Equal Experts was recently commissioned to develop an iPad application to coincide with the launch of the iPad in the UK, for Rightmove.co.uk, the UK’s number 1 real estate portal. Being a non techie tech junkie with the right domain experience, I was asked to lead this initiative. And I just couldn’t refuse an opportunity to be on the bleeding edge of cool. Despite the fact that launch was less than five weeks away, and despite the fact that I had no development team!

Thanks to Equal Experts’ extensive network, we managed to team up with Robots And Pencils Inc, a Canadian outfit with iPad and iPhone development experience, and in a matter of days the project team was formed, contracts negotiated (verbally) and the project started.

Now, four weeks is an extremely short time to deliver what amounted to a functionally substantial application, in a domain that was completely unfamiliar to the developers. With the delivery date critical for the realisation of the business objectives, delivery of a stable and engaging application relied on a couple of highly critical success factors (and a dollop of calculated risk). Although these factors will differ from project to project, there might be some universal value in explaining these. In a later article, I will explain a little more about the process we applied in this project.

Critical Success Factors

1. Clear and well prioritised business objectives

Is on-time delivery critical? Is scope critical?  You can have one or the other, but not both. In this particular case the client was quite clear: maximise brand exposure by going live on the date of the iPad launch, when consumers and the press are really hungry for iPad content. But, make sure that the publicity is positive, by delivering an iPad experience that is familiar, functional, stable, yet unique to the iPad. Scope took a distinct backseat (to a point – there will always be a minimum acceptable set of features, otherwise there won’t be a project).

2. Functional and UX simplicity

User interface design, user experience and workflow needed to be pretty much spot-on from the outset – we planned for refinements in the UX, but not for a complete change in approach. Simplicity and a limited scope is key to getting the UX right the first time.

Simplicity requires less testing, and it creates less opportunity for things to go wrong. Complex workflow and complex UX tend to generate unpredictable, and usually large numbers of small defects, cluttering the project backlog and distracting the developers from getting on with the big stuff.

3. An experienced, committed development team

The iPad is a device with incredibly rich UI capabilities, but with relatively little processing power. Stability and responsiveness are key to a decent user experience. Performance and stability must be architected in from the outset – as with the functionality and the UX, there would be preciously little time to rethink the architecture midway through the project. The only way to mitigate the risk of architectural failure is to make use of highly skilled and experienced developers.

Also, don’t try this type of project without significant domain expertise and knowledge of the client’s existing products on the team.

4. Trust, and as little interruption as possible

For me personally, a huge learning curve. When you require the unthinkable from a development team, you HAVE to trust them. You have to allow them to work in the way that they think is best. You have to give them some space.

This by no means imply that you let them be and pray for the best, it merely implies that you have to bend the process in a way that enables them to be productive. You cannot impose a process on the team, you have to fit a process around the team. More about this in a later article.

It is also very important that the client trusts the team enough to let them get on with it. Make this quite clear from the outset (on our project, this was not a problem at all – prior to joining Equal Experts, I have worked for Rightmove for a very long time – mutual trust was implicit).

5. “Extreme” agile

Very short feedback cycles, very short iterations and tight control over the project backlog. For this project, the first two weeks were relatively unstructured, basically creating the architectural foundation and creating the most basic required functionality. Thereafter, we delivered production ready code once a week, with daily or two daily reprioritisation of the backlog. I will explain the approach in more detail in a subsequent article.

As it turned out the project was remarkably successful, with the app shooting  to the number 2 position in the UK free app download charts (and number 1 in the lifestyle section). And favourable reviews from users, bloggers and twitterers.

Rightmove iPad Application

In this section I will look at how Wordtracker helps you to discover related keywords (also known as lateral keyword research). In my case, I wanted to set up a website selling paragliding accessories, and started out looking for keywords related to “paragliding”:

The list of related keywords is sorted in “most popular” order. I struggled to find a detailed explanation as to how they calculate the popularity, my guess is that it is compiled from  the content of (?all?) the related indexed pages on Dogpile and Metacrawler. The more pages the keyword is contained in, the higher its popularity score . The Wordtracker Academy also indicates that they are using Majestic-SEO’s database of URL’s to get In Anchor and Title Metrics, perhaps they use this same database of URL’s to calculate keyword densities.

If you know more about how Wordtracker calculates the popularity, please add your comments to this post. I am sure I am not the only one wondering about this.

It would have been great if the related keywords tool reported a couple of additional values – total searches on the keyword, and total number of vertical keywords – this is currently possible, but only if you save a search term to your project.

The related keywords tool is useful to give you of the language in use in the marketplace. As a discovery tool and a checklist it is great, but bear in mind that  it bears no relation to search volumes.  It is just an indication of keyword density on indexed content (perhaps this should be highlighted slightly better in the Wordtracker interface).  Before you add any of these terms to your seedlist, pop them through the vertical keyword finder and assess their relative popularity against the rest of the words in your seedlist.

A quick comparison between Wordtracker and Google Adwords Keyword Tool reveal a fair number of missed keywords, covering important keywords like “reserves” (if you are a skydiver or a paraglider you will know how important a reserve is) and big paragliding brand names, like  Independence, Niviuk, Icaro and Woody Valley. Common sense would assume that these keywords are fairly popular, and Google stats corroborates that.  Wordtracker’s failure to pick these up can only be ascribed to their small and possibly biased dataset.

This not to say that Wordtracker’s lateral keyword search tool is not useful, but do not for a moment assume that it is exhaustive. Review the recommended set of keywords critically, and use as many other reference sources as you can.

In Part III I will assess the vertical keyword search, and I will comment on the service I have received from Wordtracker during my trial period.

Having recently needed a keyword research tool for two personal projects, I decided to give Wordtracker a try after hearing good things about it from  an ai digital podcast. Tools like Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery help you find the keywords and search terms people use to search for the service, content or products you are offering. Most online businesses rely heavily on search engines to generate traffic to their websites, making keyword research and search engine optimisation a vital part of any online marketing strategy. Wordtracker’s price should put it within the budget of almost all online businesses (at the time of writing £28.00 per month, minimum 1 month, £161.00 per year).

Wordtracker uses data from meta crawlers (metacrawler.com and dogpile.com) and not straight from the search engines, thus eliminating non-human search queries. On the one hand this greatly improves the accuracy of the results, on the other its small dataset introduces statistical uncertainty. Wordtracker presents this as one of the unique selling points of its toolset. I will discuss this in greater depth in part 3 of this review, specifically in the context of UK keyword research.

The basic approach to keyword research in Wordtracker is simple. Wordtracker, like others, suggest you build a 3-tier information architecture – home page, category pages and content pages, with a defined set of keywords for each of these, as explained in this video .

Defining a list of categories relies on domain expertise, guided by initial keyword research. For instance, if I want to create a paragliding website, a quick scan of the paragliding search terms will highlight a few potential categories very quickly : paragliding training, paragliding clubs, paragliding manufacturers and equipment, and paragliding tours and destinations. Perhaps, like me, you would have been somewhat surprised at the search popularity of powered paragliding. Keyword research is in effect a quick and affordable way of doing high level market research, and I would recommend that you start doing keyword research in the very early stages of your business strategy.

Wordtracker has two tools that assist with keyword research – a lateral search tool to help you discover your keyword universe and build out your seedlist (keywords found in websites like yours), and a tool to discover the and evaluate all the search terms that include your keywords.

In part 2 of this review, I will assess the related keywords option in more detail, and in part 3 the included keywords. As I am primarily concerned with the UK market, I will focus on UK datasets.

I was wrong.

Open the homepage (www.omniture.com), and you see a great presentation of their product suite :

The product selector uses nested hover over actions. I am not a fan of this. You always have to do mouse gymnastics to ensure your second level options don’t disappear. But this is a comparitively minor gripe.

The fun really starts when you try to view the product features, or even a well advertised case study (like the one highlighted in red on the above picture). Try to find out what miracles they have performed for Guess, and this is what you get :

Mr Omniture, you insist on lengthy form asking all sorts of complicated questions . . . to allow me to get acquainted with your product? Yup mr. Big Corporate Omniture, I might only be a student looking to get some information about online marketing tools, but I am your potential future customer. Don’t antagonise me now, I might just remember it when I am a big shot myself.

Or I might be the not-so-clued-up marketing director of a company that could actually afford your pricey product, wanting to perform some research in the comfort of my own privacy. You know, so that I might not look so stupid when I speak to my bright online marketing manager, or when I have to justify spending tens or hundreds of thousands on your products.

The copious copy on the left hand side doesn’t help either – it is convoluted, and adds very little in terms of additional information. And it is in light grey, as if you really don’t want me to read it. Maybe it’s only me, but this page gives me a decidedly creepy feeling.

You might argue that the capture of some customer data is important, but is it really more important than letting the customer know what you have to offer?

Can you not think of ways to engage your potential customer in a way that he willingly and trustingly gives you the data that you require? Remember the marketing / engagement cliche “What’s In It For Me”?

So I will give you a couple of suggestions for free (and it won’t cost you the earth to implement) :

1. Allow me to research your products on-line to greater depth – I don’t promise that I will be more attracted to your product, but at least there is a better chance that I won’t waste your salesperson’s valuable time.
2. Use your attractive sounding “white papers” for marketing executives to get me to sign up, ONCE you have given me some confidence in your product (and in your Brand, or let’s just call it your company values)

And then maybe I won’t be such a bastard when your salesperson phones me after I have succumbed and completed your form.

Thanks for listening. Now I feel better (but I still haven’t downloaded any of Omniture’s product info)