Keyword Generation with Mind Maps
Friday, October 16, 2009 | 4 Comments
Tags: Listening
Posted in: Guest Blogger, Listening
When you’re getting ready to listen to the social media stratosphere there are probably a few keywords that come immediately to mind. Your brand, your product your founder or CEO but that’s just the beginning. People don’t always search for what you might want them to. You need to get outside of the company for a moment and think about what someone who has no idea who you are or what you do would type into a search engine to find you.
What other names could be used to describe you? Is there a string (a short list of words or phrase ) that people might use to find you?
Some people will argue that they look at their analytics reports and see that people are already finding them with the company name and the name of the CEO and that means they are being effective. Let me just point out those people knew you so they knew what to type into the search field. What about the ones who don’t already know something about you?
I’ve started using mind-mapping tools to sort out the keywords for a particular website to good effect. A mind map is a radial diagram of words, ideas or relationships linked around a central word or phrase. In this case it’s you. These can be drawn out on a whiteboard, a piece of paper or through software. They help you get focused and really think about what keywords pertain to you and whether or not your messaging is really delivering those keywords. Think of this post as a how to listen and SEO lesson all wrapped up together.
Here’s how it works
I know this is going to sound silly, but do this off-site. Even being in the office can keep your head in the corporate box.
Try to put yourself into the position of someone who is looking for a product or service you provide and do a stream of consciousness download of those words onto a piece of paper or document.
Don’t think about it at all; just spew out everything you can think of. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense or if you’ve got bad grammar, sentence fragments or bad spelling. Nobody cares. Worry about that later.
When you get tired of that do the same thing with a clean slate about your competitor. Don’t be nasty. Really think about every positive attribute or search term anyone could use to find them.
If you still think you’re not getting far enough from the already entrenched keywords it can be hugely useful to call a client, a friend or do man on the street interviews and ask people what it is your company does, what the product is good for and how they would use it.
Now comes the fun part Take the entire list and compile them in one document. See where the duplicates are and put them at the top of your list. Don’t think about the rest yet. That’s in the next step.
Create a mind-map
I use a site called Mindmeister for this, but there are several tools you can use online or purchased software that can quickly create mindmaps. If you don’t want to do that draw it out on a whiteboard or piece of paper, but be warned to do it in pencil. You’ll be moving things around a LOT!
Start with your company in the center of the map.
Now create nodes for all of the keywords you came up with in the first step. Throw them up any old way around the center of your universe–your business.
As you go you’ll start to naturally group things together.
Once you have all your keywords up connect the ones that go together into clusters. Make sub clusters if necessary.
When all the clusters have formed then you can link them to each other and to your business in the center.
Voila! Your prime keywords will reveal themselves.
This is an over-simplification of course and there should be lots of discussion over which words would really be used, which you’d like to avoid etc. That’s the point. Thin them out through discussion and distill your key message down until you have 10 or 15 words that are the main focus.
You may find you need to make separate maps for a product line or division of the company, and that’s fine too. All are useful before you start doing anything like search engine optimization or setting up listening tools.
Go ahead, give it a try, and be sure to let us know how it worked for you, or if you developed and even better way to suss out the right keywords to listen for.
About Janet
Janet Fouts is a social media coach, helping individuals and corporations make sense of social media tools and create an effective social media strategy that meets their needs. She shares her advice on her blog- Social Media Coach, on Twitter as @jfouts and in her new book, Social Media Success!
4 Responses to “Keyword Generation with Mind Maps”
Janet on October 16th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Thanks Craig,
It’s a great way to visualize your message and the way you think about your business. I use it for coming up with blog posts as well. A mind map around a particular subject can generate a lot of sub topics if you start mapping all the ideas that swirl around it.
Nicole on October 16th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Mindmapping is a great problem solving tool… We use Spinscape. Nice collaboration features. http://www.spinscape.com
Barry Dalton on October 29th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
What a great idea! I’m a big mind map fan and I hadn’t thought of using the process to identify keywords. I’m going to bring this into my organization right way.
Craig Fifield on October 16th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Good post Janet! I’ve been using mindmaps for a while now to great effect and this is the exact use that got me started. I can’t stress how useful it is to show a keyword map to a client/boss instead of talking about this list or that niche, etc, etc.