The point here is that all communications channels carrying product communications are “in offer.”

As for keywords, dealing with translation forces you to deal with translation memory, and some notions around terminology and language planning. These decisions follow ontology or concept capture. These decisions are pre-UML, prior to application design type issues. They link to things like the mission statement. This terminology provides a starting place for the development of keyword inventories. It also implies that marketing can start their efforts very early and in tandem with development, instead of being a trailing process that begins after the code is thrown over the wall.

As product managers, it is critical that we focus on market problems, not their solutions. You addressed that brilliantly in the SEO context – with a focus on the keywords that help us attract people who are looking to solve the problems we care about.

Great point about how SEO is not just a “get traffic” tool, but also a component of engagement with your customers. You can fret over positioning, but as you point out – there’s an opportunity to leverage SEO as a “channel” for folks to discover your products, in the context of that positioning.

You also really touched on a key element from a product management perspective (as did Stephanie) – keywords are not just phrases that describe your products. There are also keywords / phrases that describe the problems that prospective customers can address with your products. Understanding those keywords is yet another avenue of understanding the problem space you’re addressing with your products.

Scott

Great post. I like your systematic and practical approach. It often amazes me to see the great conflict between brand and product managers who are so concerned about positioning and the word of key product attributes and SEO analysts (often me:)) who try to educate them that the greatest positioning in the word is not worth much if your prospect can’t find you.

Further, having a deep understanding of the market for search terms can provide a valuable source of market research for future development.

I look forward to following more of your posts.

Sincerely,
Brent

The report is the 2nd one listed (unfortunate that TechTarget doesn’t make this easier to share).

I would also argue that there’s just as great an opportunity to draw prospects to your site during the initial “identify a need” stage. This is where companies can offer thought leadership articles, papers, blog posts, etc that convince prospects of the pressing need to address their issues. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa, prospects search on terms related to their problems far more often than they search on terms related to a solution so it’s a prime opportunity to connect with prospects early. The key, of course, is to find out what keywords prospects are searching on. IT marketers should check out a chart in the “The Google/TechTarget Research Project: How IT Pros Search Online During the Purchase Process” report (http://pro22.sgizmo.com/survey.php?SURVEY=68WKQZCH9W8K18GR1D65O74DMJPH48-82268-51564656&pswsgt=1243872123&sg_g=d0f148aff624e0d1780d834b15b5d0d8&_csg=34BLbo27wDbL2&notice=DO-NOT-DISTRIBUTE-THIS-LINK); it spells out what types of searches IT buyers conduct at different phases of the buying cycle.

Thanks for the great post!

Best,
Stephanie

I completely agree that conversion (into a sale) is not the only metric you should track, and B2B interactions really highlight that.

For buying processes that are more transient (or transactional) in nature, conversion is still the key metric. When you have a buying process that involves multiple stages of interaction, I agree that expecting a purchase on each visit is not the right expectation – even for B2C interactions, like buying a car. In those situations, defining additional goals (beyond conversion) is also important. Conversion is still important, although instead of tracking conversion-per-visit, you will get more insight from looking at conversion-per-visitor – combined with visits per conversion.

As to “SEO-ing” non-website channels, I don’t think that makes sense. Measuring, monitoring, and reporting the effectiveness of other “get more people to the site” marketing channels is certainly important. But SEO (by definition) is specifically focused on increasing the effectiveness of traffic generated from search engines.

Definitely a lot of analysis of user behavior that can be done with web applications (SaaS or otherwise), as well as any application. Getting insights from “measured behavior” is certainly important – just broader in scope than this article, which I tried to focus solely on SEO.

Thanks again!

Also be aware that you can SEO, all channels not just your website. It takes a server and a website to SEO your non-internet channels, but it can be done. Typically, it isn’t done, so marketing shifts to being internet facing only. If I give you a t-shirt, I’ll use the internet to know if the t-shirt worked. If i give you a print brochure, same deal.

If you are a SaaS application, the application’s pages can likewise be analyzed via web analytics.

Great article! Thanks!