Search Marketing InsiderPay Per Click, Social Media and SEO Strategies – An Internet Marketing Institute Publication

By Kelly Larsen Director of Marketing, PPC Summit 

At past PPC Summit events, attendees have shown a lot of interest in WordStream’s keyword tool so we decided to provide a more detailed look at how these tools work. We recently had the opportunity to talk with Larry Kim, Founder and VP of Product Development at WordStream, to learn about their new keyword tools. Larry walked us through how the Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper work and how you can use them to enhance your SEO and PPC results. We wanted to share some of the cool product takeaways in the following Q&A on how these tools can help you better manage the keyword development process.

1.  How do these new tools help Search Marketers do their jobs better?
We launched these free Keyword tools to offer Search Marketers a broader range of keyword development and management options. The Keyword Niche Finder is designed to help prioritize content, keyword targeting and campaign creation based on an entire “keyword universe” surrounding a topic. It helps Search Marketers find the most popular pockets of related keywords (keyword niches) rather than individual keywords. And the Keyword Grouper helps Search Marketers organize their own keyword lists and data into actionable groups and niches.

 Advantages of The Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper:
a. Identify Keyword Niches Versus Single Keywords – Many times the most popular   keyword will perform best on your site, but not always.

b. Discover In-depth Keyword Variations – The Niche Finder offers popular variations within a given keyword cluster. This helps to vary page content and anchor text – something SEOs advocate – and it helps to structure comprehensive PPC campaigns or Ad Groups.

c. Improve Campaign Structure – These tools help to create a well-organized, semantically themed campaign and Ad Group structure for paid search accounts.

2. What are keyword niches and how do they help SEO and PPC campaign performance?
Keyword niches are groupings of tightly related keywords that can be used to drive paid and organic search marketing strategies.

For SEO purposes, identifying keyword niches helps marketers prioritize SEO workflow, identify promising topics for Web content and blog posts, and ensure that a website is optimized for the most profitable keywords.

As for PPC performance, when you identify keyword niches in your vertical, it allows you to create a strong PPC account structure at inception. This will save time and money by delivering more relevant ads, which in turn generate more clicks and improve your Quality Score.

3. How does the Keyword Niche Finder work?
Let’s take a look at the Niche Finder in action. It’s interesting to compare the results of a traditional keyword tool to The Free Keyword Niche Finder, as shown below. Here are results from WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool:

 
Now let’s look at the results for the same topic using The Free Keyword Niche Finder:
 

The interesting point here is in the difference between the two results, and the way that the two tools function. The Free Keyword Tool looks at the volume of results across a variety of sources (ISPs, search engines, and toolbars). The Free Keyword Niche Finder takes the same data that The Free Keyword Tool is using and then clusters that information semantically. So what we’re seeing here is that some keywords have a longer or more substantial “tail”.

Take one of the more popular niches (“refurbished laptops – dell”) and enter that keyword into the Niche Finder:

 
Assuming we’re using Refurbished Dell Laptops as a campaign, these would make for a series of pretty tight Ad Groups, ranging from approximately 10 – 35 keywords. This allows you to write very targeted ads and create a very specific, compelling landing page for each group.

4. What is the Keyword Grouper and how does it work?
The Keyword Grouper offers similar functionality to the Keyword Niche Finder, but instead of asking for a keyword as input, it groups existing data. You can export data from your analytics or a search query report, drop it into the tool, and then The Free Keyword Grouper segments that data.

Just drop in a list of keywords, and it provides a list of results similar to what you would find with The Free Keyword Niche Finder. This is a nice way to look at either a list you already have, or to examine historical data on a client site or an existing site you may be taking over. You can then leverage the same advantages The Free Keyword Niche Finder offers.

5. How can I get these tools?
The tools are free and easy to use; all you have to do is create a free WordStream account to gain full access to both tools, the Keyword Niche Finder and the Keyword Grouper.

By Heather F. Lutze – review by Mary O’Brien, Founder of PPC Summit

Many small (and larger) businesses put up a website and assume that the “If you build it, they will come” concept applies. Unfortunately, this wasn’t true when the internet started and it’s even less so now. Successful businesses get the fact that your website is now a critical part of your marketing campaign. It needs to be designed to attract search engines AND customers to be successful and Heather does a great job in this book of explaining why.

“Findability” in the title of the book refers to the critical need of every business to be visible on the internet (and particularly in search engines) at that crucial time when their prospect is ready to buy from them. Basically, it’s so competitive now that if you are not on the first page of search engine results you are wasting your time. And -  if you’re NOT there you can be sure your competition will be.

Heather has a great ability to translate quite technical marketing concepts in to terms that beginners and experienced users alike can relate to. I have seen her explain these concepts accepted time and time again, in training she has given at our Pay-Per-Click Summits, and I’m delighted to see that she has used this same relatable quality to get her points across in the book.

Search Engine Marketing can be a complicated subject, particularly for the beginning marketer, and this book does a great job in translating the technical jargon into actionable concepts that you can follow.

Heather describes it as a non-technical guide, but the basics are all covered in an easily readable way that allows a beginner to easily implement a successful Search Engine Marketing campaign. Readers will learn the basics of Pay-Per-Click and also how Pay-Per-Click and Organic Search work together to give you better search engine visibility for your business.

Advanced users might find it a bit basic, but that’s not who this book is designed for. This book is designed for those new to internet marketing who also know that Search Engine Marketing is an important web traffic driver for their business, need to get up to speed fast, and want someone to explain it sequentially.

There are more advanced books out there for those who need to delve into the nitty-gritty, but if you are just getting started, and are a non-technical person who wants easy to follow instructions, then this book is a must read.

You will learn:
•    A complete step-by-step approach to search engine marketing applicable to any product or service, in an easy-to-follow instructional style.
•    How to avoid common search marketing mistakes that cost big money.
•    How to set up campaigns in a smarter way to get better search engine visibility.
•    How search engines work, how search engine marketing works, and how to take advantage of both.
•    The online tools to use that make campaign management easier

By Heather Lutze, Founder Findability Group

As the recession continues, companies are scrambling for new and creative ways to continue marketing while keeping costs down.  That is why, as an Internet marketer, it is exciting to be able to offer Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising as a cost-effective alternative.

In traditional marketing, a business might put up a billboard on Main Avenue, expecting “x number” of people to see it, of that 5% to be in their target audience, and of that to get “x percentage” in leads.  In PPC advertising, businesses now have the option to only show their “billboard” (ad) to interested members of their target audience. It is a revolutionary new way to target, and can save businesses a large amount of capital, in addition to bringing them much higher-qualified leads.

Of course, in order to take advantage of the targeting potential in PPC, entrepreneurs must get in touch with how their target customer searches online.  More specifically, how their target customer searches online when they are ready to buy.

As the Internet continues to play a larger role in consumer’s lives, understanding the buying cycle online is critical to a successfully targeted PPC campaign. The importance of understanding the buying cycle is realizing that a “customer gathering data” and a “customer ready to buy” type in very different search strings.

For example, a person gathering basic information might search “TV” whereas a person serious about making a purchase would type something such as “Plasma, 32 inch televisions in Denver with free delivery.” In this example, the second consumer is a more qualified (and typically much cheaper) click to pay for. For most businesses, you must make a decision of where in the customer’s search process you believe they are ready to buy. Honestly, determining this ideal point in an internet search is the real art behind Internet marketing and PPC targeting. Fortunately, if you don’t have the budget to hire a PPC firm, there are a few tools available to help you get in touch with your ideal keywords:

Tool #1 : Word Tracker (www.wordtracker.com ) – Owned by a private company, Word Tracker generates keyword suggestions based on search volume. In addition, Word Tracker determines how many competing sites are using those keywords and can help businesses take advantage of untapped market niches.

Pros: Generates keywords suggestions and gives strategic recommendations of easy to penetrate online markets.
Cons: Paid service ($59/month).

Tool #2: Keyword Discovery (www.keyworddiscovery.com) – Operated by Trellian, Keyword Discovery also generates keyword suggestions based on search volume. However, Keyword Discovery also offers spelling mistake research, seasonal search trends and keyword density analysis, to help PPC advertisers to really hone in on creating a campaign which maximizes results.

Pros: Generates a very comprehensive list of keyword suggestions, including spelling and seasonal keywords.
Cons: Paid service ($69.95/month).

Tool #3: Google Wonder Wheel (under “show options” when you do a Google search) – If you are new to keyword research and a bit intimated by getting back lists of data in tools like Word Tracker or Keyword Discovery, the Wonder Wheel is a fantastic starting point. Launched in May of this year, the wheel helps advertisers understand the organization of how users search for their product. In addition, the wheel is much easier to grasp, as it uses an easy to read org-chart interface.

Pros: Free, easy to use and great for beginners.
Cons: Strips out a lot of data in order to maintain usability. The Wheel does not include search volume, competitive analysis, or more than a handful of keyword recommendations per “wheel.”

Tool # 4: SpyFu (www.spyfu.com) – Curious how much you are going to pay for each click you receive? It is important to build your keyword list with your budget in mind.  Fortunately, SpyFu offers free analysis on the bid range for keywords. In addition, SpyFu gives great competitive analysis on how many advertisers are competing for that keyword and the ad text they are using.

Pros: Free and gives a lot of great information in just one page.
Cons: The free version only offers limited information (typically only on keywords up to two words long).

Your ultimate goal is to connect with your target customer online and to make sure your paid ads are findable at the best point in that user’s search. Remember, even your ideal target searcher can’t become a customer unless they find you.

***********************************
Heather Lutze is the author of the newly released book, “The Findability Formula: The Simple and Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing” (Wiley and Sons). As a nationally recognized speaker and author, she has spent the last 10 years as CEO of Findability Group – a Search Engine Marketing firm that works with companies to attain maximum Internet exposure. Heather is also a lead speaker for Pay Per Click Summit, and previously spent two years speaking for Yahoo! Search Marketing. For more information, visit www.FindabilityGroup.com

The devil is truly in the details for paid search managers. I hope that this article will help you attend to more of the details in your accounts – like better ad text writing, stronger negative keywords and better bidding management. The bottom-line is that if you are not spending a tremendous amount of time on large account management changes, you will have more time to attend to those all important details that can make the difference between PPC success and failure.

AdWords Editor 7.0
AdWords Editor is Google’s free, downloadable campaign management application. Download your AdWords account to your computer, make your changes, and then upload your revised campaigns.

Tool Description and Functionality:
This indispensable tool should be an integral part of your pay per click management arsenal. With account management features no account manager should be without for day-to-day maintenance for all your pay per click campaigns. The old way of managing large campaign templates are gone and now AdWords Editor has given us a way to not only easily manage your Google AdWords campaigns but also to export entire campaigns into a format that can then be converted to YSM and MSN campaigns quickly and easily.

Tool Review:
• Web Site: http://www.google.com/adwordseditor/
• Rating:  ****
• Benefits and features include the ability to:
- Navigate your account quickly and easily
- Make bulk changes to keywords and ad text
- Work offline, then upload your changes
- Copy and paste keywords and ad text
- Circulate proposed changes and get feedback
Cost: Free

AdWords Editor is without a doubt the best FREE tool on the market. Use this tool to do all you Google account edits locally.

Release Notes:
After you install AdWords Editor, you’ll be notified automatically whenever a new version is released. (You can determine which version you have by going to the Help Menu > About AdWords Editor.) The release notes cover what’s new and what’s been fixed in each release.

AdWords Editor Features and Reviews:

AdWords Editor’s “Top 10 Favorites”
Have you wondered how to make the most of AdWords Editor? Or, if you haven’t used the desktop application, are you interested in learning about its most popular features?

Annie Hsu from the AdWords Editor team spoke with users and compiled a list of the top ten reasons they love this campaign management application:

10. Find duplicate keywords in your account with just two clicks of your mouse.

9. Copy or cut and paste between ad groups, campaigns, or even across accounts.

8. Make bulk changes to destination URLs using the Add/Update Multiple tools or Advanced URL Changes.

7. If you need to edit your keywords or ads in a spreadsheet, copy the items to edit from the data view and paste them into a spreadsheet. Make your changes, and then paste the contents of the spreadsheet directly into the appropriate Add/Update Multiple tool.

6. Undelete and activate previously deleted text ads.

5. Search your account quickly. Perform simple word searches, or do an Advanced Search to find items that meet the multiple criteria that you specify.

4. Easily find and edit bids, destination URLs, and text for ads, keywords, or sites.

3. Submit multiple exception requests at once.

2. Automatically organize your keywords into ad groups based on common themes.

1. Save a snapshot of your account for archiving or for sharing. Later, you can import the archive file to restore your prior account settings.

Campaign Manager Review:
Best features of the AdWords Editor from the perspective of Senior PPC Account Manager follow. Katie Bivens has more than three years experience managing dozens of accounts with Google, YSM and MSN on a daily basis.

Here is what Katie likes best about AdWords Editor:
• Faster to use then working inside AdWords online
• Ability to export campaigns from Editor into an Excel document for importing into Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN
• Allows for the manual manipulation of Excel templates for all engines
• Easy bulk updates that would normally take hours in Excel.  Also includes fast bid changes
• Editor ad text counter tracks characters and turns color when there is an overage in character length

*************
Heather F. Lutze is owner of the Findability Group (formerly Lutze Consulting LLC).  She is a nationally recognized Internet marketing speaker, trainer, and consultant in search engine placement, cost per click models, natural search, and ad campaign tracking.   Her book The Findability Formula: The Easy-To-Follow, Non-Technical Guide to Search Marketing was published in January 2009.

In the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) content has always been considered king.  But is it in Pay Per Click (PPC)? 

Content is in fact very important in PPC, but other things are equally important.  Identifying these can be the key to running a successful campaign, or running a really successful PPC campaign.

What I want to do here is to give you a few tips and tricks we commonly use to find the gaps in most PPC campaigns.

All of the search engines look at conversions to determine the quality of ads and landing pages. They also use a version of their organic ranking algorithm to ‘grade’ the various elements of your campaign – which directly influences your placement and price. So things like the age of a page and the back links to that page are just as important in natural search results as they are in paid search results.

In many markets the big guys dominate and run up the cost of this valuable traffic to a level that most everyone else cannot monetize. So how can you get to the top spots? After all, being in the top three paid results on Google carries certain privileges like syndication across other networks. AOL, for instance, converts twice as much as every other network that uses Google’s top PPC ads in their search results. These are merged into their organic results just like they are on Google.

Now assuming that you are familiar with techniques like day parting, site placement and keyword weighting, what I’d like to show you is how to implement more off-campaign techniques to improve your conversions.

First off, most of the larger bidders (corporate types) employ PPC companies or professionals. Coming from this scenario first-hand and managing millions in PPC budgets I can say that the majority of these people test and create landing pages. Whilst this is a great idea, the fact that they create new pages is a problem. As I mentioned above, the PPC algorithm is a chunk of the organic algorithm, so you should use existing pages and change the content to include CTA’s or call to action elements. Match back link anchor text to the keywords that your PPC uses.

The next tip is to target ‘break out’ terms. These are terms that have drawn new attention. We use three techniques for this:  Google Alerts, Google Insights and DomainTools.com.

Google Alerts allow you to tell Google that any time it finds a particular term on a website, news article or other source that you want an email sent or an RSS feed updated. This monitors anything to do with your targeted term and can provide many longtail terms that you can target.  Be one of the few that are actually targeting these terms and your bids are cheap and your click through is high. By the time everyone else comes around, you already have the best history and you stay at the top of the results for less than anyone else pays.

The next tip is to get an upgraded account through DomainTools.com. The cost is only a few dollars per month depending on your settings. For example, if we are primarily targeting the gaming market, we monitor new domains for new operators springing up in this arena. DomainTools will let you know newly registered, domain transfers or just about any change that happens.

Upon receipt of this daily report we decide whether to add the domain, the keywords or both. We may even create a completely new adgroup. How many new start-up’s have you seen in the last six months for bingo websites spending mass amounts of money on off-line advertising? (Since trademark infringement has become so loosely regulated or even allowed, this is useful information.)

The third tool that we use for exploiting breakout terms is Google Insights. You may be familiar with Google Trends? Well this is a new and improved version that gives great information. Google Insights allows you to nail-down recent trends much better than Google Trends.

Besides giving regional search levels, top searches, and a host of other features and filters, it gives you Rising Searches – which we call Breakout terms. You may add this to your iGoogle dashboard and see every day if anything has changed or a newcomer is breaking out in your market. The key to this technique is to find the hot keywords and target them quickly. The various paid engines have loosened their grip on trademark infringement so look into it carefully and find out what you can and can’t get away with.

In closing I’ll say that the PPC market is a competitive market, but with a little ‘outside-the-box’ thinking, you can do very well.

******
Gary R. Beal has been in the Search Engine Optimization field for 12 years. He attended Ohio State University in the US and holds a Masters Degree in Biometrics and Mathematical Statistics. Gary is currently the MD of Vanguard SEO based in Leeds. He has been instrumental in the development of many SEO and PPC tools as an analyst and consultant. Gary specializes in Search, Pay Per Click, Affiliate Management and Email Marketing and he has worked for many years in lead aggregation for highly competitive industries such as Online Gaming, Banking and Finance, Insurance, Travel and Investments, and primarily specializes in SEO for the gaming industry. You can contact Gary at Gary@VanguardSEO.com .