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as more than a simple optimization tool, because it became a business marketing tool. When sharing the keyword research with a local company, they were highly interested in the search trends more than the search terms. In nearly every case, the search trend started in February and March. I learned from the owner of the company that the marketing cycle started in April and May, a full two months after their business-to-business market started researching for purchases. Because they were marketing the same way they had marketed for the past 50 years, they were missing the early market, and most decisions had been made by the time they were sending their direct mail campaigns and following up with sales calls. The next year, they moved their marketing schedule up to coincide with the search trend, resulting in one of the best years ever and capturing a significant percentage of the market.

In this way, the keyword research is a strong first step. It is searchers telling you, in their own words, what they need. It also supports one of the most important sales principles I have ever learned:

Listen more than talk.

Online keyword research is inherently a quiet activity. The researcher is reading, listening to thousands of searchers, and quietly analyzing and drawing conclusions. Activities that force quiet analysis are the ones that tend to be the most effective. The primary obstacle to that quiet analysis is your own assumptions.

Listen to Your Customer

Those who want to persuade must understand the impulses of the audience. Well over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle understood the value of knowing the motivations of the audience:

It may be said that every individual man and all men in common aim at a certain end which determines what they choose and what they avoid. This end, to sum it up briefly, is happiness and its constituents.

—The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, Book 1, Chapter 5

To know what makes the customer happy in their own words is a pursuit that requires businesses to leave ego and branding behind. Simply, this activity is gaining an understanding of what the customer thinks about you or your product. Even more deeply, what need do you fulfill, in the customer’s own words? You may be surprised to learn that the need you believe you fill as a business is not the same need perceived by the customer.

Businesses that have performed these types of surveys and research find how they are perceived by customers and can learn from and adjust to meet these expectations. Perceived benefits of the customer may not be the same benefits espoused in marketing copy or messaging and can be used to refine that message.

The more you listen to the customer, the more you can increase your website’s “salability” (see Figure 7-1). Learning more about the needs and concerns of the customer, in their own language, can help your marketing campaigns take on a new light as you develop around the customer, rather than develop around corporate-speak or directives.

This is where involving salespeople in the process of keyword research and content development can assist a company. Sales departments are on the first line of finding and selling to the needs of the customers, and they may have a keen ear as to the immediate feedback of the client and apprehension of the prospect.

Online survey resources such as Survey Monkey and Zoomerang are accessible for any budget and can be used to provide amazing levels of insight. Any investment in survey work and setting up the survey with the proper questions will pay off with fast, insightful, and marketable information specific to your enterprise.

Figure 7-1: “Salability” and conversations—linked for success

The market can have very different needs. A site that is built to meet the owners’ needs is not a site that will meet the visitor’s needs. If you are developing a campaign to a specific market and you have not done research on that market—such as actually talking to that audience or conducting surveys, customer interviews, or more—you could be missing a large part of the marketing message.