Every modern business wrestles with the elusive lady that is the search engine and the potential she offers to connect with customers. Google and Bing make it easy for anyone to buy keywords and drive customers to a website, but what keywords are our customers searching for? Would a sales manager frustrated with the average 70-80% accuracy of business listings bought from data providers search for “crowdsourcing,” “address checking,” or something else entirely? Since we’re a crowdsourcing company, we had to try crowdsourcing the solution …
In the last two weeks of my summer internship at CrowdFlower, the marketing team challenged me to generate the widest range of search engine seed terms that could be used in SEM keyword tools to generate “hot” search phrases. For those of you who’ve dealt with SEM, you know that thinking of seed phrases to plug into these tools can be a painfully frustrating and surprisingly difficult task. (For those of you who haven’t and don’t believe me, try right now to describe what your company does — or anything for that matter — in 10 significantly different ways.)
Keyword tools are based on your thought process, which takes care of the customers who are thinking in the same way you are, but what about all the people of a different mindset who are trying to find your solution? For example, if I were looking for pet grooming services, depending on my thought process, vocabulary range, and amount of sleep the night before, I could search anything from “pet grooming salon” to “quality feline hair cuts” to “kitty bad hair day.” The challenge was to understand the full breadth of how the crowd approaches a certain problem, essentially the perfect task for the crowd.
Looks like PetSmart forgot to buy an ad for "kitty bad hair day"
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