What is a Word Cloud (and why should I use one)?

There’s a lot of ways that entrepreneurs and small businesses could benefit from using word cloud research. 

If you frequently work with a lot of text, you may have already heard of a word cloud analysis.

For some of us, however, it may be like opening pandora’s box- there’s a whole WORLD of possibilities out there waiting for you… *gasps in anticipation*

A word cloud is a type of analysis that uses text- or specifically (and obviously) words or phrases. The analysis takes these words and bundles them together based upon the frequency of the word.

The bigger the word is in the cloud, the more frequently it shows up in the data set. (In other words, it is more popular, more important or more valuable.)

This is a perfect type of analysis for all the awesome folks who work with SEO, copywriting, and keywords.

All you need to make a word cloud is a Google (or Excel spreadsheet, but we’ll get to that in a minute) with words on it. These words can be keywords, product titles, names, description words, or whatever other wording you’re trying to evaluate.

You can get these words (or other lists of words) by downloading your shop data, from web page scrapers, by getting specific data from a data scientist (shoutout to myself, hint hint), and other places. 

Google Docs has a free add-in, called Word Cloud Generator that makes word clouds at the snap of a few keyboard strokes.

Excel doesn’t have an easy way to do it (sorry), but if you would like a step-by-step tutorial, comment below and I can create one if readers are interested!

(Image is taken from Etsy.com word scrape completed in Python by DataAnts)

Word Clouds Provide 2 Great Things That We Should Be Looking For:

• New Long-Tail Keyword Terms
• Unknown Keyword Terms

When we use a word cloud, we are giving a visual representation to each word. It is easier to see bigger words, and we can notice outlying words that we might not have noticed before.

We get a broader scope of words we wouldn’t have thought of ourselves (unknown keyword terms). 

And we can see similar or alternative words or even phrases that relate to our product or topic (new long-tail keyword terms).

Word clouds are also powerful ways to display word information to viewers, customers or clients.

A fun tip: You can make different shapes in word clouds, to give the chart a fun design aspect. Try different shapes to display the right message to your audience.

Using word cloud charts are a must for those in SEO and keywords. They are easy to build and provide a lot of information within them.

Hey, thanks for reading! 

Got a question? Comment below! I’d love to help! 🙂

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