Issue: Having to Fight Product Marketing to Use Keywords

[SmartBear]

This is sort of a "DUH!" moment to me. I know everyone has come across this at some point in time and am interested in hearing how others deal with this.

A little background:

I was researching keywords for new menus and pages. Sometimes, people (product marketing in my case) do not give me a heads up on changes they want to make to pages and it is always a fight with them to change it. This is pretty normal for me and I am use to it.

It is one of those things that they don't want to discuss it with you because they know you are going to critique their work. and, yes, change it for the good of the company.

I had a co-worker say to me:
"We may have to start making [pages] meaningful to the human visitor than satify the bot army".

My response was:
"What better way to make it [web page] meaningful to users by knowing which terms they search on the most in our industry? Keyword research is not just for Search Engines, it is actual live data as to what most people are searching. That is why I put such a high precedence on it and report on trends. You can bet that if 100,000 people are searching for [keyword], that is what they want to see when they search for it."

Anyways, that is how I handled this particular event. I have several responses when these comments pop up from time to time. Usually it is something to the fact that they are not the ones who will get fired if leads drop via organic search, so we better try this. But today, I was feeling kind of spunky and decided to take another route.

What are some of your responses to these types of remarks?

Hopefully this will make for a good discussion.

[SmartBear]

I have tried this as well, but they either forget about it or do not want to use it. Not sure why, but I do know that they are busy, so it may just be that they are trying to complete their tasks as quickly as possible and don't want it to get in the way.

[EGOL]

I have seen a few situations like yours...

I introduced those folks to the Adwords keyword tool and once they could experiment with it and see search volumes for themselves then they gave up the hard line about using their language.

Some people are empowered by information.

.... that could backfire on you.. lol