Feature

posted 31 Jan 2007 in Volume 3 Issue 7

Web content management

Carewords: The keys to action

Carewords are the key words or phrases that can make all the difference to a successful website, argues Gerry McGovern. But they must be chosen and used with care.

By Gerry McGovern

Words drive actions on the web. There might be many thousands of words published on your website, but there are only a very small number that really matter to your customers. Even in the most complex environments, there are core patterns and common tasks. Carewords are the core patterns of your website. They help people simply and quickly complete common tasks. When you discover the carewords of your customers, you discover what makes them click.

Networks, in particular, have core patterns (and the web is a network). Take river networks, for example. “Scarcely anything can look less planned and lacking in design than the drainage basin of the Mississippi,”

Mark Buchanan writes in his book Small World (Orion, 2003). “Nevertheless, this random, haphazard appearance disguises a hidden order. If every river network is unique, they are also in many respects deeply similar.

“The way to trace the outlines of the process behind river network formation is to work backward,” Buchanan continues, “first by ignoring almost all the factors that might conceivably affect the evolution of a river network and starting with a few of the most obviously important.”

When scientists followed this approach, they discovered that the Nile, the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Volga – in fact, every river network they studied – had the same core pattern.

Carewords are the core patterns of content. There is a best way to write headings, summaries and paragraphs, and in each case, identifying the carewords of the customer you are writing for is the first essential step.

Follow the careword trail

On the web, we hunt for the content we need to complete our tasks. The last time I wanted to buy a laptop for example, I started my search with two carewords: laptop and notebook. I scanned web pages as a hunter would scan the horizon, and if I didn’t see those carewords, I got impatient. When I found a link for laptops on a page, I clicked on it straight away. Now the trail was warming up and a new set of carewords came into play. I didn’t want to see every laptop available; that was way too many.

I travel a lot, so my next set of carewords included ultra-portable, ultra-light, laptops for travelling users. When I didn’t see these carewords, I got frustrated; when I did see them, I clicked. As I was closing in on my prey, a new set of carewords opened up. What were they? Well, what do you think someone who travels a lot really wants in a laptop? Price? No. Memory? No. The carewords I had now were weight and battery.

I wanted to buy a laptop that was as light as possible. I knew I’d have to pay a premium because cheaper laptops are generally quite heavy, so whatever I might save on price, I’d end up paying to a chiropractor (and I’m speaking from experience here).

As often get stuck in airports, I needed a good battery. It wasn’t that I didn’t want good performance and lots of memory, but rather that weight and battery came first for me.

Low fares or cheap flights?

Let’s say you are thinking of flying somewhere. What might your carewords be? Low fare? Cheap flight? Research indicates that 400 times more people search using the words ‘cheap flights’ than ‘low fares’. So if you are selling economy fares, it is important that you use the term ‘cheap flights’ in your marketing and advertising campaign.

I remember telling this to a senior executive from a major airline. He shrugged, replying that there was no way that his airline would use the phase ‘cheap flights’ on its website. “It would hurt the brand,” he told me (very sensitive things, these brands). At the time of our conversation, this airline was in financial difficulties. No wonder. It had failed to recognise a key economic trend: customers’ carewords now drive communication.

The good news is that, when faced with a particular task, people all over the world use the same basic carewords. It is quite simply a myth that, if you put 20 people in a room and ask them to choose a set of 20 carewords, you’ll get 20 totally different sets of answers. Certainly, there may be subtle yet important differences in certain careword choices, but there will be strong core commonalities.

For example, I put more than 1,000 people in rooms in 11 different countries to find the carewords of tourists in order to help an imaginary company called Great Irish Holidays achieve success.

Or should that be Great Irish Vacations? In Ireland, we say we are going on a summer holiday when we are going away for a week or two. In the United States, a holiday is an official break – Fourth of July, for example. If you’re going on a longer break, you’re on vacation. American tourists search for ‘vacations’, not for ‘holidays’.

The consistency of choices from these 1,000 people was amazing. I asked them to choose their ten favourite carewords from a set of 136 careword options. More than 45 per cent chose the same top-ten carewords. The bottom 70 potential carewords were chosen by fewer than three per cent of the people. Whether you are in Boston, Belfast, Brussels or Brisbane, there are certain carewords you use when thinking about going on a holiday/vacation.

The top 15 carewords were: accommodation; special offers; planning a trip; about Ireland; getting here and around; things to do and see; deals; what to see and do; book travel; home; Irish vacation packages; best of Ireland; contact us; travel bookings; about us.

The above carewords define the common tasks for the Great Irish Holidays website. (There are, of course, some similar/duplicate carewords in the above list, and I will examine how we deal with these later on). These carewords tell us what the tourist requires:

They want a place to sleep;
They want special offers/deals;
They would like the option of a package where everything is looked after for them;
They want a ‘best of Ireland’ list and a list of interesting things to do and see;
They want to be able to contact Great Irish Holidays easily.

The implications of these carewords are substantial. It takes a specific

type of company and a lot of work to put together special offers/deals and packages, for example.

These carewords are highly strategic. Should they be adopted by Great Irish Holidays, they will come to represent – in the smallest number of words – exactly what the company does.

The McGovern Careword Finder

The McGovern Careword Finder helps you quickly identify your customers’ carewords. It’s a simple three-step process:

Prepare a list of potential carewords;
Get people to choose their favourite carewords from the list; and
Analyse the results.

Step 1: Prepare a list of potential carewords

The important thing here is to get as wide and comprehensive a list of potential carewords as possible. Open up a spreadsheet and start listing words and phrases. Don’t worry about words that are very similar; there’s a method of dealing with those that I’ll explain later.

Here are some ways you can find potential carewords:

List your objectives. Analyse the goals and objectives of your website. For example, let’s say that Great Irish Holidays – our imaginary tourism website – wants to become known as the number one website for Irish accommodation bookings. List carewords that flow from those objectives in your spreadsheet;
Ask the customer. Brainstorm with some potential visitors to Ireland to see what their carewords are;
Talk to people. Ask sales reps, marketing people, industry experts, and other interested parties. Get potential carewords from them;
Do search analysis. If you already have a website and have a search engine, identify words that are most commonly searched for on your website. Also, use services such as Wordtracker, Overture and Google AdWords to see how people are searching on the web itself;
Examine competitor marketing materials and websites. Where appropriate, add their carewords to your list.

Try to be as broad and comprehensive as you can. At the end of your research, you should have developed an extensive list of potential carewords – at least 100 and certainly no more than 150.

Step 2: Get people to choose their favourite carewords

Now that you have your list of potential carewords, it’s time to get people to choose their favourites. Ideally, you should aim to get about 100 people to choose. Who should these people be?

For Great Irish Holidays, the target market is potential tourists, but we need to be more precise. Irish tourism tends to follow the well-known 80/20 rule, which dictates that a small percentage of your market will represent a significant percentage of your revenue. From an Irish perspective, a substantial percentage of tourism business comes from American, British and native Irish holidaymakers; so most of the people you get to choose from the list should be from these markets.

Before you ask someone to choose, provide some background on why you are carrying out the exercise. Then, as you perform the exercise, ensure you meet the following conditions:

1. Ask people to select the top-ten carewords of their choice and to score these, with their first choice getting ten, their second 9, and so on;

2. Make sure they do it on their own;

3. Make sure they do it quickly – ten minutes should be enough. Do not let them go over 15 minutes. This is very important, as the less time people have to think, the more likely they are to choose carewords that reflect how they really feel about the subject. What you want are their instinctive choices.

Step 3: Analyse the results

To analyse the results:

In the spreadsheet where you have listed the potential carewords, create a column for each participant;
Place the relevant scores given by each participant in the appropriate column. So, if Jack gave ‘special offers’ a score of ten, put that score beside ‘special offers’ in Jack’s column;
Create a column showing the total mark for each careword; per cent
When all the marks of the respective participants have been entered, sort your spreadsheet based on the total column, highest mark first.

Figure one shows a selection from the master list of all 39 workshops I have done this tourism careword workshop test for.

Managing duplicate and similar carewords

From the initial results, it is obvious that there are some duplicate and similar carewords that we need to manage. For example, we have ‘things to do and see’ receiving a score of 1,084, and ‘what to see and do’ receiving 1,032. While it may be okay for us to alternate use of these careword phrases in the text on our web pages, if we want to use them as part of the classification of the website, we must choose one of them.

If we did decide to amalgamate these two categories, we would also combine the scores. So now, ‘things to do and see’ has a score of 2,116, moving it from seventh to third in the list.

The case with ‘special offers’ and ‘deals’ is not quite as clear-cut. ‘Special offers’ gets a score of 2,373, while ‘deals’ gets a score of 1,052. However, that doesn’t tell the whole story of the importance of these particular carewords. When I checked with Overture, a company that sells search-based ads, I found that in February 2006 the following searches were made in the US market, the results were surprising (see figure two, below).

There are a number of interesting points here. First, hardly anyone searches using the words ‘special offers’ – there were 17,623 people who searched for ‘vacation deals’ in February 2006, but not a single person who searched for ‘vacation special offers’.

This could indicate that, when they visit a particular website, people sometimes search using words different from those they would like to see. I asked a number of people who had chosen ‘special offers’ why they had done so. The general reply was that special offers sounded special and unique, but ‘deals’ sounded a bit shady, a bit like a second-hand car deal. The words people search with may not always be those they like to see when they visit a website.

The ‘long neck’ theory and the 25/5 rule

The 25/5 rule states that 25 per cent of value will be created by five per cent of content. This is the ‘long neck’ – the place where the killer web content resides. Every time I have carried out a careword poll, I have noticed that there is a small grouping of carewords – usually no more than six words/phrases – that get disproportionate scores. In the tourism study, for example, there are two words or phrases – accommodation and special offers – that between them represent 16 per cent of overall scores.

This phenomenon is illustrated in figure three. I was influenced in giving the long neck such a name because of another theory called the long tail. (In figure three, you can see that there is indeed a long tail.) The long-tail theory proposes that the web allows us to offer a much wider range of content and other products in a much more cost effective manner than was previously possible. It cites the book and music industry as examples of the long tail – much more variety can be offered on the web than in traditional book and music stores.

The long tail is an interesting theory and, for certain environments, it has major implications. However, I have unfortunately found long-tail theory being used as an excuse of the ‘put-it-upper.’ “Let’s just put everything up on our website because everything is of interest to somebody.”

There is value in the long tail, but it is in the long neck where the most condensed profit and value lies. The good manager is focused on ensuring that, first and foremost, the long neck is as polished and perfected as possible.

But what does this long neck theory actually mean? Well, let’s look at the tourism example again. If you were managing Great Irish Holidays, you would want to make sure you did two things really well: have a great accommodation booking process; and have lots of excellent special offers.

There is a long neck to every website I have ever examined – a core essence of what customers want from it. Unfortunately, too many websites that I have dealt with do not understand the essence of what they do. Don’t make that mistake. Understanding what your website is about and perfecting those core tasks is how you deliver maximum value.

Gerry McGovern runs a web content management consultancy and is an internationally renowned speaker. He is also author of the recently released book, Killer Web Content (see review, this issue), from which this workshop has been extracted. Gerry can be contacted via his website, www.gerrymcgovern.com.

Figure 1: The McGovern Careword Finder

Classication: ‘Accomodation’

Total: 2479 or eight per cent

Classification: ‘Special offers’

Total: 2373 or eight per cent

Classification: ‘Planning a trip’

Total: 1375 or four per cent

Classification: ‘About Ireland’

Total: 1234 or four per cent

Classification: ‘Getting here and around’

Total: 1146 or four per cent

Classification: ‘Things to do and see’

Total: 1084 or four per cent

Classification: ‘Deals’

Total: 1052 or three per cent

Classification: ‘What to see and do’

Total: 1032 or three per cent

Classification: ‘Book travel’

Total: 977 or three per cent

Classification: ‘Home’

Total: 885 or three per cent

Classification: ‘Irish vacation packages’

Total: 829 or three per cent

Classification: ‘Best of Ireland’

Total: 793 or three per cent

Classification: ‘Contact us’

Total: 741 or two per cent

Classification: ‘Travel bookings’

Total: 707 or two per cent

Classification: ‘About us’

Total: 557 or two per cent

Note: Carewords listed in order of popularity in McGovern’s focus-group research into carewords.

Figure 2: Deals or offers?

Search phrase (Number of searches)

Vacation deals (17,623)

Vacation special offers (0)

Travel special offers (46)

Travel deals (58,615)

Cheap travel (90,679)

Figure 3: The careword trail

Notebook --> ultralight --> weight --> battery --> availability --> price --> BUY!