Utilizing Keyword Tools Effectively

When you’re doing SEO or PPC keyword research to expand your sets, keyword tools like Wordtracker, keyword discovery, Keyword Spy,and Mergewords can be a big help at the beginning of your research.

What happens when you’re stuck, and you need to expand your set of keywords that are more relevant to your audience search behavior and intent. Or maybe you need to expand more to consumers that are ready to buy your product or call up your service.

Some outside the box thinking on expanding your keyword reach can be found below:

• TagCrowd – throw in some keywords and let TC show you the KW cloud, from here you can prioritize the keywords.
• Google Insights – take a 1st tier keyword (phrases) plug it in and see the historical trends and pay attention to the “rising and break out searches”.
• Keyword Spy – a decent tool to look up keywords and domain information for competitive keyword research.
• Majestic SEO – Similar to Keyword Spy, but what separates it apart is the historical link velocity chart that gives you an idea of how much effort is your competitor putting into link acquisition.
• Merge Words – its great for SEO/PPC if you need to create your own blend (modifier), can easily copy & paste to spreadsheet.

These are some of the many keyword tools thats out there, and some I haven’t mention like Google Keyword tool, KW Discovery, and Market Samurai. The idea behind all this is the utilization of the tools, there is no one keyword tool that rules them all. It is the process of research when these tools come into play.

Expanding Keyword Sets

Say your managing a PPC account in Google Adwords that needs to be optimized to bring more targeted traffic. Your viewing all the keywords and wondering how are we going to expand more relevant keywords into the sets. There are a couple of routes to take from here.

Below are “relevant” and “rising” search options.

• Relevant is used when you’re digging deeper into the keyword sets. With this ideally, you’d want to be advertsing on Google Adwords or any 3rd party that can display the raw searches. You’re distilling down to the intent as much as possible.
• Rising is used when you’re looking to go after what’s trending at the moment. Normally using this approach works great if you’re running a PPC campaign and in a big market, and if you’re looking at the organic. Be sure that your website or blog is capable of ranking for some of the fresh term. For further reading into Quality Freshness recommend Justin Briggs post.

Relevant Searches

1. Viewing the “raw” search query in Google Adwords will display the actual search query typed into the box. You do this by selecting the keyword and go up to the “see search terms” and click on selected.
2. Export this list of raw searches and inserting it into TagCrowd. Tag Crowd will create a keyword cloud, you will be able to see what the main keywords are, and there may be more than one phrase.
3. Take those highlighted keywords from TagCrowd and insert one at a time into your choice of keyword tool – such as Google KW, Keyword Spy, or SemRush the choice is yours – The tools can expand these keywords further.

Rising Searches for Freshness

1. View your list of keywords from Google Adwords or Analytics and look at your top query that isn’t branded. Usually will be a service or product phrase.
2. Once selected plug this keyword phrase into Google Insights to view historical trends and rising searches.
3. Pay attention to the season and rising searches, as this will cue you in on which keywords to go after.

Summary

There you have it are a couple of ideas to implement on how to use your keyword tools. This post is just the tip of the iceberg on keyword research and implementing action. Many more ways to use tools, in future post we will cover other aspects of what do we do with our competitor data. So, what are some of your ways of doing kw research, please share at the comment box.

Seattle Tacoma SEO

eCommerce Conversion Test

In this post I am setting up a test for conversions based on that the visitor is already at the end of the buying funnel. All the research has already been done, and ready to buy online.

The search is for a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10″. Please make a decision based on the above parameters.

Above are 2 images of a product page, which one would you choose to go forward with a purchase? Please leave your comment for your selection.  Any Question please let us know.

JS Bookmarklet On Page SEO Tool & Python

Here’s a really quick SEO Tool that Troy Meyer has built to share with everyone. This tool is built from JavaScript as a bookmarklet. This can be used by you that is reading this article. All you have to do is drag the button to your browser.

About the SEO Tool

This is an “On Page SEO Tool”, this tool will highlight the on page factors that are important for SEO, such as:

• Meta Title Tag
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Count of Image alt tags
• Headers Numbers – like H1′s, H2′s, etc..
• Look up of Robots.txt
• Site Cookie – this one is really good to know
• The Goodies are Other Links from “Research/Intel Tools that pulls info about the page that you’re on

Use this seo tool to get a sense of what a page is about, or to use it while you’re site auditing. Whats great about it is that its quick. Again you can thank Troy Meyer for this awesome On Page SEO Bookmarklet.

After viewing this, and reading Tom Critchlows work on JS Bookmarklet. I went ahead and built my version, but not as in-depth. As I am just getting my feet wet in Python. I created a desktop tool that pulls link data from SEOMOz API on competitors website. Not completely done yet, as I am at the parsing stage. But I will let you all have a look at the scraping of the page.

Oops, I almost forgot, here is the bookmarklet.
On Page SEO

3 Awesome Twitter Tools

There are some great social media tools that are available, for twitter users that listens in to the world wide users.  There are 3 tools that I’d like to share about and how to use it for productivitiy. These 3 tools are used due to being free.  These tools can be used in SEO, and Online Marketing.  Here they are, have a look.

Follower Wonk  -  look up the power of twit users, so you know who to follow and can influence others (Search Engines).

Time.ly – Timely figures out when the best time to tweet. Think its nothing, think again, if you want to pass on messages to someone that you want attention. Tweet when they’re most likely to be tweeting, this makes a huge difference in getting a response.

The Archivist – This twitter analytics pulls its information from Twitter API, you can get information on who is tweeting about a subject, who is top tweeter for that subject, get multiple info on users, get colorful graphs & data. Very nice tool to have.

How to Use

How do you use the 3 tools? Simply use follower wonk to find your heavy influencer and mark them. Go to Timely, input the heavy influencer user and know when the best time that they tweet. What to tweet about? Yes, what you want to do is go to the Archivist and plug in the words that you’re thinking that they tweet about. Behold, you will get the results in colorful charts.  With all these information, as a marketer you should know when to push out your marketing messages to these fine folks.

If you know of other useful similar free twitter tools, please share.

Content Marketing – SEO/Social Media Case Study

With the new Social Media buzz going around, it’s hard not to ignore it.  Rand Fishkin and other SEO Experts stated in their current state of “ Link Building” presentation emphasizing the importance’s of the social channels that is picking up on new content.

Originally this article was going to be on my link building approach, but I realized link building/SEO is content marketing.  The precede findings opened my eyes to using trusted sources in an industry.

In this case study, I have taken the blogging method to drive the message, but funny thing is you will not hear much of it – you will see why. We utilized this approach due to the budget.

A little background about the client’s product without going into detail. They are in the health industry with a product to solve a problem that affects 30 – 50% of the U.S. population. Ok on to the nitty gritty!

-         Free Sample  (be careful with this free sample approach)– the approach  was to spread the word about health product to the online world.  This campaign did not require as much link building as we speculated due to the niche.  We only submitted a few articles to blogs about the free sample , and submitted to communities that are coupon/discount minded like www.sampling.com.

-         To our amazement, about a week later other similar sample websites picked up on our free sample product. Big hitters (mojosavings.com/dealnews.com) websites now have caught on to the news. The traffic sky rocketed as we scrambled with the bandwidth, for a month before we pulled the plug on the offer.  Below image shows the traffic that had taken place.

So I guess the question is did the traffic convert? Yes, we converted on products that actually made money and acquiring emails. Below image shows the Goal conversions, highlights are the promo deal which came in from refer traffic and of course Facebook.

On the social media side we received refers from Facebook which converted as shown here in GA.  We implemented a custom Facebook page with the spectacular offer. Our Client Facebook Fans grew from 20 to 530 in a month span.

Engagements about the product increased at 70% .

-The image below shows referals and visits with conversions and pay attention to the Time on Site.

-Whats amazing is #2 there were visitors from a mobile phone with FB apps. (Yes, some visitors actually made a purchased, mCommerce)

On the link building side of the house, approximately one month after launch our client website obtained a little over 1K natural links from 300 referring domains.  Below are stills from Bing Web Master Tools and Majestic SEO displaying the activities, numbered links, and referring domains.

This all happened rather quickly, and at the time we weren’t concern with the type of links or anchor text. Users and Publishers were linking to our client website because of the content. This was driving traffic, far exceeding the search engines at the time and currently.

A note about this adventure is to position yourself in the market to help solve the audience’s problems. That was key for our client product.

Currently, we are back on track in link building for targeted keyword phrases in our client industry, where we are utilizing our smarts to outreach to the big players that have shown support in the client Facebook.

Infographics for Marketing & SEO

Everyone has heard of infographics as being a great way to tell a story. Not just story but a visual map of the story and/or to convey data visually. How does this affect online marketing and SEO? It matters greatly, as this can be unique content.

In the past when we (SEO) conducted a link building campaign. There was always some form of directory submissions, and link wheel combined. Most of the content was text type of content. Infographics offers a new way to view facts with visuals.

The pros of this is that infographics and videos may be the choice of content to push out to the social channels. People like to be entertained, they don’t read. They scan to see the vital information. Its important to provide laser targeted content for the people.

How Do You Get a Link
You can insert the link in the image, make it as a hyperlink when visitor click on the image. The other way is to let visitor naturally link to it. If the message is compelling enough, people will share and tweet about it to their friends. That are friends to another batch of friends, you get the idea. We have tested some awesome infographics and it works.

The Downside
The downside is, it can be time consuming, not creative, and not photoshop incline. But just like in creating slideshow and converting it to a video. Takes a little practice and you’re off like a meteor with full of ideas.

Setting Up Google Analytics on Your Facebook Page

The above video is a great quick tutorial on setting up Google Analytics for your Facebook Fan Page. This is approach is way better than just tracking the referring page in your GA. However, there are some steps that you have to follow to set it up. Tal from WebDigi has kindly provided us with the tutorial on this.

Why Should We Track The Facebook Page?

If you’re running a business, its a great idea to setup a business Facebook page. To know what is going on in Facebook, this set up is a must to know. UK WebDigi figured out how to get around Facebook pages to track it. Hats off & buy them a bottle of Guinness!

Why Must You Know?
If your business is active in your community and you’re engaging with your friends and fans in Facebook. Chances are some of that traffic are possibly turning into leads. On the internet, its about expanding your online presences. I’m not talking about SEO, but the more referral traffic you get the better. You want to have more referral traffic than the search engines. Its been reported that Facebook gets more traffic than Google, but this is at an overall picture. So we know Facebook is a big player in getting your business traffic. The reason is online presences again, hope you get the picture.

We’re currently trying this out with Ace Air a air conditioning service company, and Builders Interiors – laminate flooring service as part of their repetoire. Any Q’s let us know!

Google Instant Preview Factor For Increasing CTR

Google Instant Preview, this is another new feature that Google has on their SERP, if activated. When you  click on the magnifying glass in your listing. The example in the picture above is for the term “carpet installation Bothell“.  Google will display the web page next to the SERP listing on the right. Pretty neat thing to showcase.

Why I think this is neat and a good thing is that the snippet picture of your website in the SERP can be a factor for increasing your click throughs. In the past articles we have talked about the importance of the meta title & description tag and how this relates to an adword ad. Now we have a 3rd factor that can increase your click through rate. Meaning your visitor reading the listing and seeing the picture of your website may be incline to click on your listing to see more.

In the past web design may have been a separate entity when it comes to SEO. But now it seems like web designs may overlap with the SEO thru the perspective of first impression. Hence, Google Instant Preview features.

Obviously, so far this is our opinion, we are in the midst of testing and tracking this.  We will have more conclusive findings in the coming months. Any comments please do so.

The Meaning of Google Instant Search & PPC

Google Instant Search and PPC – Here’s what it may mean.  I”m sure by now you are aware of the instant keywords in the search query that populates when you type in a word.

The Good – is that its cool using AJAX to fetch the data from Google server without a whole page refresh. These keywords that populates may point you to the right direction.

The Bad - is in the realm of Pay per click, questions that arises are: will this feature hurt the marketers bid?, will it kill the long tail? Must we bid keyword partially like if I’m typing “carpet show” here is what is shown:

Why does Google show  carpet show case?,  but what I was looking for was carpet showroom & carpet prices in Bellevue.  The time that it takes to read the suggested keywords an impression is counted.  Is this information accurate enough to count in the analytics for your purpose?

In summary mine your analytics data carefully, and know all of your Key Performances Indicators and from which search engines that its coming in from. You can filter the traffic and take into the account of instant search and compare the new data with your historical data.

Basics of Link Indexation

In the past we have talked about the importances of having your pages indexed quickly by Google. This will help your website getting ranked by the major search engines, and it will help your business. If nobody can find your business online, then you better do more cold calling to spread your presences.

The basics of getting or creating a link is use HTML codes. The spider bots from search engines will read the html code that looks like this – <a href=”http://www.germanauto.com”>German Auto Repairs</a> in the backend.

On the front end it looks like this German Auto Repairs. When you click on the highlighted words, you will be hyperlinked to the web page.  This is straight forward use of this hypertext index or sometimes referred as anchor text.

If you’re using videos, you can’t put a link inside the actual embedded video, because its a flash file, but the embedded info that you put you can insert your code to link.

Can you see the anchor text? The text can be anything that you want, like carpet prices Seattle, or Seattle Carpets.

OK, moving on how do you know if the spider bots have indexed your web page with the links?  You can use a tool like “Crawl PHP” or just go to Google and type in the search box – “cache:www.yoursite.com” -  Google will give you the cache indexed date and time. Looks like this: