SES Session – Live from Chicago : Advanced Keyword Research

First presenter is Christine Churchill from KeyRelevance.

“It’s not about the keywords you want to be found on, it’s about what users use to find you.”

Keyword Popularity Suggestion Tools

Adwords Sandbox
Overture Suggestion Tool
Wordtracker
Nichebot
KeywordDiscovery

Keywords indicate where consumers are in the buying process.

Problem Recognition – Information Search – Select Alternatives – Decision – Purchase

Three types of Search Behavior:

Navigation – Knows what you want – goes to the site.

Informational – Want to know something

Transactional – Intends on performing a transaction.

Getting inside the searcher’s head

Understand the “why” behind the search and you can better target how to respond

Research vs Purchase
Stage in the buying process
Personal – Gender/Age
Psychological – Fear, uncertainty and doubt sells
Knowledge-based filtering
Adjust ad copy and landing page to reflect knowledge or service

To compete, you need Search Term Parity

You need to see how active the competitors are within the same marketing environment. Are they doing PPC? How much are the bids? How optimized are the sites? What’s their linkage situation? Anchor text?

Competitve Intelligence Tools

HitWise or qSearch

AdGooroo – Tells who is advertising on keyword phrases and how well they are doing. Very interesting tool!

Keyword Analyzer

Test Keywords Performance Early

Use PPC to test candidate KW’s before creating landing pages. This gives quantitative feedback on the KW performance.

Summary

Evaluate keywords from different angles
-Relevancy
-Conversion
-Volume

Next up is Lori Weimann from KeywordMax:

Methods Covered:

1. Mining Referring URLs : Organic & PPC

What you need:

A. Conversion Tracking Tool
B. Reporting that displays conversion rate broken down by keyword
C. For paid listings, make sure to capture BOTH the actual keyword bid upon & the referring URL

Mining Organic Search: The Easy Way is to create a report from your web logs.

Mining PPC Searc:

A. Run an analytics report
B. Find the converting words
C. Find the referring URLs
D. Mine the referring url for the query string

2. Word Building with Excel

Use concatenate to build keyword lists

3. Keyword Research Tools Best Features

A. Use what’s free
B. Important Data
i. Estimated # of searches
ii. Number of competitors/bidders
iii. CPC for position #1
C. Find Gems – words with lower number of competitors and low CPC.

4. Using Analytics: Case Study

Case Study : Gravity 180

Gravity180 provides event photography services – aka “Photo Marketing”
The keyword itself drove a lot of traffic and no business? Why not?

The referring URL’s explained why it didn’t work – they were receiving clicks on “Photos of Marketing” etc.

Tactics changed from broad match to exact match.

Good presentation Lori – now for Shaun Ryan from SLI Systems.

How to get the data out?

Manually examining logs
Write a script
Search tools
Analytics tools

Small case study – Ian Blackford of DesignConcious.com

Email script to collect search terms of www.hifix.co.uk. Quickly had thousands. Found that one manufacturer had dominated. Also found that people can’t spell.

Why use your site search for Keyword Research?

It is the language of your customers
They are continuously updated
You should be looking at them anyway to improve your site search and expand your offerings. You need to think of site context.

Site search is a fantastic source of keyword research, according to Shaun Ryan.

James Lamberti from ComScore networks takes the podium.

Today’s challenges according to Lamberti are:

Discovering the people behind the keywords – the users.
Integrating search marketing with other media
More, better competitive and market intelligence
comScore Technology

Passive tracking of actual consumer search activity.
They have a panel of about 2 million members of online consumers who have agreed to be continuously and passively observed.

They are able to track actual search data, at a click level to a link on a page level, based on the opt in granted by the consumer.

Search Marketing Today

Tools to evaluate words and volume
Performance at my site
Best Practices and consultation

A significant knowledge gap exists:

How many people am I reaching? How often?
Who are they?
How do I integrate search with other ad strategies
What are the trends?

Based on these needs, comScore have developed their software, qSearch. James goes onto to displaying some charts and results relating to the keyword iPod and he analyzes the market demand and supply for that keyword term.

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