bobjots : redux

One very under-rated and often maligned method among the NGO and non-profit industry in Malaysia is the use of commercially proven practices in getting their message across. Whether we like it or not, we are competing for attention in a marketplace that is at this moment dominated both by commercial messages and Barisan Nasional political propaganda.

Taking into account that most of the mainstream media; both printed and electronic; are essentially controlled by a complicated system of licensing and distribution, the only entry-level arena essentially left for effective social communications would be the Internet.

Now that seems all taken care off, isn’t it? Not exactly. How many web pages do you think are listed on a search engine like Google? 1 million? 10? How about 25 billion? And this figure is a 2005 estimate! How does one expect to get found on the Internet?

This is where search engine optimisation (known in the industry parlance as SEO) comes into play. One method of SEO is keyword research. Keyword research is the practice of discovering keywords and monitoring the performance of your current keyword to draw extra traffic. The tool that I am going to review today is Wordze, a relatively new tool in the market.

I’ll try to give an example of how this can be used. My current job with Tenaganita involves; among other things; establishing a network of Malaysia based NGOs to participate in the policy making process of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). With the increase in demand of palm oil due to the development of bio-fuels, there are increased dividends in the establishment of new oil palm estates. This means the further destruction of rainforests and the disenfranchisement of indigenous communities whose livelihoods depend on the forests. Health and gender related abuses are also common in many labour intensive harvesting of raw materials.

I know there are those who would like to see the industry abolished as a whole. I’ve seen campaigns seeking to abolish the use of palm oil in totality. While this may seem to be one way to deal with the abuses and problems created by the industry, I would anticipate that the removal of the livelihoods of 350,000 people who depend on the industry in Malaysia alone would create a brand new set of problems.

Due to these concerns, a roundtable discussion was established comprising of participants from governments, civil society and industry, to work out sustainable standards in the palm oil industry. A general consensus was achieved and there is now a campaign to get industries and retailers which use palm oil as a raw material to not utilise palm oil sourced from non-RSPO certified producers. A parallel campaign is being planned to get consumers to only purchase palm oil derived products that bear the RSPO certification. This is where SEO and keyword research tools like Wordze come into handy.

A simple search on the term “palm oil” on Google would render the following results :

You’ll notice that the first 5 returns are all industry related sites, including one industry funded NGO who’s purpose is to “debunk the myths” about how the palm oil industry can actually be detrimental to the people and the environment. This is not good news by any conscientious advocate’s standard. So how do I beat that?

By using Wordze, I can pull out search data from search engines and ISPs around the world (they claim on their website to receive between 7-13% of all internet search enquiries) and it helps me find out which keywords are most popular and also how hard it is to rank for those particular phrases. By using the tools provided by Wordze, I’m also able to identify long-tail search phrases which may be easier for me to target for better visibility on search engines by tweaking the text copy of my web pages to include these phrases.

The additional tools provided by Wordze include :

• Keyword Research Tool
  This is the basic research tool that allows me to pull up frequency data on the keyword I am looking for :
  

  It also has an option for me to research historical data and this is very useful for locating similiar keywords to the one I entered.

• Wordrank Tool
  I find this an extremely powerful and useful tool. It basically tells me which factors of my site are important in gaining a higher ranking for specific keywords. Using it in conjunction with the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index – offsetting the number of searches for a keyword against the number of search results), I get a good picture about how difficult it is to get a good ranking with a particular keyword :
  

  From the example above, it doesn’t look like it’ll be too difficult for me.

• Dig Tool
  Wow! This one tool is amazing! It essentially scans thousands of websites and extracts the prevalence of the keyword you’re targetting from those sites. Using this in conjunction with the filter tool which cuts out the non-essential stuff, it allowed me to collate a list of strategic keywords that I can use for my campaign and helped me identify certain search keywords with appealing KEIs.
• Keyword Density Tool
  How about finding out what your competitor’s website is using as keywords? Just pop in the URL and do a search. The results come out in 1, 2 and 3 word phrases which I could use to pad my keyword list.
• Keyword Typo Database
  People do make mistakes in typing in keywords when they do searches. How about benefitting from this tendency? The Keyword Typo Database seeks out the most commonly mistyped versions of the targetted keyword. Something to keep in my keyword list and perhaps put up a post or two with intentionally misspelled words?
• Exporting The Results
  It would be quite a hassle if I had to do my analysis on a browser. Wordze allows me to export the data I’ve collated into an Excel worksheet so that I can edit and sort through the data offline. It only captures the KEI data though. Would be cool if it captured the Wordrank data as well.

Even if you are a business user, you can also see how Wordze can help provide you with useful data to significantly improve your business’ search engine rankings. If you have some time on your hands, you might want to check out Wordze in action with some tutorial videos; Keyword Research Demonstration and Competitor Keywords Demonstration; or have a look at their site tour.

The one major deficiency with Wordze is that there isn’t enough information for the SEO newbie. If you are freshie and are not familiar with the quirks of SEO, it can be quite a challenge – although its nothing that cannot be solved by a bit of trial and error. I’d like to see Wordze add some tutorials and resource materials though. Reading what the founder of Wordze has to say in this interview, it looks like it might happen. At the very least, there are some good sites linked in that interview to help you get started on SEO.

For the time being, you can head on to the Public Sector Marketing blog to see how social marketing is put into action for advocacy and public sector purposes. It might give you some ideas.

Disclaimer & Disclosure

The preceding post is a paid review. I hope that it is evident that I did put quite a bit of thought and enquiry into the services provided. If you see anything you might not like about this post, please do contact me or leave a comment here. If this resource was useful, let me know too.