Archive for the ‘keywords’ category
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.
Advice on Generating Keywords for Your Pay-Per-Click Campaign
Keywords are the lifeblood of your pay-per-click marketing campaigns. If you don’t have a strong list of keywords, then you are going to lose quality traffic. Don’t just rely on the keyword tools within the search engines for your keyword research. Here are some ways to generate keywords to try in your campaigns:
Comb your web site for keywords. Every different way you have described your business on your site is a new keyword or set of keywords.
Think from your customer’s perspective. Are the words you use to describe your business really the way other people would describe it? Ask around. Whatever words people are using to search for your kind of business are the words you need to target, regardless of what terms are used in your industry.
Nichebot.com. We really like this web site. First sign up for an account. It’s free to sign up. Then type a starting keyword related to your service or product in the text box at the top of the page and hit the Search button. You can change the middle dropdown list to “Overture” to get a better idea of the actual keywords people are using to search in Yahoo. But don’t overlook the “Word Tracker” option, which will generate a lot of keyword data. The data will be returned with information such as the number of searches performed for each keyword, the amount of competition, and the KEI for each keyword (“KEI” is a value for the keyword based on a formula that considers the number of searches for the keyword relative to the number of directly competing web pages).
You can also look through your web logs for the search terms people have used on your web site or to find your web site.
If you sell products, you can combine brands with attributes of the products (color, width, size, etc.) to create many specific, late buying cycle keywords.
Try to think of keywords that reflect different stages of the searcher’s buying cycle. Early in the buying cycle, they will be looking for more general information about your type of service or products. Later in the buying cycle, when they are much closer to making a decision and doing business, they will use more specific keywords, which might include particular brands and models, or even locations to make a purchase. Try to use keywords that cover the entire buying cycle.
And remember that you are looking for groups of keywords. Unless your campaign is very small, it is unlikely you will want to run a 1:1 ratio of keywords to ads. It will be a very unrulely number of ads to have to create and monitor. So you will be assigning ads to small groups of related keywords, and writing ad copy that applies to all of the keywords. So if you’re going to run ads for “gardening”, you might as well run them for “flower gardening”, “spring garden”, and “planting”. Yahoo and MSN have some nice dynamic features that make it pretty easy to customize an ad for multiple keywords.
If you would like some help generating keywords and managing your pay-per-click campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Finding Pockets of People – Strategic Use of Keyword Research Data
I have a friend who has a vegetarian recipe web site. It’s a blog in which he posts every now and then with a new recipe. He asked for some advice on generating traffic to it. My first piece of advice to him was to make more posts. For a blog to be an effective marketing vehicle, you must post often. I recommend a minimum of 3x per week. But at the very least, regardless of what business you are in, at least post once a week. That is the rock bottom minimum for your blog to be legitimate.
But while I was checking out his site, making suggestions for his title and whatnot, I decided to do a little keyword research just to see what kind of traffic there was related to vegetarian and vegan recipes. As was expected, there was a fair amount of traffic for broad terms like “vegetarian recipes”. Competition for those broad phrases was also fairly stiff. But what I found interesting is that there were a lot of less trafficked terms that had much less competition.
Our primary keyword tool is Nichebot’s Keyword Tracker. The main way it counts competition is the number of web pages with the keyword in the title. Search engines place much stock in web page titles. If you have a web page indexed with a specific keyword in the title that few other web pages have, that page will likely rank highly for that keyword, regardless of external factors such as the number of backlinks the site has.
So I found lots of keywords with just a few searches, but also just a few competitors. My suggestion to my friend was to use those “long-tail” keywords as the basis for future blog posts. As a hypothetical example, if our data showed that there were ten searches for the phrase “low fat vegetarian lasagna”, with eight competitors listed, then a blog posted with the title “Low fat vegetarian lasagna” would have an excellent chance of generating a first page ranking.
A first page search engine ranking for a search phrase being used by a few people is way better than a page 23 ranking for a search phrase that lots of people are using. You have to think specifics. Think niches.
Think in terms of finding keywords you can dominate and serving content directed toward small pockets of people, rather than trying to compete for broad, general phrases against thousands of other web sites. Keyword research can help you find those small pockets of people.
Getting back to the vegetarian recipe example, if my friend were to use the long-tail keywords as a guide to what kinds of recipes to post, eventually he would have a large collection of blog posts (and corresponding web pages) that focused on keywords with little competition. And he would have some real nice search engine rankings to go along with it.
If you would like some help performing keyword research for your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Microsoft adCenter Keyword Research Tool: Generating Demographic Data Useful to Your Search Engine Marketing
We have been doing a lot of pay-per-click campaign management that spans all three major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. We’ve always done Google, but with the newness of the Yahoo and MSN ad interfaces, it has given us the opportunity to learn some new things. Of the three, MSN has the nicest interface. You’re probably going to be shocked to hear this, but it has some bugs (WHAT? Microsoft release something with some bugs?), but they are fairly minor.
One feature of Microsoft adCenter we really like is its keyword research tool. To access it, after logging in to adCenter, just click the Research tab on the main menu. You can then have Microsoft generate a list of keywords based on a single keyword, or based on a URL. The returned keywords are sorted by the number of searches performed for each keyword in the previous month. You can generate keywords that contain the specified keyword, or that are similar to the specified keyword.
But what really sets the MSN keyword generation tool apart from other similar tools is its ability to generate a demographic profile for a set of keywords.
Here is an example:
Let’s say you are in the business of copywriting. Typing “copywriting service” in the search box returns the following results (in the “Contains Term” box) in order of previous month’s searches:
seo copywriting service
copywriting service
website copywriting service
copywriting service web
complete copywriting service
This in itself is interesting data, because we can see that more people are searching on MSN for copywriting services related to search engine optimization than anything else.
If we select each of the keywords and then click “View Profile”, MSN generates a tabbed box of charts, divided into five sections:
Traffic Trends
Age and Gender
Geography
Wealth Index
Lifestyle
Below is a screenshot of the chart displayed if we click the Geography tab.
Very interesting. We would have expected cities like New York and Chicago to appear high on the list, but they are nowhere to be found. By far, the number one geographical location for MSN searchers searching for copywriting services is London. So what does this mean? Well, you don’t want to draw any wild conclusions, but it looks like if you could get your marketing message to web sites and forums based in or focusing on the U.K., you might find yourself a very active market. This information is also useful in targeting specific cities with your pay-per-click ads.
The above demonstration is just a simple example, but we suggest that you give it a try and see what insites you can glean about your target market.
For help running an effective pay-per-click campaign for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4827 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising Keyword Research Tips
Keyword research is a very important part of the process of running a successful pay-per-click campaign. If you only run ads for broad, heavily searched phrases related to your business, you will likely be competing against lots of other businesses, and bids may be quite high. But if you expand your view and seek more “long-tail” terms, you will face less competition, and clicks to your site will cost less.
“Long-tail” terms are less-trafficked search phrases that are more specific than broad, general phrases. In addition to being less competitive, and thus less expensive to bid on, they have another bid advantage. Often, they indicate a searcher who is farther along in the buying process. For example, the keyword “tennis shoes” indicates that the user is searching for information on tennis shoes, but may not have any particular brand in mind. However, the keyword “Nike Air Max 360″ is an indication of a user who searching for a specific brand of shoes. The searcher using the more specific keyword is likely further along in the buying process.
Our favorite tool for finding keywords is Nichebot.com. You provide the tool with a keyword and it returns a list of related keywords, along with traffic and competition information for each one. Clicking on a keyword in the list of returned results will generate a new list of keywords similar to the one you clicked. You can use it to drill down through keywords and come up with lots of keywords you may not have thought of. But to use the tool to its maximum effectiveness, you need to come up with unique keywords to start with.
Think of all the different ways someone might search for information related to your products or services. For example, if you sell wedding dresses, you might want to research keywords related to tuxedos, limousine services, wedding and engagement rings, locations for weddings, how to conduct a wedding, etc. And of course keywords related to specific brands and products in your inventory. Running all of those kinds of keywords through a keyword tool like Nichebot will reveal many more keywords you can use in your PPC campaign.
If you would like some help conducting keyword research for your pay-per-click campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Myriad Search: Another Tool for the Internet Marketer’s Toolbox
Myriad Search (myriadsearch.com) is an interesting search engine research tool created by the guy who runs seobook.com. It lets you run a search query and generate a list of results that are a combination of rankings in four major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. So the tool has several uses:
- Competitive research. Who are your competitors that rank highly across the board for desireable search phrases?
- Link partner research. Sites that come up highly in the composite rankings for keywords related to your industry may be very valuable sources of links.
- To find out your own standing. If you rank highly here, then you likely have strong visibility in the search engines.
- General research. A site that ranks highly in the composite rankings is likely a strong source of information related to your search query.
One unique aspect of the tool is that it allows you emphasize or de-emphasize search engines (using a control called “bias”), and results can be weighted based on total number of results. For instance, if you specify to run the query based on 50 results, then a number one ranking has less weight than a query based on 10 results. These different ways of running queries allow you to take into consideration factors such as:
- Particular search engines being more relevant than others for some searches.
- Some searches being less sensitive to having a top-10 or top-20 ranking than others.
- Some search engines allowing duplicate results, which would tend to skew results.
The tool also allows you to download a .CSV file of your research data.
Myriad Search is a very interesting tool that gives you a unique perspective on search data related to your business. We recommend you give it a try.
For help conducting search engine research for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.
Internet Marketing Weapons: A Look at MSN Labs Tools – Part 3
We’ve spent the last couple of blog posts discussing the MSN AdCenter Labs beta tools and how you might use them for marketing purposes. Today we are going to finalize that discussion by looking at one more of the tools, the Online Commercial Intention Director. This tool gives a value for a search query or a web site from 0 to 1 that is an indication of the degree of the visitor’s intention to purchase products or acquire information. For queries, it returns a single value. For URL’s, it returns three values for three different OCI (Online Commercial Intent) types: NonCommercial, Commercial-Informational, and Commercial-Transactional.
There is little information about how this tool works, but it’s an interesting idea that could be a valuable research tool. For instance, you could type in different search terms and use the result (the Probability for Commercial Query) to get an indication of how strong each search term is in terms of intent to make a purchase.
For example, let’s say you sell wool clothing on your web site, such as sweaters. Typing in “wool” returns a Probability for Commercial Query of .65227. Buy typing in “wool sweaters” returns a Probability for Commercial Query of .79378. So the wool sweaters search indicates a greater chance that the person performing the search will engage in a transaction.
In testing the tool for URL’s, I tried my own web site: http://workmedia.net, and got the following results:
Probabilities for Each OCI Type:
NonCommercial: 0.82111
Commercial-Informational: 0.1572
Commercial-Transactional: 2.1683e-002
Our site is a commercial site since we use it to represent our business and services, but it is also very information-heavy, which perhaps is why it ranks so high for “NonCommercial”. When I ran the test with the URL “walmart.com”, it still only showed a Commercial-Transactional value of 0.32238. So the tool doesn’t seem to be all that accurate yet at guaging the commercial intent of web sites, as opposed to search queries.
For help implementing a state-of-the-art search engine marketing campaign for your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or info@workmedia.net.