Archive for the ‘keyword research’ category
Focus
I wanted to take a few minutes today and discuss something that is CRITICAL to success in the world of search engine optimization: FOCUS.
Focus is a requirement for success in anything in life, and search marketing is certainly no different. If you want your website to rank highly in Google or any other search engine, you have to decide what keywords you want the site to rank for. You must avoid the temptation to take some wishy washy, half-ass approach where your sort-of optimized for this keyword, sort-of optimized for that keyword, etc. You must decide on specific keywords (with those decisions being based on proper keyword research) and then map those keywords to different pages of your site. Forget about trying to get your homepage to rank for all your keywords. Pick two keywords for the major pages of your site and optimize each one of those pages individually and specifically for those keywords.
This is kind-of like the concept of picking a niche to target in your business (a very good idea). If you present yourself as a generalist in your field, there are likely way too many potential prospects to do a decent job of marketing to, and you are going to face price difficulties. Generalists cannot charge the same premium as specialists. You should pick a specific market and go after it hard. The same is true with your search engine optimization. Pick a set of keywords that matches the criteria explained below and there will be much more congruity between your keywords and your website.
Keyword Criteria
1. It is highly relevant to your business.
2. It generates some traffic.
3. It is in a reasonable competitive situation.
In addition, any keyword for which you are currently in the top 50 is a good candidate, unless the competition is so competitive that it will take a very long time to reach the front page.
Another thing to remember is that the links you create in your link building campaign should contain your target keywords or close variations and that they should link to the specific pages of your site that are optimized for those keywords. Again…focus.
If you need help focusing your search engine optimization campaign, please call Work Media today at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.
Google Search Options You Should Try Out
There are many things about Google that I dislike. I dislike many of the things about the Google AdWords program, such as the change recently preventing advertisers from split-testing different domain names in their ads within an ad group. I dislike the way Google constantly throws out new technology, and then provides little in the way of support for it (for example, sometimes Blogger will publish to an external web server, and sometimes it won’t, yet Google has shown very little interest in dealing with the problem or providing any guidance).
But the fact is, despite the many things I dislike about Google, I pound on the Google search ,engine non-stop. It is a fantastic research tool. There are a couple of Google search options that I recently started using that aid in the research process. If you write articles or use Google as a marketing tool (and you probably wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t), then you should try these out.
To start, do any search in Google. The search I am using as an example while I type this out is “law firm internet marketing.” Hey, there’s my law firm internet marketing site at number six, and the Amazon.com page for our book on the subject at number nine. Neat. Anyway, now click the Show options link next to the plus sign at the top left above where the search results start.
Now you should see lots of links along the left-hand side of the screen. Some of them let you focus in on specific types of search results, such as images or blogs or whatever. But the two that I want to discuss here are Related searches and Wonder wheel.
Clicking the Related searches link shows a number of other searches that are, obviously, related to your first search. I think it is safe to assume that these are search queries that people have actually used because some of them are way too specific to just be synonyms or whatever. Clicking on one of those related search query links brings up a new page of search results, just as if you had types that keyword into the search box. Doing this process repeatedly will expose you to all kinds of search terms that you may not have thought of that might be applicable to your business. If you are purely engaging in the process for research purposes, it may lead you to some web sites or resources you would not have found by using your own search terms.
The Wonder wheel option is similar to related terms but more dynamic. Clicking that option displays a circle (or “wheel”) with your keyword in the middle and spokes coming out that point at related search terms. Clicking on one of the outside search terms draws another wheel with the second search term with a long spoke that connects to the first wheel, as well as its own set of spokes pointing to a new set of keywords. Really, this tool does the same thing that the Related searches link does, but it presents the information in a “mind mapping” kind of way and lets you see the path you followed to arrive at a search term.
Gain an edge on your competition by putting these tools to use today in your research and online marketing activities.
The Three Critical Criteria for Judging SEO Keywords
The first step in any Internet marketing campaign is picking the right keywords. Many businesses and law firms make the mistake of choosing keywords to target based on their opinion of what keywords potential customers would use to search for them, rather than basing that decision on research. Don’t do that.
The other big mistake I see some companies make is picking a huge basket of keywords for which to promote their web site. Don’t do that, either. Think small in number and highly specific.
So just what do you do? Let research guide your decisions, and pick keywords that meet three specific criteria.
Here are the three major criteria to consider for any potential keyword:
1. Degree of relevance. You want a strong sense of congruity between a keyword and a particular web page. It doesn’t have to be relevant to your home page, but it needs to be relevant to SOME page on your web site.
For example, a good keyword for the home page of a Ford auto dealership in Memphis might be “Memphis Ford dealer.” A good keyword for a page about Ford Mustangs on this same dealer’s site might be “Memphis Ford Mustang dealer.” These are completely hypothetical examples.
2. Search engine traffic. The more search traffic there is for a particular keyword, the more potential traffic the keyword could drive to your web site.
3. Competition. The fewer competing web sites there are for a keyword, the more attractive that keyword is for the subject web site.
So the three major criteria for any keyword you are considering targeting is relevance, traffic and competition. The relevance criterion is judgment-based. It is common sense. For the traffic criterion, the best tool to use to generate that data is the external Adwords research tool, located at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. For the competition criterion, I suggest basing it on Google “allintitle:” searches, because this will return the number of web pages that are closest to being specifically optimized for that keyword.
Compile a list of potential keywords using Google’s external keyword, eliminate the less relevant ones, then rank them by the number of searches Google claims for each one. Then look for ones that are in a favorable competitive situation. Your highlighted keywords at this point are your best bet for generating targeted organic search engine traffic in a reasonable amount of time. Your chance of ranking for those keywords, and thus generating visits to your web site, is excellent.
Call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net if you need some assistance orchestrating an organized SEO campaign for your business web site.
Better Linking by Going Deep
April 8th and my first blog of the month. Shameful. My excuse is that I have spent a lot more time lately updating my newer blogs, those of the legal marketing variety on a couple of other sites. But really, there should be no excuses. I should just get it done. You need to have the same attitude yourself. You must blog!
Okay, now onto the actual subject of this blog.
When link building, the temptation is to always focus on your home page. Obviously, you would prefer that that be the page most people see and arrive at. It’s sort-of like the cover of a book. It creates interest and gives the reader a little idea of what it is about.
So people love to link to their home page. However, the problem with this approach is that it does not account for two things:
1. You need to strive for a connection between the keyword in the link (if there is one) and keywords on the page that it links to; and
2. A single web page can only be optimized for a VERY small set of keywords (technically, it can only TRULY be optimized for one keyword).
So you want keyword-specific links pointing to keyword-specific pages. If you always link to your home page, you are not doing this. Instead, you need to practice something called “deep linking.” Deep linking is the act of linking not to the home page but to a more specific sub-page. For example, if you have a web site that sells shoes, and there is a sub-page on the site devoted to Nike shoes, then a keyword link like “Nike shoes” would be more effective if it linked to the Nike page rather than your home page.
For help with your company’s Internet marketing, contact Work Media at www.workmedia.net, info@workmedia.net, or 888-299-4837.
A More Accurate Way to Estimate Keyword Traffic
The very best source of keyword data for your search engine optimization campaign may be your own paid search campaign. We use keyword research tools such as NicheBot.com a lot, especially early in the life of an SEO campaign. The problem is the data generated by such tools is only an estimate, and sometimes those estimates are highly inaccurate.
If you want concrete proof about the potential traffic for various keywords, take a look at the search queries people are using that have triggered your ads. In Google, you can run a search query performance which will show you most of the actual search terms that were used when your ads were displayed. One column of data in the report is impression share. If you run a report for a month, then divide the number of queries for any particular keyword by the impression share for that month, you will have a pretty accurate total for the number of times that keyword was used in that month. If you then divide that by 30, you will have an estimate for the number of times that search term is used on a daily basis.
The formulas are as follows:
Monthly Searches = Number of Impressions / Impression Share
Daily Searches = (Number of Impressions / Impression Share) / 30
You can then plug these search queries into NicheBot or another tool to get an idea of how many directly competing sites there are for the keyword. Or you can type the search query into Google surrounded by quotes to get an estimate of the competition.
The final data set created by doing this will give you a more accurate picture of actual search traffic and competition than simply relying on the information provided by keyword research tools. You can’t go wrong with hard data.
If you need some help conducting keyword research for your search engine optimization or pay per click marketing campaigns, please call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Lose the Ego – It’s About the Keywords, Not Your Name
Get used to being known as a keyword rather than a name. If you’re trying to generate search engine rankings, at least. For example, which of the following would make a better signature for an article or blog post response?
www.franks.com – Jackson’s pool table retailer.
or
www.franks.com – Jackson’s pool table retailer.
Intuitively, you might think the first one is better, since your business name is hyper-linked. However, the second link will help boost your ranking for the specific keyword “pool table”. Assuming that that keyword accurately reflects the products you sell (and that you have done some keyword research to make sure the keyword generates traffic), then the second one is much better for your business.
If your goal is to achieve search engine rankings, then you need to put your ego aside, and do everything you can to seed the Web with links to your site that contain your main keywords. Article writing is a great way to do this. Personally, I’m not convinced that making forum posts with links is still a valid method. I feel like the search engines probably discounted the value of those links a long time ago. But there are plenty of other techniques.
If you need some help with your search engine optimization or pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Keyword Relative Value: a Simplified Way of Measuring Search Engine Visibility
This week we published an article on our web site discussing a concept we have developed called Keyword Relative Value. The article can be accessed via the link below:
http://workmedia.net/articles/Keyword-Relative-Value.asp
To quote from the article:
We developed a formula intended to attach a numerical value to a web site’s search engine ranking for a specific keyword. The resulting number, called the Keyword Relative Value (or “KRV”), places a value on a keyword for a particular web site based on two parameters: the amount of expected traffic for the keyword and a site’s ranking in a particular search engine for the keyword.
Here is the KRV formula:
KRV = ROUND(T*(SQRT((1/R)^3)),2)
where T = the expected traffic for a keyword and R = a web site’s ranking for the keyword in a particular search engine.
The above formula derives the value for one particular keyword. A much more instructive exercise is to calculate the KRV’s for a group of keywords. We call this the Aggregate Keyword Relative Value (“AKRV”). The formula for AKRV is as follows:
AKRV = X(ROUND(T*(SQRT((1/R)^3)),2))
where X is the number of keywords that have search engine rankings.
The point of these formulas is to boil your web site’s search engine visibility for a common set of keywords down to a single number. You can then track this number over time and compare it to your competitors to gauge your visibility against your competitors. We believe this concept is a powerful new tool to give web site owners a stronger sense of how well they rank in the search engines, in an easy-to-understand format: a single number.
To learn more about KRV, please read the article linked above.
If you could use some help improving and understanding your search engine visibility, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Microsoft’s Latest Keyword Research Tool: adCenter Add-in for Excel
Microsoft has released a new tool for use by advertisers on its search engine – adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007. Microsoft describes it as:
“…a keyword research and optimization tool that can help you understand keyword popularity and trends, and gain valuable insight on the demographic and geographic information of actual searches.”
Now, we are all the time doing keyword research in various tools, exporting the data, and opening up it up in Excel to do whatever type of sorting and filtering we need to get down to a list of keywords we can use for our purposes. So we were very interested in a tool that would allow us to do keyword research directly from Excel, even if all the data comes Microsoft’s own search network.
To download the tool, go here:
http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/adcenter_addin
It is easy to install and it even worked the first time we tried it. One disadvantage is that you have to have Excel 2007, which a lot of people probably don’t have yet. Obviously Microsoft would like everyone in the world to upgrade to their latest version of Office, which may be one reason it only works in the 2007 version. But it did not seem to cause any problems with Excel’s functionality, so if you have Excel 2007 and have need to do keyword research, you should definitely try it out.
After installing it, it places a new tab on Excel’s main menu labeled “Ad Intelligence”. Clicking the Ad Intelligence tab reveals a whole new sub-menu of really big, colorful buttons:
Keyword Wizard – generates a keyword list from seed keywords.
Keyword Extraction – generates a keyword list based on the copy in a particular web site.
Keyword Suggestion – suggests keywords based on three possible criteria: advertiser bidding behavior, keywords which contain the original keywords, and by keyword category similarity.
Search Buzz – suggests keywords based on top spikiness or frequency.
Monthly Traffic – provides historical and forecast traffic for selected keywords.
Keyword Categorization – identifies categories for selected keywords.
Geographic – provides location information for keywords.
Demographic – provides demographic information for keywords.
Monetization – provides keyword monetization data, such as CPC, CTR, impressions, etc.
Advanced Algorithm – lets you customize the parameters used to create keyword lists.
Options – lets you set system options for the keyword tool.
To try it out, we typed in three seed keywords in successive cells, clicked the Keyword Wizard button, selected the cells, selected the algorithms to use (campaign association, keywords that contain the seed keywords, or keywords that are similar – we selected all three options to bring back the most keywords), set the maximum results to return and the minimum confidence, and then let it run. It returned a list of keywords directly in our Excel workbook that contained lots of traffic-related data for each one.
The whole problem with Microsoft’s search platform is that it just doesn’t have enough keyword inventory. We recently gave up on Microsoft for a search campaign we were running because we were actually doing much better generating traffic in second tier search engines like Miva (and of course, Google and Yahoo!). But purely for purposes of generating keyword data to be tried in various search engines, Microsoft’s adCenter Add-in for Excel is a very cool tool.
If you need help running paid search ads in Microsoft or any other search platform, please call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Five Pieces of Blogging Advice
Here are five pieces of advice for your blog (you do blog don’t you?).
1. Go deep. Here’s what we mean – unless you’re the kind of writer who is so fascinating that people will hang on your every word no matter what you say – and it’s probably a safe bet that you’re not – the best way for you to attract readers is to focus on a narrow subject. Pick a niche and stick to it. Become known as a top expert in a very narrow field.
2. Establish relationships with other bloggers in your field. Now, I will admit, we are terrible about doing this. We publish this blog but do little posting of comments to other blogs, which is what we should be doing. My only excuse is that we’re so dang busy we do good just to get this blog posted. But YOU should do better. Spend some time reading and commenting on others’ blogs and you will help drive traffic to your blog.
3. Use traffic-generating keywords in your blog. Set up an account at Nichebot.com, then use it to find keywords that generate a lot of traffic. You might also want to go to some of the social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and look in the tag clouds to see what tags people are using for blogs in your industry. Using these keywords in your blog will increase your blog’s exposure and drive traffic to it.
4. Monetize your blog…subtly. Use in-text links to link to products or services for which you are an affiliate. You will probably have much more success with this style of link than a more obvious banner or AdSense-style link. Not only will you generate more clicks, but it will seem less like you are advertising than simply making recommendations. If your readers trust you, then they might just take your recommendations…and make you some money.
5. Blog a minimum of three times per week, and ping your blog out to various directories every time. If you don’t have time to effectively author and promote your blog, then you need to find someone who can do it for you.
Work Media offers a blog authoring and management service. If you need some help with your blog, feel free to give us a call at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Fine Tuning Your Google AdWords Keywords with the Search Query Performance Report
We are running a large campaign for a software company that sales design-related products. A lot of our time thus far on the project has been devoted to ad group “expansion” (that is, expanding the number of keywords and ads in each ad group). It is a multi-stage project, and the first stage is basically to start generating as much traffic as possible, and then later stages will be devoted to improving the quality of the traffic and increasing conversions.
We’ve been working on the project for a few weeks, and have begun generating a fair amount of traffic. So we decided it was time to take a look at the search traffic that was generating clicks and see what it looked like. We did this by generating a Search Query Performance Report from the AdWords Reports tab. The results were very enlightening.
What we discovered was that we were getting lots of traffic from completely irrelevant searches. We are using broad match, in order to maximize ad impressions, but we discovered that our ads are being triggered by way too many searches that are unrelated to the products we’re selling. Despite ad copy that clearly states the nature of our client’s business and its products, people are still clicking on the ads even if it is not relevant to what they are looking for.
The solution is to add negative keywords to the ad groups to prevent our ad from being displayed by all of the irrelevant searches. After generating the Search Query Performance report (with the data divided up by ad group), we pulled out bad search terms that had triggered clicks and added those as negative keywords to the proper ad groups. As a result, we should greatly cut down on the number of irrelevant impressions and clicks, which should result in improvement in our conversion rate. And that’s the ultimate goal.
So the negative for us is that now we’re going to have to do more keyword research to try and generate as much traffic as we can. But we’re pretty sure our client will be happy at the prospect of paying much less for conversions. After we add another round of keywords, we’ll have to repeat the whole process, generating reports to look for irrelevant search terms that are triggering our ads. But that’s what it’s all about – iterative improvements over time that maximize account performance.
If you would like Work Media to help you manage or improve the performance of your Google AdWords (or other search engine) campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.