I guess I should start with explaining what I mean by “purple cows.“ Those of you who are familiar with the work of Seth Godin can continue to next chapter. If you‘re not familiar with his work, I highly recommend him even though he is not an SEO guy.
A purple cow is something that stands out, grabs your attention, and urges you to tell. Imagine driving on a country road with cows biting grass all around. Chances are that you won‘t notice them, because you have seen them all before. Most businesses are like that. You have seen them all before. But what if there were suddenly a purple cow beside the road? You would definitely notice it, even stop to look closer, and most likely tell everyone when you got home. That‘s what purple cows do. They grab people’s attention, make them stop, and urge them to tell.
Link bait works this way, as you are probably familiar with. But it doesn‘t stop there. You can create purple keywords as well. This thought is actually inspired by a post on Dr. Pete‘s blog post about unique product IDs. Peter argues that unique product ids and codes can be used for branding purposes, like how UPS tracking codes always start with 1z. Well, I would like to take this thought one step further. IDs and codes are difficult to remember, so you have to make unique names for your products. Not just call them what they are, but create new names, even new words for them. Now this may seem strange to many of you, as the rule is to use the most obvious word that people are most likely going to search for. But everybody is competing for that, so unless you all ready have an excellent status on the search engines, it won’t bring you anything. By differentiating this way, the competition is a lot less for that name, if any at all. The tricky part, of course, is getting that new name known, and for that you might need viral stories and contagious ideas.
Just like when you create a new name for a company or a product, you try to have it somehow relevant to the role of the company or the product but yet innovative and unique for branding purposes. When I create a new name for a product or a company, I check if the domain is available and I check the competition and the SERPs for that name. And I do the same for those purple keywords.
If your brand has a story, realize the importance of that story for your SEO. We can take, as an example, a purple cow from the 1930s that still goes around: the ducks at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. Those ducks make a great story. It’s quite unexpected to hear about 5 ducks marching on a red carpet through the reception of a nice hotel every morning at 11. I only heard about them last week, and even though I might have troubles remembering the name of the hotel, I will always remember the story about the ducks. So, what do I do when I want to find the hotel? I type in “ducks in a hotel,“ and the #1 result on Google is the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. There are not many hotels competing for that phrase, but it will bring you very targeted traffic. That‘s what I mean by purple cows in SEO.
Don‘t chase the same words as everyone else. Differentiate. Use guerrilla tactics. Create unique stories for people to search for and create unique keywords for those stories. By differentiating in keywords you can leave all the keyword competition behind and get some great results from the search engines.
So, colour them purple and milk those cows!
Hjörtur
Marketing Safari
