Wil Reynolds

Episode 2

After watching the second episode I got this one easily figured out. My Buddy Carey got fired because he didn’t look outside of his own bias to properly develop a product that would appeal to all. He made a swimsuit that appealed strongly to VERY in shape gay men. Even Derek who admitted he was gay as well, thought that swimsuit was a little over the top. (did you see it? Straight or Gay that swimsuit was shorter than my underwear).

Carey’s desire to develop a swimsuit for men who were in shape and able to pull off what looked more like underwear got in the way of LISTENING and UNDERSTANDING who his target market was. He was all about fashion and strutting his stuff, and not the task! It wasn’t his fault, he was just too close to the task to take an objective look.
On the website when asked why he should be the next apprentice his response was “I should be the next Apprentice because I am a marketing guru, and that’s what this show is all about!” what guru calls themselves a guru, that’s lame.

Anyway

The lesson to be learned is simple…to target the right keywords (use tools like Google suggest , Quintura, Keycompete, and a slew of others) you need to check your search baggage at the door. The hardest part about keyword research is that most people bring their biases into keyword research. Which ultimately leads to a too narrow view of keywords to target for a campaign. We recently reviewed a few tools which may help with your SEO competitive research, take a gander.

So if you want to keep your job in SEO and not hear “Your Fired” then make sure you are targeting a wide array of terms that are developed to target users in different steps of the conversion process, research through to purchase.
Carey’s mistake is that because he is a gay male, when given the chance to develop a swimsuit for all males (both gay and straight) he insisted on targeting the minority which was a risk and ended up losing for his team and getting himself fired. Had the judging panel of buyers been mostly gay males in great shape he would have scored big points.

So next time you get ready to do keyword research, step outside of your own search behavior, there’s a whole world of people out there searching for things that search in a different way than you even when looking for the same thing.

Lesson from episode 2 – Stay hired by developing comprehensive keyword lists