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

Before targeting a new keyword vertical, it’s a good idea to evaluate the competitiveness of the market. This will give you a sense of how difficult it will be to rank for that term in organic search, and/or how costly it will be to bid on that term in your PPC campaigns.

This is done by analyzing keyword competition. By estimating how much time and effort it may take to achieve top rankings for particular keywords or search terms, search marketers can better gauge where to spend their time. So how do you judge keyword competition? What are the factors involved in competitive keyword analysis?

Here are five tips on evaluating keyword competition to get you started.

1. Check the age of competitive domains

One indication of how difficult it might be to rank highly for a keyword phrase is the age of the domains of sites that are already ranking at the top of the SERPs. WHOIS is a tool that allows you to look up domain registration info, so you can see how long the top 5 or 10 sites that rank for your chosen keyword have been around. Older domains tend to have a much longer tail of inbound links, and it can be difficult to compete with trusted domains that have been around for many years.

2. Use Google search operators

The search operators “allintitle” and “inanchor” can provide a good indication of how many pages are already being optimized for a particular search query. Google allintitle:”keyword” to find pages with the keyword in the title tag and inanchor:”keyword” to find incoming links that use the keyword in the anchor text. The more pages these searches return, the more competitive the keyword.

3. Check the top results for home pages

Are the results in the top 10 mostly home pages or deeper pages? For example, for a keyword like “running shoes” you might see mostly home pages on the first SERP (such as Nike’s and Reebok’s home pages), whereas for a keyword like “how to write a wedding toast” you might see deeper pages, forum threads, and blog posts. If the top results are mostly home pages, you’re probably looking at a very competitive keyword.

4. Run it through a keyword suggestion tool

Do a search on your keyword in a tool like WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool.

In general, the more keyword suggestions, variations, and related results the tool returns, the more competitive the keyword. The relative frequency, monthly search volume and competition columns in our tool provide further signals of the keyword’s competition (the latter two are only available in the paid version of the tool).

5. Gauge advertising interest

By looking at the sponsored ads for a given keyword, you can get a sense of the competition. If the advertising space is full on the first page of the SERPs and extends past the first page, and if the ads aren’t based on broad match (in other words, the ads are linked to targeted domains, not general ones like Target and Amazon), this is a strong indication of a competitive keyword.

These are some tips to give you an idea of where you stand when it comes to tackling a new keyword space. There are also plenty of tools devoted specifically to keyword research and analysis, some free and some paid. Competitive tools can make a nice complement to straight-up keyword suggestion tools. Give them a shot!

About the Author
Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream Inc., a provider of PPC management software and services as well as a new Keyword Research Suite. Elisa is a frequent contributor to the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog and you can follow he

I’m a go getter. I love setting and reaching goals and always have a couple projects that are in the works. But every now and then I’ll sit down on the couch and ask myself, “What should I do with my time?” and nothing comes to mind. For the life of me I can’t think of any of the dozens of goals or projects that I usually have spinning through my head! Have you ever had this happen with a pay per click account? Have you sat down and looked at your campaigns and thought, “What should I do today?” and had nothing come to mind?

So what can you do to avoid that glazed over, analysis paralysis look? Focus on keyword research by category. Perhaps that sounds different than any research you’ve done before. I’ve compiled a list of categories that you may or may not be using in your campaign. If you ever are at a loss for more keywords review this list and see what else you can add:

• Industry Keywords- these keywords exactly describe what the company does. Ask someone what they do and these are the words they will use.
• Predicament Keywords- describes an issue or problem someone is having. Finding these words takes a little more effort. Try putting yourself in your customers shoes and think about what kind of problem they may be having.
• Competition Keywords- competitor’s names or URLs of competitors. You may step on some toes here but Google does allow for advertising on trademarked terms.
• Navigational- searches done in a www or .com format. PPC Blog did a great post on navigational keywords. Surprisingly a lot of people type website addresses in the search bar rather than the address bars. You may be shocked to see how much traffic comes this way.
• Typos- take any of the above keywords and misspell them! You could come up with endless variations of typos but we’ve found that misspellings come up more often in most cases.
• Technical Keywords- describes features of products or services. Many searchers don’t know exactly what brand or product they are looking for, so the search for things they do know. If your product or service has a unique attribute add it as a search term and see how it does.

With personal goals it’s always good to review them and remind yourself what you are shooting for. The same goes for your PPC campaigns. As you are reviewing your accounts keep in mind these keyword categories and see where you might be able to expand your current keyword list. You may find yourself with more keywords and organizing to do in a day than you have time for!

Image via Atenga.com

**************************************

Luke Alley is a PPC account manager and owner at www.GetFoundFirst.com, based out of Rexburg, Idaho. He is an up and coming search engine marketer and loves working in the search marketing industry. You can find him on Twitter at @lukealley.

Think about the hot-button keywords for online businesses. Many will say “need traffic”. Others say “more leads”, “improve rankings” or “need new website.” I say conversions, i.e. the result that is recorded after the visitor performs an event and actions preceding that. This is what smart marketers work on.

Recently, I spoke to the owner of an online health-care business. He needed to ‘improve’ his website with a new look. After a brief discussion, he shifted his thinking. He didn’t need a prettier site, but rather – to focus on tracking, measuring and tuning the traffic, conversion and funnel experience that the visitor had with his website.

Your website – a performance machine.

To build a better performing website – you must build trust, authority – both in the users and search engines’ eyes. And, it helps if you create compelling, actionable pages that convert.

However, this article is not about detailed conversion strategies, per se. It’s about building website content with which users engage. And, it is about creating an experience for the visitor that compels action, referrals and admiration (fans) for your business.

I have used these strategies to more than triple traffic in a short period of time using content marketing and SEO friendly copy. The bounce rate moved from approx. 90% to about 22% in the same period, as well as doubling the lead count, and increasing time on site to an average of 9 minutes.

Quality content – how to create it.

What is the word that you hear most often at SEO conferences? Answer: Links. It makes sense, since that’s at the heart of search engine’s ranking algorithm, and in specific, Google. It is the power of “votes” for your website (pages, actually) from others across the Internet. You get the benefit (depending on the link attribution) of ‘link juice’, overall visibility and, if done right – more web traffic.

To develop quality content, several criterions exist. One important aspect is about matching your content to your audience.

You can do this by collecting information for topics from:

• Keyword research (Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker.com, Keyworddiscovery.com)
• Competitive research (Search engines, spyfu.com, semrush.com)
• Links research (OpensiteExplorer.org)
• Popularity research (Google trends, digg.com, amazon.com, shopping.com, search.twitter.com)

Once you have data from this research, you’ll be able to build the articles and a content calendar for your website. You’ll have a never ending stream of ideas from which to build. You can even outsource this research if you don’t have time. Check http://www.elance.com/ to start. (Footnote: I recommend using a blog – WordPress – to facilitate the organization and output of this new, steady content. Soon, I’m launching a new search-engine friendly WordPress system with built in content marketing solutions. Feel free to check http://www.simplewebsitepress.com/ for more information).

Visitors and links attraction.

Now that you have your content factory constructed, users should find you as you deploy and get a few links. However, you must expand your strategy to capture a broader net. These next steps will help your content get wings, and will provide much needed links for the authority building.

While some would say, start with a PPC campaign, find out what works first – and then apply wider strategies later, I say you can expand using social media with very little effort and cost too. Reaching out to other bloggers in your space will be important, don’t forget that. Here’s what to do:

Step 1: Convert your text into video format. Upload to Youtube. Use Tubemogul for wider syndication. Use keywords in Titles, URLs early in descriptions, add full text there also.

Step 2: Build an audio version. Audacity.com is free to record if you do it yourself. Or, use transcription services (also elance.com). I hear good things about castingwords.com. Distribute to podcasting / voice directories. Try itunes.com.

Step 3: Create a list of places to “tweet” and distribute the (links) multiple formats of content into the social media sphere – start with Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin. (Footnote: don’t spam, join the social communities, and become a listener first). Include rich media into press releases. Try a social media release with prweb.com.

These tactics work, and Google loves multi-media and video. It’s easier to get listed in organic (universal search) results with video.

Develop a process for yourself, and keep doing it consistently. I spend most of my time in research and RSS feeds, and content is built in 10-20 minutes on average.

Provide something of immediate value, offer downloads and give products (when you can) away for free. Don’t forget to build out a great relationship via your follow-up email marketing (did you get their name & email?). Learn their behaviors from that list over time. Send information they care about, and drive them back to your money site.

Let us know how you are creating an experience to compel visitor actions, referrals and admiration (fans) for your business. Feel free to comment!

****************
Jon Rognerud is the SEO columnist, blogger at Entrepreneur Magazine, author of the “Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization” (Entrepreneur Press/McGraw-Hill) and writes on his own blog at http://www.jonrognerud.com. Visit now to get more cool information on internet marketing, SEO, PPC, Social Media, content, traffic, lead strategies – and learning more about the human challenges of being an Entrepreneur. You are not alone.

by Jon Rognerud, Entrepreneur.com

Why do you have a hard time getting (converting) web traffic when it’s *this* easy?

The lifeblood of all businesses online is traffic. I mean – targeted traffic that you can begin to test for conversions.

#1: Keyword Research
Keyword research should be #1 on your list – always. Try tools like Google Keyword Tool, SEO Book Keyword Tool, Market Samurai (free trial). Get more ideas using the search based tool. If running PPC (you should), look at PPC data and keyword portfolio overall that is most closely aligned to your market need: write and optimize for those terms. The most competitive should be in focus, but the higher converting term is most often not the most highly trafficked term. Discover how they search the web and target your terms accordingly. (Informational, Transactional or Navigational)? “Armani black leather jackets for women” is better than “leather jackets,” for example. Use search engine optimization (SEO) to create a set of themed pages to match your findings.

#2: Social Media & Link building
Most know and agree that the Google algorithm relies heavily on links for ranking, especially in competitive markets. Most of these tactics are low cost entry points. Offering quality, and something of value will create link opportunities by default, and should always be your goal. Spend more time thinking about this and submit to quality properties than the useless “300 directories for $49.99” approach.
a. Article Marketing - 400-600 words with real value. Think about the users and webmasters (who    may use the information) first. Make sure to include at least 2 links in the resources box. One could be the actual company name, another, an anchor text keyword. Think users, and then search engines. Make sure to submit to top article directories within your category and sub-category. You can use Yahoo directory and DMOZ to get a sense for activity and relevancy in your marketplace. Use EzineArticles to start.
b. Answering questions - Providing value to your community is always a good thing. See the top answer search engines and get started. I have used Yahoo Answers and Yedda, they are all pretty easy to use. Remember to not “pitch” your own business. Provide real, useful answers. Of course, you’ll get a link back to your site, but the “value” is more important long term. If one of the answers (example Yahoo) appears high and gets you more traffic, you can target additional ads on that page too. (Sponsored Results). If you cannot spend the time yourself, an expert author or an outsourced model works well for an hour a week to work on this.
c. Activate the social communities and start sharing your (quality) content
        a. Start with one of two at first. Look at what your competition might be doing. Then, check – Digg, Reddit, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Youtube, Technorati, Stumbleupon. But – don’t forget to look at: Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Zimbio.com, Scribd.com, Docstoc.com, Slideshare.net, eHow & Wetpaint.com. For competitive terms you can get to first page ranking using these trusted web properties. It certainly can build your brand and company reputation much quicker. All this for free (outside of your time, of course)! Use socialmarker.com to bookmark your best content across multiple accounts easy and fast. However, do not spam – and try to keep the various content channels unique, not just duplicate content.
        b. Distribute your videos via tubemogul.com, and for a paid fee, try trafficgeyser.com.
        c. Use budurl.com to track your clicks and visitors from Twitter, and use ping.fm to distribute your “tweets” across multiple social platforms – in seconds! Remember! Creating your trust and authority using relevant link building is a “never-ending” task for you.

d. Blog Strategies
      a. A little more advanced topic, but creating PR or Traffic pumper sites with (WordPress) blogs that are relevant to your business, can work very well. Create newsworthy sites and promote them. Use an inter-linking strategy to feed traffic and PR juice to the destination sites of more “core” (money) sites that you own.
e. Directories
      a. Get Yahoo (paid), DMOZ (free) listings established. Look at goguides, gimpsy, skaffe and botw.org as well (not free). This strategy will yield more link/authority juice than 100’s of low quality directories.

#3: SEO
SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of crafting keyword rich copy and building search friendly websites to appear high in the rankings in the natural search results pages. Consider the power of blended search in all your doings where video, news, podcasts, images, maps all display into one “Universal Search,” as Google calls it.
     a. TAGS: TITLE, DESCRIPTION, H1, ALTs – Make sure to describe your page using keywords in these tags.
     b. LOCAL SEO: If you are a local business, make sure you get your listings into the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing/Microsoft). You can use getlisted.org to check your listings, and ease the process of submission. Do NOT spam by faking multiple listings and phone numbers. See Google Local for more details, and the steps you can take. Make sure to read David Mihms Local ranking success factors.
    c. Google Webmaster Tools: Make sure to set up a free account here. Look at the diagnostics, links, what Googlebot sees, and terms that Google qualifies. Do they match your major topics and keywords? Tune accordingly and continue to build links, as mentioned.
    d. Analytics: Google Analytics, Getclicky (free/paid) – to make sure each page is getting the right keywords and traffic that you had planned for each topic and subtopic.

#4: Plan to Fail? Or…
…fail to plan. Be clear on your strategic plan for all online endeavors. Make sure you have short and long term goals in mind. A SWOT plan can really help you. Look at the competition using (free/paid) SpyFu.com, Compete.com and SEMrush.com tools. If you want a quick overview of your competition that includes social popularity and traffic measures, try quarkbase.com. However, it’s important not to over-obsess on the competition. And, think about conversions as your end goal, not rankings.

Summary
Using the above tactics – along with tracking your competition’s URL and keywords in your space via Google alerts (www.google.com/alerts) will get you ahead of your competition and the search engines. 
 
***************************************** 
Jon Rognerud is Entrepreneur.com’s SEO columnist, an SEO consultant and the author of The Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization, in bookstores now. He has more than 20 years experience building software and marketing projects, including creating content and application solutions at Yahoo!/Overture. His SEO company provides search marketing solutions for small to midsize businesses.

by Kim Toomey, Anvil Media, Inc.

Social Media is More than a High School Reunion.

We all know we should be engaged with social media as companies try to communicate with customers and monitor what’s being said. Think of social media as bringing word of mouth marketing into a visible medium.  Never before have businesses had real time access to what is being said about their products and services, and all of this content is perfect for parsing out keywords to use in other search engine marketing (SEM) activities based on what your customers think of your brand.

People are going to search for the terms that they know and use when it comes to your company, so make sure you’re optimizing your site with those phrases.

Keyword research has never been a science, but most would agree that the wider variety of tools you can initially brainstorm with will result in a more targeted and successful keyword list. Google’s Keyword Tool, WordTracker and Keyword discovery have been some of the heavy hitters in the past. But with more social media sites popping up with elaborate search features, the flood gates have opened.

Use the Right Tools: There are plenty of tools out there to help you find conversations that are going to be beneficial to your research.

• TwitterSearch is Twitter’s own search engine, and with great advanced search options, is a great starting place. You can look for an exact phrase (your brand) in a certain location with a positive tone, and voila! You can see what your customer’s are saying about your brand.
• Collecta is a new real-time search engine that scours social media sites as well as blogs, news and Flickr for your search term.  You can filter your results if you don’t want to see pictures or news articles for example. Don’t expect these new breeds of search engines to take over the search marketplace anytime soon, but they can provide more helpful results than Google, Yahoo or Bing.

Sort through the Clutter: Once you begin searching for conversations about your company, what exactly is it that you’re looking for? Frequent misspellings are a good place to start. Do you have a store front located in a city that’s not easy to spell? How about variations of your brand name? Do your customers say Dr. Martens or Doc Martens? 

While you may not want to use these variations on your website for search engine optimization (SEO), you will want to use them for Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. 

• Social media conversations are also great ways to determine what your customer base thinks your most popular product is. If you have a site with many different offerings this is great information to have so you can make an informed decision about what content belongs on your homepage.
• Don’t forget to consider seasonality and that the needs/wants of your customer will change, so make it a point to revise this at least every quarter.
• Lastly, look for the adjectives that are being used when describing your company or product. Do you have a “cozy restaurant,” “rugged backpack” or “time-saving software?” Chances are you’re already aware of some of these descriptors, but it is always important to check your perception of what you are offering with your customer’s perception.  Use these descriptions in all the usual places where you would put SEO effort on your site, because chances are that other people are looking for a “cozy restaurant” for dinner tonight.
• Beyond keyword research, this information can also be used in offline marketing materials when describing your company or products.

Keep up with the times
Now that you have some keyword ideas down, you should also verify your information against social media tools that pull top trending keywords. These are great resources for finding “now” keywords; topics that are mainstream right now. Twitter’s rising trends are also found in Twitter’s search tool, and show what topics are being most discussed in Twitter at that moment. TweetVolume is another Twitter tool that allows you to see how often a word appears in Twitter. You can enter up to five words at a time to compare traffic. This tool is particularly helpful if you’re trying to decide between variations or synonyms of a popular keyword phrase.

Facebook Lexicon is a similar tool that pulls top phrases being used on user’s walls. One of the more interesting aspects of Facebook’s tool is that it also provides demographic data for their keywords which may help you make a final decision on keywords based on your target audience. Select a keyword and Facebook will show you how many people are posting that word in their profile daily as well as the age and gender of these users (still in beta, so only a limited number of keywords are available for the demographic data). 

One last overlooked social media research tool is Delicious Tags. Delicious is a bookmarking service that has been around for quite a while and gets overlooked in the social media world because it’s not very flashy and exciting. Delicious has a “popular tags” list on the homepage. The great thing about Delicious keywords is that if you click on one, it gives you a list of related tags that are also popular. While Food is a popular tag, it also suggests recipes, cooking, health, restaurants and travel as related keywords.

There is no right or wrong way to build a keyword list for your website. As the Internet continues to evolve, be on the lookout for new ways to discover what is being said and searched for online. I recommend using social media keyword research to supplement traditional methods and tools for now. What your customers are saying about your company is important on many levels; thanks to the internet and social media all of their comments are now traceable and easily accessible.

************************************
Kim Toomey works for the Portland-based SEM agency Anvil Media, Inc. She has expertise in all aspects of search engine marketing and specializes in social media strategies. Toomey has been responsible for the development and execution of dozens of search and social marketing campaigns during her time at Anvil.