups are using non-specific terms to describe a company that is unknown to them. These present a real market opportunity for dominating this industry sector.

Event: These fall into two categories. Poetry and writing contests, and competitions. The opportunity here is to sponsor a competition and award the winner with a published book of poetry or short stories. This would help generate traffic, and presents you with good PR opportunities for your self publishing firm. 73,320 searches a month are done in this category.

Magazine: Most of this traffic (62,860 searches) deals with the magazine industry, but 1K a month is for the “Self Publishing Magazine.” The value here is to provide a link on your site to the magazine as a convenience to your visitors.

Jobs: This traffic is completely off topic, and is of no value – unless you are hiring (35,700 searches).

Organizations: The majority of this traffic (15,306 searches) is for the Publishers Association. The value here is to provide a link on your site to the association as a convenience to visitors.

Quality:  I was very surprised at the lack of interest in quality-based searches (4,450 searches a month). In most cases consumers are very interested in quality and value, but that is not the case in this industry.

Observations

There is a lot of search variability in this industry. When you look at the variety of phrases that are used, you find consumers are expressing a single concept in a variety of ways. This variability provides options to conduct A-B landing page test to see which phrase converts the best. Here are several examples:

• Self publishing
• Print on demand
• On demand publishing / printing
• Make(ing) a book
• Publish your book
• Publish my book

Term Density

When you look at how often certain terms appear across all queries, we see some interesting data. It’s no surprise to see book, publisher and print dominating this list. The interesting terms are those that you can conceptually use as a labeling device for custom landing pages.

These terms represent a lot of search traffic, and when carefully combined into a title you have options to create micro-sites that statistically represent what consumers are looking for. For example, consider these phrases constructed from the list of top terms:

• Online Self Publishing
• Digital Online Self Publishing
• Online Photo Book Self Publishing
• How to Self Publish
• How to Make a Book

The top 25 secondary terms in the following list account for 77% of all instances in keyword phrases.

If you extend the list to the top 50 secondary terms, you account for 91% of all terms used in the self publishing dataset. Not all the terms are on topic, but those that are provide a very focused palette that can be used in website and ad copy.

When you review this extended list you find further opportunity. In the above list you see the top types of books consumers are interested in getting published.

• Photo books
• Romance
• Picture books
• Fiction
• Poetry

The density of these terms provide more support for developing custom landing pages and book template options in your software publishing platform.

Key Insights For Self Publishing Companies

So, what does this analysis do for your self publishing business? Let’s list some of the most important items to think about.

• There is clearly an opportunity to provide consumers with “how to” content. They are looking to understand the process before they sign a contract.
• At the highest level, consumers are interested in certain types, sources and want to transact for services. These themes should underpin your website information architecture and ad copy.
• Consumers are doing relatively few brand searches. This indicates a real lack of brand awareness in their minds. Increasing brand awareness should be top of mind for any self publishing company.
• Pay attention to the transaction categories – these folks are definitely looking for your services and they are using just six types of phrases to express their intent.
• A lot of consumers are searching for book design services – this provides a landing page opportunity.
• Consumer interest in contests and competitions provides sponsorship opportunities that can lead to new business.
• There is a lot of noise in this traffic – the searches for magazines, jobs, products, industry, software and marketing services are clearly off-topic and you don’t want to inadvertently target these groups.

• Multiple sclerosis
• Microsoft
• Mississippi
• Morgan Stanley
• Masters of science degree
• MySpace

This is something to think about because it reflects how people and search engines process information differently. People can see “MS” in context and get the meaning, but search engines have a harder time figuring out what it means. For example, do a search on MS and look at the results. As you can see, you end up with a search results page co-mingled with results from Microsoft, Morgan Stanley and Mississippi. I think this causes consumers to do a second search spelling out multiple sclerosis which returns a rich set of search results.

I took a look at a couple of multiple sclerosis non-profit websites, and indeed I found that the term MS was used almost exclusively over multiple sclerosis in webpage copy. One home page I looked at had 15 instances of MS, and only one instance of multiple sclerosis. This is not the best usage of the terminology from an SEO perspective, but the copy was just fine for consumer consumption. Non-profits should try to strike a balance in website copy between these two important keywords because they have two important but very different targets: the consumer, and the search engine crawler.

Multiple Sclerosis

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s take a look at how consumers find information about multiple sclerosis. 90 million monthly searches is an enormous amount of traffic that reflects consumer anxiety, and a quest for answers about this debilitating disease. There is a fair amount of complexity in this data, and understanding this search behavior will help you provide more options and information to people in crisis.

The first thing to examine is the high-level categories of search behavior. Consumers are participating in 19 distinct behavior patterns. Reviewing the categories by volume shows you that informational searches are the most dominant category by a wide margin. Informational searches are often vague, and hard to exploit because you know that they are in some way interested in MS, but you can’t tell what specifics they are looking for. The next two largest categories (symptoms and treatment) are the most common specific search requests where you can deduce user intent.

The next thing that jumps out at you is the Spanish category. 90K people are searching on “esclerosis multiple” each and every month. This is close to one million searches a year; therefore this would make an excellent micro site opportunity for the Hispanic community. Keep in mind that these are global numbers, and your strategy may be different if you focus is local.

Sub-Categories

Several of the high-level categories have themes that can be called out. In the following table you will find these themes sorted in descending volume so that you can see the relative importance of each sub-group. For example, about 88% of searches for treatment reflect a traditional physician / hospital approach, while the remaining are queries about diet, and other alternative approaches.

While examining the list of sub-categories is an interesting exercise, it is more productive to see if there are common interests that allow you to regroup this list in sections that make sense from an information architecture perspective (for website development). It turns out there are four very distinct organizational opportunities in this search behavior.

First cluster: Searchers are looking for very specific information about all aspects of the disease. They are in self-education mode.

Second cluster: Here searchers are concerned with treatment options, the long-term prognosis and future developments that may impact treatment.

Third cluster: Here searchers are interested in finding services and support. This includes locating hospitals and doctors. On the support side you find them looking for support groups and non-profit support organizations.

Fourth cluster: Here searchers are requesting specific types of content. They are naming products and people, and making content requests using terms like guides (in the content category).

The ability to organize search behavior into common categories allows your non-profit to display the information that consumers are looking for into logical sections accessible from the home page. This organizational strategy makes sense for Facebook support pages as well.

Categories In Detail

Let’s take a look at the individual categories in more detail. I will be dealing with each of the categories by descending volume.

Information: Informational searches account for 2.9 million searches a month. These tend to be vague in nature. They use phrases like MS information or multiple sclerosis websites that make it clear that they are interested in MS, but what aspect of the disease is unknown. One of the more interesting things happening in this group is how many searches are done on abbreviated spellings of the medical terms. For example:

• multiple sclerosis – 550,000
• multi sclerosis – 550,000
• multiple sclerosi – 550,000
• multiple sclera – 550,000
• multiple scl – 550,000

This terminology can be exploited as part of your SEO strategy.

Symptoms: Consumers search for symptoms more than a half-million times each month. They tend to cluster into two sub-categories: non-specific searches using vague terminology, and very specific searches mentioning body parts and specific symptoms. For example:

These non-specific search terms most likely reflect consumers who are in the earliest stages of research and self-education.

• Early signs / symptoms
• First signs / symptoms
• Initial symptoms
• Warning signs
• What are the…

When you look at specific symptoms used, you see clusters in the following areas:

• Pain
• Fatigue
• Lesions
• Numbness

Consumers search using non-specific terms by a ten-to-one margin over specific medical terms.

Treatment: Consumers conduct 195,388 searches for treatment options in three distinct sub-categories:

• The first category is generalized searches about therapy, medications and new developments in treatment.
• In the second category, they are searching for alternative treatments using the terms natural, homeopathy, herbs and alternative.
• In the third category, they are concerned with diet, nutrition and vitamins.

Organization: Most of the 103,540 searches are for MS organizations. Consumers are searching for these groups using the terms association, society and foundation interchangeably. society is the most commonly used term and should be the term of choice for website and ad copy.

• Society – 40K
• Association – 20K
• Foundation – 10K

Spanish: 90,500 people search for “esclerosis multiple” every month. This is clearly an opportunity to develop a Spanish language micro-site to front-end the rest of the content available at your non-profit site.

Location: The majority of the 71,320 searches in this category are for locating a hospital (60K searches). They are using the terms hospital, center and clinic interchangeably. The most common term is center, used about 54K times a month. This behavior should be reflected in your webpage copy.

Drug: Two thirds of the 62,656 searches are for drugs by a brand name. Avonex is the most common (29K searches). The second / third most common search is generic in nature, and is for new drugs and MS drugs. The following terms are the most common found in the drug category.

• Avonex – 29K
• New drugs – 7K
• MS drugs – 5.4K

Consumers are also using medication, medicine and meds interchangeably. It’s hard to make a case for a preferred term in this instance, though you can make a case for using all three variants throughout all your content.

• Medication – 6,140
• Medicine – 6,000
• Meds – 4,400

Support: Of the 56,600 searches in the support group, 44K are about the MS walk. The searches for support manifest itself in several distinct themes.

• MS walk
• Awareness
• Charity / donations
• Resources for individuals

Causes: These 43,660 monthly queries are really about consumers asking questions. The most common terms in this category include:

• Causes of – 12K
• Etiology of – 6.6K
• How do you get – 6.6K

This behavior provides a great labeling opportunity for a custom landing page.

Diagnosis: When consumers search about diagnosis (41,770 searches) they do so using variants such as diagnose, diagnosing and diagnostic. You find them using the following terms to modify the primary phrase:

• Blood test / test
• MRI

Disease type: When consumers search for information about MS (32,590 searches) they do so in two ways. They are specifying their searches in general terms using the word type or types of – 10.8K searches. When they search more specifically they are commonly using the following terms:

• Progressive – 8.3K
• Primary progressive – 4.8K
• Secondary progressive – 1.7K
• Benign – 1K

Research: The 31,746 searches in research break down into three distinct consumer interests.

• General research – 12.8K
• Stem cell research – 11.9K
• Clinical trials – 6.9K

Complications: The 29,028 searches in the complication category cluster into four groups:

• Relapsing MS – 10.4K
• Myelin / myelin sheath – 4.1K
• Secondary complications from pregnancy, alcohol and stroke.
• Reference to body parts: brain, bladder, neck and legs.

Gender and Age: Of the 16,721 searches conducted by gender and age we find that 10K searches are for information about women, whereas only 2K searches concern men. The rest of the search traffic is demographic in nature, and deal with age and onset of MS.

Prognosis: 50% of the 15,926 searches in the prognosis category deal with questions about cures. The rest of the traffic deals with the effects, the stages and prognosis of the disease.

Doctor: Consumers look for professional medical services in several ways (11,773 searches). The most common titles include:

• Physicians – 3.6K
• Doctors – 2.9K
• Neurologist – 2.6K

In other medical behavior models I’ve seen that consumers tend to favor the term physician over doctor when they are searching for services.

The remaining categories have very little traffic, but it is worth understanding what consumers are looking for in these cases.

Content: 4,237 searches. These are very specific content requests, and most of this traffic consists of people searching for pictures and videos.

Products: 2,530 searches. These people are interested in books, bracelets, jewelry and t-shirts. Though this traffic is limited it is transactional and valuable because they want to buy something.

People: 2,450 searches. Most of this traffic is for famous people with MS. Perhaps they are trying to find out how these personalities are coping with their disease.

Secondary Term Density

It’s always useful to look at how often an individual term or a two-word phrase is used across all the keyword phrases in a particular dataset. The following table outlines the top 25 terms, and how often they show up in a search query. The terms in this list account for nearly 90% of search traffic. In particular the terms symptom and treatment reflect the primary interest of consumers, and should play a major information role on the home page.

One of the more interesting behavior patterns in this list is the propensity for partial spellings of sclerosis in very large numbers (1.65 million) each month. It could be that many consumers are not sure how to spell sclerosis, and they hope that the search engine sorts it out for them. The top three partial spellings are:

• Scl
• Scler
• Scelosi

The word “multiple” is also abbreviated 550K times each month (i.e., multi). Behavior like this is difficult to exploit in consumer friendly webpage copy without it looking like spam. Though you can get creative, and call out this behavior on a “did you know” facts page.

In the final analysis these terms represent your textual pallet when developing website pages and ad copy, and the terms should be reflected in your information architecture.

Key Insights For MS Non-Profits

So, what does this analysis do for you as a non-profit organization? Let’s list some of the most important items to think about.

• At the highest level, consumers are interested in symptoms, treatment and organizations. These themes should underpin your website information architecture and ad copy.
• The sheer number of Spanish searches provides additional recruiting and donation opportunity.
• The 18 categories identified in this analysis fold neatly into four sections that can be the basis for focused architecture in website design. These can also be the basis for custom landing pages. These are:
  • Self-education
  • Diagnosis and treatment
  • Locate support and services
  • Locate content and products
• Editorial focus. Each category of behavior has a very narrow set of terms that are being used in searches. These terms provides you with the opportunity to tailor page copy to exactly what consumers are searching for. One of the major reasons consumers bail out on a website is their intent is not satisfied. When they see an exact match for the terms they are using, they are less apt to leave.
• Google taught the world how to search. Consumers are taking these skills and are applying them in the enterprise and in social networking platforms. The insight in this analysis applies to your enterprise and social media initiatives.
• Strike a balance between MS and Multiple Sclerosis when writing website and ad copy. Consumers know what MS means from context. Search engines are not as smart.

Parting Advice

Your non-profit organization may not be focused on multiple sclerosis, but the insight in this analysis exists in your cause. I encourage you to sort out how consumers find your organizations services.

Finally, your non-profit may be national but all your events and fund drives are local. If you have not claimed your organization in Google, Yahoo and Bing’s local search services, you should do so. You will not automatically get added to these local search indexes. There are local search requirements for being included. Make sure you understand what they are.

If you are looking for more information about multiple sclerosis please check out the national multiple sclerosis society for a chapter near you.

The data used in this analysis were extracted from AdWords.

In comparison, the following model is the family restaurant hierarchy of categories displayed more or less in descending order by search volume with brand having the most traffic and games having the least.

Family Group Vs. Restaurant Group

To simplify this analysis I will refer to last months’ analysis as the “restaurant group” and this month’s analysis will be referred to as the “family group,” or “family.”

When you compare the family and restaurant taxonomy you find they both have eleven distinct high-level categories of search behavior, with about 70% of the categories in common. When you contrast individual categories you find that the traffic can differ dramatically as in the case of brand. When you review the tables below you can see that searching by brand is very important to family searches, whereas this is less so in the restaurant group–by a ten to one margin (12.7M vs. 1.2M searches). The same is true for searches for a type of restaurant.

Comparing the two taxonomies head-to-head, we find that consumers in the family category are much more focused in the questions that they ask. People are executing far fewer of those vague informational searches found in the restaurant category by a fifty to one margin (1.3M vs. 66.6M searches).

Search Priority

When you examine the top four or five categories in each group by volume, you see different priorities for each demographic. For the family group, we see that brand is the dominant category, while location is the most common category for the restaurant group. When you look at the top three categories for each you can see discreet primary themes for what is important for each of these groups. These themes provide focus (information architecture) for UI designers and web copy editors. For example, in order of importance:

In the family group the company’s brand name, the type of restaurant it is and its location are the primary concern of searchers.

In the restaurant group brand plays a minor role. Its location, the type of restaurant it is and quality are the primary concerns.

Clearly, these two groups have different priorities, and this should be reflected in your website design.

Quality vs. Value

When you compare the quality and value categories we see that both groups are certainly interested in a quality eating experience, but the ratio between quality and value are very different. For example:

• For the family group there are 1.4M quality-based searches, and 58K value-based searches (roughly a nine to one ratio).
• For the restaurant group you find there are 1.8M quality-based searches and 500K value-based searches (almost a four to one ratio).

The difference between the two groups is that value and quality are less important factors to the family searcher—their need for service and content are greater priorities, while this is less so for the more broadly-based restaurant group.

In the next table you can compare the search volume data for the common categories for both groups.

Group Differences

In the next table, when you compare the categories that are different (not in common), you find that the family traffic is much more focused and valuable. They are looking for services, they clearly indicate that they want to transact for specific information and they specify their content requirements (games). The restaurant categories are higher-level informational queries, with the exception of tools which are off-topic.

Sub-Categories

Several of the high-level categories have a number of sub-categories. In particular the type, content, quality, service and value categories have very specific search behavior themes that provide opportunities to experiment with custom landing pages. In the following tables you can review and compare all the sub-categories sorted in descending order by volume.

Type sub-categories. Both groups show a lot of depth and variability in the type category. The family group is more complicated, with parents being interested in themes (e.g., birthday party restaurant) and time (e.g., breakfast). These sub-categories provide an excellent content outline for a custom-designed landing page.

Content. When it comes to searching for content the family group comes out on top by a two to one margin in terms of search volume. Menus are very important to the family group, and they search for them by a nearly ten to one margin over the restaurant group. The content focus for the restaurant group is reviews.

Quality and value. When you examine the search behavior by quality and value you see both groups using the same terminology, but in differing volumes. In this comparison, the family group clearly values the quality of the experience over saving a buck. I would have expected to see more value-based searches in the family group, but that was not the case.

Family Categories In More Detail

Brand. Families search for restaurants by brand 12.7 million times a month, while the restaurant group searches for a brand name 1.2 million times. This suggests a conservative (I know what we want to eat) approach to finding restaurants for families. I think these searchers are not much interested in trying new restaurants when they have kids in tow.

Business. As a family restaurant business owner, these searches are of no value to you. The traffic is for products, services, franchises and for sale opportunities. The good news is that there are 492K searches here vs. 1 million in the restaurant group.

Content. The family group is mostly interested in menus (1.3 million searches) with requests for restaurant guides coming in second at 219K searches. The restaurant group’s top priority is reviews. The search for reviews is almost non-existent in the family group.

Games. There is not a lot of traffic here (30K searches a month), but parents are looking for those distractions to keep the kids busy while waiting for their food to come. The most common two word phrase in this group is “family games.”

Information. The family group has orders of magnitude fewer searches compared to the vague informational type queries. They came in at 1.3 million searches a month while the restaurant group conducted a whopping 66 million. You do find some families looking for restaurants using terms that are ambiguous such as “new” or “list of.”

Location. Location is third in total search volume with 4.3 million searches across 235 unique search phrases. This represents 30% of the entire family restaurant data set. Location-based SEO will be an important factor to pay attention to when developing landing pages and ad campaigns.

In the restaurant data set (13.5 million location-based searches) searchers did not specify any other attributes, such as food type, content or quality. In the family data set 29% of the search phrases included references to a type of restaurant in location-based searches.

Quality. Though the terminology (best, top, fine) being used is more or less the same between the two groups, we do see the family group executing fewer quality-based searches (1.4M vs. 1.8M searches). The family group has an additional quality sub-category where they are searching for restaurants that are fun. You find none of this traffic in the restaurant group.

Service. When families look for services, they are looking for takeout, catering or delivery. Pizza is the most popular food for delivery by a ten to one margin over Chinese food (500K vs. 49K).

When it comes to take out food, families specify their needs in three ways. They search using the terms:

• Takeaway – 392,000
• To go – 9,000
• Take out – 8,100

Transaction. In the family group consumers are using transactional terms in two specific ways. They want to find a family restaurant but, they have not specified a location. They are primarily using the terms find and locator as in the following keyword examples:

• Fast food restaurant locator
• Find restaurants by zip code

There are 95K of these searches done each month, where the consumers do not specify a specific location in the keyword phrase.

Type. The family group searches for a type of restaurant 9 million times a month, while the restaurant group conducts 4.2 million type searches a month. The family group has the most complex category of behavior with seven sub-categories. These include:

• Type (general) 1.1 M – e.g. family friendly
• Type by a quality 81K – e.g. organic, kosher
• Type by style 2.5 M – e.g., bistro, cafe
• Type by time of meal 1.3 M – e.g., breakfast, brunch
• Type by theme 161K – e.g., birthday, theatre
• Type by food 2.3 M – e.g., BBQ, chicken
• Type by nationality 1.4 M – e.g., Hawaiian, Italian

When you look at the term usage in the type sub-categories you see some interesting patterns. For example, you see the following two-word combinations used to modify search strings. Clearly, kid friendly is the phrase of choice when writing page copy.

• Kid friendly – 53,160
• Family friendly – 33,000
• Child friendly – 11,646

Value. When it comes to value, family searchers are not concerned with expense in the way you see in other behavior models. Most of the value-based traffic (158K searches) is associated with finding coupons and special offers. Though this behavior is associated with reducing expense, it is still at the bottom of the list in terms of search volume. In fact, there is minimal traffic associated with the terms cheap, affordable and discounts. This holds true for the restaurant group as well.

Consumers will freely use the term cheap in very large numbers when searching for products and services such as airline tickets and car insurance—but they tend to shun “cheap” when it comes to food. You also don’t find consumers searching for a cheap doctor or lawyer.

Term Density

When you look at term density in the two groups you find that both are concerned with quality (demonstrated by the high usage of the term best). An appetite for Chinese and Mexican food is well represented in both groups, and it’s no surprise that pizza is the most commonly used secondary term in family restaurant searches.

In the family group, one set of terms reflects a desire to provide their families with restaurant food at home (menu, delivery, takeaway and catering). However, I think the term menu reflects two agendas; certainly ordering for delivery or takeout makes sense, but I think parents also want to review the specific food offerings before they bundle up the kids and show up at your restaurant.

These lists of terms are valuable in that they detail the most common secondary words that are being used to modify search queries. In general, the top 25 terms will appear in over 50% of the search traffic. This implies that they should be used in web page and ad copy where it makes sense.

Key Insights For Family Restaurant Owners

So, what does this analysis do for you as a family restaurant owner? Let’s list some of the most important items to think about.

• At the highest level, families are interested in brand, type and location. These themes should underpin your website information architecture and ad copy.
• Families are much more interested in quality than value by a ten to one margin. Though value plays a lesser role in this group, you do find 135K searches a month for coupons.
• 30% of brand searches are compound queries, where they are looking for a type of restaurant by location. This should be reflected in your ad copy.
• If you are a family restaurant you really need to be in the takeout business as well.
• Easy access to digital menus is a must—the word menu is the second most common search term in the family group. Question: is your menu easily accessible from the home page, or is it buried three levels deep in a PDF file?
• Families have more demands when they are looking for a type of restaurant—theme, time and quality are additional requirements. For example, will you accommodate a birthday party when you take the reservation? If yes, is this service mentioned at your website?
• If you are a family restaurant, do your customers know this? Does your website mention that your establishment is “kid friendly?”
• Last but not least, you have the option to provide potential customers with several distinct ways to find your restaurant. Statistically, large numbers of families search by brand and by food type. Brand probably does not present any new opportunity, but the pattern for searching for restaurants by food type presents a custom landing page opportunity.

Finally, your brand may be national, but all restaurants are local. If you have not claimed your business in Google, Yahoo and Bing’s local search services, you should do so. You will not automatically get added to these local search indexes. There are local search requirements for being included. Make sure you understand what they are.

The data used in this analysis was extracted from AdWords.