It’s the study of what words are used by regular folks to find stuff and is typically employed to understand where to spend your paid search budget. This is great, but Search Intelligence can deliver more insights than just the keywords used.

Everyone’s struggling to find the most memorable ways to get their messaging across. And whether doing brand awareness or direct marketing, we all want some form of action to occur. Something to consider is looking at what Search Intelligence can tell you. This search-based linguistics research gives insight into what language is familiar and what isn’t to the audience you’re trying to communicate with. It can help focus advertising messaging, site nomenclature, naming, content priority or other areas where clarity is key.

We all get hung up on corporate brand speak, the “inward talking” jargon, your CEO may get it, but many times your audience doesn’t. Familiar language helps your customers feel comfortable and more likely to take action. Unfamiliar language can delay or postpone their decision, especially for high consideration decisions, where the audience’s comfort level and understanding is critical (or if you aren’t optimizing for what they are looking for, prevents them from finding you altogether. That’s a search marketing issue for someone else to blog about).

It may be worth considering: if the language used to find stuff on Google is familiar, it follows that it would be familiar in other media like digital advertising or God forbid, the off line variety. How many off line advertising initiatives include insights from search-based linguistic profiles as part of the initial research?

Also, your customers are emailing you and searching your site all the time… in their own voice. How well do you know how you are compiling and managing this information? It could be worthwhile to look at the linguistics of these interactions, in addition to focusing on what they’re asking for or where they’re going. Some of your consumer communication may span years, giving you the opportunity to get a historic perspective. You may be sitting on a significant piece of research.

The words used in search are sparked by a direct, declared, personal need, not a question asked to get an opinion. Looking at the search environment has taught us that people search the way they think. I learned at the knee of a great research professional, “Is it a couch or sofa?” They’re defined as being the same thing, but can mean completely different things to someone based on a variety of factors.

And in the end your customer decides what they mean, not your brand manager.