The Maine SEO Blog

Keyword research Notes from Keyword Research & Copywriting SMX East 2011 – Christine Churchill, President KeyRelevance Follow her at @keyrelevance

Keywords are important because people still type in phrases and terms to find things online.

Everyone wants to be #1 on Google, and it takes a lot of know how, keywords, links, social, etc. You can increase conversions by speaking the customer’s language. By using the keywords they are using you are speaking like your customers, so they feel like you get them. Also, try to find overlooked or new keywords and take advantage of longer tail phrases.

Below you will find notes from SMX East’s Keyword Presentation, it will cover where marketers get their keywords, how the cycle of finding your keywords works, important tools and how to use these for ideas on content creation and copywriting.

Where marketers Get Keywords:

• Site log files for converting keywords – Google Analytics
• Google Analytics for frequent words
• Internal site search
• Competitor sites
• Competitive intelligence tools
• Exploring long search phrases
• Social semantic mining

Cycle of keyword research

1. Brainstorming and discovery
2. Keyword expansion
3. Keyword evaluation

Brainstorm and Discovery phase:

• Brainstorming – no judging words at this stage. Goal is to cast your net widely and generate broad list.
• Keyword lists from within company
• Review company website and print collateral
• Press releases
• Often too much insider jargon
• May or may not be customer’s lingo
• Customers’ words are disconnected from marketing department, change keywords and traffic rises, if you are using the words your audience is using.

Other good places to look at what language your target audience is using:

• Conduct customer interviews
• Customer surveys and focus groups
• Talk to support of sales personnel who talk directly to customers
• Search twitter and blogs and social media
• Review discussion forums, user generated talk
• Online magazines or print
• Company and product reviews
• Online thesaurus

Competitors:

• Review their website and collateral for keywords
• Look at words they are buying in PPC
• What terms are they targeting in SEO?
• Can give you competitive insights and ideas on overlooked terms

Analytics:

• Captures “exact phrase” that searcher entered
• Provide rich source of keyword data, but only show what’s currently working
• Could reveal “untapped” keyword gems

Site search box

• Reveals keywords and expressions that visitors are actually using/wanting
• Gives insight into relative popularity
• Can follow visitors path and see if site converts
• Make sure you collect all info
• Can tie your site search into your analytics to see what people are searching for
• Can get inside mind of consumer when they are coming to your website

Why Use Tools for Keyword Research?

• Save $ / time
• Provide insight outside of your site
• Identifies keyword opportunities you might miss
• Offers popularity #s you can’t get from your own analytics
• Moves you beyond keyword assumptions
• Allows you to compare phrases

Free Tools:

• Google keyword tool
• Webmaster tools
• Insights
• Trends
• Content targeting
• Adcenter labs tools
• Microsofrt ascenter add in for excel

Paid Tools:

• Wordtracker
• Trellian
• Hitwise
• Wordstream
• Nichbot
• Comscore
• spyFU

Why pay? It’s usually a suite and you get a lot more then just a list of keywords. Looking at Different Tools: Google Keyword Tool

• Free and easy
• Provides keyword volume data from Google
• Finds synonyms
• Can export to excel
• You can log in to your Google account for more keywords and options including local trends
• If you log in you are going to get more keyword choices, more columns, more options
• Select “exact match” or “phrase match” when doing SEO research, broad makes large jumps in lateral thinking, comes up with some terms that aren’t as great
• Advanced options, allows you to choose country, language, mobile research (just added back in Dec) you will get diff numbers for laptops vs mobile devices
• Recently added column is Google Search Network – added as option but have to be logged in to see it, it’s goole and it’s partner sites, not just Google, so pulls in more data, #’s tend to be higher
• Can use words, phrase, url (competitor, page, etc)

Google Trends

•  Monitors trends
• Allows you to compare popular phrases – ex. Myspace and Facebook, you could use plural and reg form of a keyword and see what’s more popular
• Also can plug in website and look at stats
• Also visited and also searched for sections tell you that searchers that went to this website, also went to these other sites
• Hot trends – good for helping you come up with blog posts, articles, find what’s hot that day

Google Insights

• Trends on steroids
• Allows you to see and monitor trends, but allows you to see keywords related to the one you are looking at
• Last few years lots of changes in keywords because economy affects what people are saying and searching for
• Key relevance – can find that in states terms are more popular than in another – can be better to check out for regional or local search stuff
• Rising searches – very valuable for up and coming phrases, break out means there has been like a 500% increase, so great terms to use, since new and growing – a lot of them aren’t quite as competitive
• Monitors seasonality – this is good for mapping out key phrases for over the month, so great for blog posts, articles etc.

Google Contextual targeting tool

• Free tool
• Builds themed keyword lists
• Great for keyword expansion and lateral thinking
• Provides ideas for organizing and structuring your keyword lists
• Basically it’s textual wonder wheel – (wonder wheel cancelled in July, don’t know if it’s coming back)
• If you were a wonder wheel fan it’s the tool for you

Keyword Discovery

• Multiple databases
• Global, historical global, international, news, shoping, eBay
• Provides seasonal data and trends
• Includes suite of tools – misspellings, keyword density tool (uses as a double check, to see where different phrases were used on the site)

Wordtracker

• Data pulled from meta search engines
• Eliminates most skewing issues caused by bots
• Differentiates between singular and plural
• Offer free tool for trial
• Questions tool so you can see what’s being asked – create blog posts or articles

Wordstream

• Keyword tool, PPC management., Pay Per Click checker gives you feedback on your campaigns

Google Instant

• Shows results as you type, great suggestions for phrases and titles for blog posts and content

Soovle.com

• Kind of like Google instant
• Pulls keywords suggestions from several different sites and puts them in one place
• Helpful to see if you missed things during brainstorm

Ubersuggest

• Start typing in phrase and it will go through the alphabet, lists them all for you, keyword ideas etc.

Twitter Search

• Trends – gives you pulse of what’s on web and what’s hot
• Look through and do searches to find good blog post and content ideas
• Great for knowing in real time what’s going on
• Great for monitoring what others are saying about your products/services, which helps you find customer language

YouTube

• YouTube search suggests keywords, pulls from YT searches and titles
• Your results will be different than Google, as people use different words and phrases to search video
• Also look at promoted videos to see keywords suggested and used

Google Sets

• Google will come up with a couple sets to help with your list, and comes up with longer lists

AdCenter Labs Tools

• Search Funnels – gives insight into mind of the user, shows searches before and after a term you put it

Yahoo

• Good for trending info, their trending is going to be different than Google, usually heavier on the entertainment side
• Suggestion box is pretty good as well, some of their suggestions are actually embedded in the phrase rather than just at the beginning

Quintura

• Allows you to navigate by clouds
• The larger, bold words are the most popular
• good for brainstorming and broadening keyword buckets

Ask

• They will show you related searches, but will also do related questions, invaluable for coming up with content ideas for what’s fresh new and on top of peoples minds

Microsofts’ ad intelligence

• Excel plugin
• Provides related keywords
• Fast for building out lists
• Extracts keywords for URL
• Gives insights on seasonal “spiky” keywords
• Shows geographic and demographic info on keywords

Keyword Expansion Phase:Target variations of your keywords

• Comparison – best, compare, reviews
• Price – cheap, discount
• product descriptor – green, plus size, ;unique
• intended use – gift for grandmother, baptism
• product
• location
• action
• season
• abbreviations
• brand/vendor/manufacturer

Keyword “buckets”

• Group related keywords into lists of related terms
• Do a series of keyword research projects on a site, not one (can do one search for every area of a website, that are more specific) do a different series of research for each site – break it into pieces
• Develop a keyword matrix – url, main phrases,

Keyword permutationsTools for permutations – aaron wall, excel, concatenate tool

• Relevancy to site (meaning choosing the kw that best describes what the site offers, traffic alone isn’t the goal, you want targeted traffic)
• Keyword popularity (number of searches done in a period of time, popular phrases less relevant, more competitive, cars or homes ex, in most cases less popular phrases are better)
• Users intent (research vs purchase, stage in buying process, kw indicate where consumer is in the buying process) you want to match your content to satisfy the user’s intent when using the keyword – for instance review in the beginning, fast or quick in terms they want to find buy button, those landing pages that you tie with those keywords are going to be very important (80% of all searches on the web are non commercial)
• competition (who is raking for your keyword terms? Who has PPC ads? Search term parity – if you are trying to win something in SEO you have to do as much as the person that is currently ranking, how much are their bids, how optimized is the site, linkage info, anchor text etc., what keywords are optimized and where are they on page) Competitive tols – Hitwise, Comscore, SEOMOZ keyword tool difficulty, SEM Rush, performance – test keyword performance look at analytics

Content optimization:

• Think phrase not just single keyword, use matrix,
• Title tages best to optimize
• Title appears in first line of listing on SERP
• Spend extra time to create compelling titles that grab attention
• Include keywords
• Meta important bc snippit that gets ppl to click on your page, keywords and strong mrkting message – good description will get ppl to click on you even if you are lower on the page
• h tags
• Visible portion of page
• Al attribute
• Links and anchor text
• File names
• url

Images as content

• Optimize images by using kw description in file name, alt ext, caption etc.
• On page
• Anchor text huge
• Home page strongest, most targeted
• Internal page SEO – look at slides
• Talk about benefits not features – makes people more interested

3 Types of searchers:

1. navigational – type in your website
2. informational – enter questions
3. transactional – buying ones/subscribing ones, download

*note: no tool is 100% accurate, but it’s a good ballpark estimate Using all in title helps to see who is optimized for that particular subset

How many terms should you target a page? It’s subjective and need to look at competitors, and look at linkage data and where you are ranking. Look at your Page Rank, and it depends on that as well, long tails better, and then each page should have laser focus on one term. But, usually two or three phases max.

Does it matter where keywords are in page content? Yes. You want it early, prominent bold, header tag, linked, title, bulleted, links, etc. Sends signal to search engines that’s what the page is about.

The above is a very thorough list of tools and ways of finding keywords. Of course this can all seem a bit overwhelming, so I would recommend finding the tools that work best for you and sticking to 2 – 3 different sources.  Also, within most of the tools talked about above there are tips on how to use those for coming up with blog titles and content ideas. If you are ever having a hard time coming up with content these are great quick fixes to get the juices flowing.

What tools do you currently use or would you recommend? Are there any methods you are currently using that you don’t see mentioned above?  Share them with us in the comments

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Google Maps has an evolved algorithm

• Improved spam detection/reducation
• Increased numbers of information sources
• Has begun absorbing microformats/RDFa/Micro-data
• Shifted to include “PlaceRank”

Google Maps spam detection/reducation

• Hired more human staff reviewers to check data
• Reported doing phone verification from offshore
• Algortithmic “skepticism” – new listings need to have reinforcements from multiple authoritative sources (IYPs, data aggregators, local info sites, etc.)

PlaceRank

• Google introduced “PlaceRank” with Landmark icons (“Smart Maps”)
• PlaceRank is PageRank for places
• More information on PlaceRank

Relative Popularity – what can help you rank better on Google Maps

• Buzz
• Wikipedia
• Photos
• Videos

Businesses might have to focus on PR to promote area to drive popularity and improve business popularity

What are citations/references?

• Links to website
• Mentions of website domain in plain text
• Mentions of business name
• Mentions of business street address/place
• Mentions of business phone number

What else might produce citations?

• Tweets about a place
• Checkins and Facebook

What to do:

Clean up your profiles with something like UBL Citation and Auditing Tool

Chris Silver Smith, KeyRelevance

Tools for Local Search

Local tools to save time

• MyGeoPosition – Get latitude and logitude of any address
  • Tag videos, images, etc.
  • Easily creates fles
• GeoRSS – Cheat sheet for geo tagging RSS feeds
  • Official zip code lookup
  • USPS mailing address validation
• LocalMarketingSource.com – Geo term generator
  • Get a ton of geo terms
• Blumenthals – Raw list of Google categoreis for GLB categories
• Google Insights – term trends by locations and dates and regions
  • Which terms are trending
  • Relative search volume by location
  • See top related terms
• GetListed Local Search Ecosystem [PDF] – infographic of local search portals
• GetListed Primary Data Providers in Local Search – Infographic of data providers
• UBL.org – Business data submission tool
  • Scrub data
  • Get more listings
  • Affordable
• Localeze: Data submission tool
• GetListed.org – Discover where business is listed and claimed

Local tools for competitive analysis

• Location Citation Finder – find top places for citations
  • Uses user input
• LocalSearchToolKit.com – competitive analsis
  • Uncover and emulate common attributes
  • Citation scraper
  • Review scraper
  • Category scraper
• GetListed.org/default.aspx – industrial strength multi location data confusion tool (best for chains, multi-location businesses)
  • Checks listings on important local sites
  • Sales and reporting tool

Mary Bowling, seOverflow

Local Search, Today: Facebook Places & Google Instant

Facebook Local Business Pages

• Address/info optional
• Interact with Facebookers
• CS, Events
• Like button
• Embed web page
• Promote, ads

Facebook Place Pages

• Location/info required
• Lightweight Local Business Page
• User check in
• Claiming process
• Can merge with a Local Business Page

Google Places - SEO benefit via web citations

Facebook Places – touch.facebook.com is SEO void

Facebook Local Business Pages - 25-50% associated!

Smartphones – Facebook Places (ContextOptional, PlacePop, NearbyFriends, and more)

Targeting “location keywords” may become less relevant for local businesses. (Google automatically uses your location.)

• Google can triangulate your location from their street view
• IP address
• Logged into account

David Rodecker, LocalSplash.com

Call Advertising: Three Trends in Local Search

1. Advertisers are getting more sophisticated in how they track calls

• Establishing more granular ad groups
• Incorporating call mining to:
  • Reverse-engineer conversion data
  • Discover keyword “nuggets”
• Leveraging call recording to learn how ad copy impacts consumer intent
• Piloting IVR testing and targeting

2. The debate over tracking numbers in ad copy is getting more intense

• Fans think:
  • It adds legitimacy to the listing
  • Gives consumers another way to respond
  • Increases Search ROI
• Non-fans think:
  • It takes up too much space
  • It may depress quality score
  • Might create user dissonance

3. Mobile search provides an opportunity to reach a completely new audience

• Consumers are leveraging feature phones to become more efficient
• They are placing calls to businesses as a way to redeem dead time (when they wouldn’t have been able to in the past)
• Many calls happen instantly at need
• Consumers are increasingly likely to place a call in response to an ad

Brent Turner, Marchex, Inc.

What’s New with Local Search?

• Searchers now EXPECT Local Results…
• Engines are responding with relevant products
• and Advertisers are responding with budgets (1/$10 of local ad spend is online; in 3 years, it will be 1/$4)

The Holy Grail? Measureable return!

• Calls
• Leads
• Conversions

Sivan Metzger, KENSHOO

Google Maps is offering a free month trial of Tags. What are tags, you ask? Well, this is what flyte’s Google Maps profile looked like before adding tags:

And here is the profile after:

A tag is essentially a way to promote certain areas of your business. (Get an in-depth look at tags here.) You can choose to promote photos or videos of your business, your website, or coupons:

Then, keep track of your tags activity right in your Google Places dashboard. How many times did users show interest in your tag? How many expansions of the tag were there on the map? How many clicks where there on your tag link?

With a free 30-day trial, why wouldn’t you try tags out?!

Nicki Hicks
Tag, you’re it

For the past week or so, I’ve been writing about how to rank better in local search, specifically in Google Maps.

Here is the entire guide:

1. Submit to Google Local Business Center (Part 1)
2. Submit to Google Local Business Center (Part 2)
3. How to get Local Reviews
4. What to do when you get a negative local review
5. Measuring Local Analytics

Once you’ve completed the 5 steps, you’re not done. [I'm sorry.]

You’ll have to:

• Be on the look out for satisfied customers to review your business.
• Add new images and video.
• Update your local posts.
• Check your Dashboard for (the right) keywords.

Nicki Hicks
Go local

Last time we talked about dealing with negative reviews; today we’re going to finish this five-step series with Google Local Business measurement.

Last June, Google Local Business Center added a Dashboard and Analytics. To get started, log into your Local Business Account and click “View report”.

The Analytics aren’t as powerful as Google Analytics, but you do get some interesting data. Get a complete look at all of the Dashboard components here.

What you get from the Dashboard

Google’s gone social

I just noticed this new section in the Dashboard (perhaps inspired by Buzz?). You can now post a 160-character status update; not unlike Twitter or Facebook.

And posts go live pretty quickly…

Local posts would be a great way to advertise a sale, a blogpost, whatever you’re looking to promote!

Is your profile complete?

Google will let you know if your profile is complete. Do you have pictures and video uploaded? Are all of your categories included? Are your business hours live?

Keywords

Activity, impressions, and driving directions are interesting – and might be more important depending on what industry your company is in. But I think one of the most valuable pieces of information the Dashboard gives are the top search queries. While I wish they would provide the geographic identifier (is it Portland, Maine or Scarborough, Maine the person was searching for?), the keywords will give you a good idea of whether or not people are finding you using the right keywords.

If the search queries are different than what you’re looking to rank for, start by changing your categories around a bit. If that doesn’t help, then there’s a problem with how your web site is optimized.

And that does it! You’ve just done everything you can to rank better at Google Maps.

See the entire guide here.

Nicki Hicks
Measure, measure, measure

Last time we talked about getting local reviews; but what if they’re not always positive?

The fact of the matter is…everyone gets a bad review at one time or another. Something out of the ordinary happened, and something went horribly wrong. It happens to even the best of businesses.

So maybe you have a bad review or two under your belt. How you respond is what counts.

You have two choices.

1. Face it head on. Leave a comment right after the review and humbly apologize for their bad experience, then offer them a free night stay or a free product for their trouble. (And if they take you up on your offer, make it the best experience they’ve ever had.)
2. If you don’t feel comfortable responding publicly, a lot of review sites give you the option to contact the person directly.

One of three things could happen.

1. Worst case scenario, the person won’t respond and won’t remove the review. Think of the benefit though: you just publicly showed potential customers that your business isn’t about to let a bad experience happen.
2. The person might take you up on your offer, and then remove their negative review.
3. Or the best case scenario (and it has happened)? The customer replaces their negative review with a positive one, pointing out that a mistake was made and a bad experience had; but this organization did everything in their power to make it right.

Next time, we’ll talk about how to measure your success using Google Local Business Center.

See the entire guide here.

Nicki Hicks
Sometimes a negative is a positive

Photo by httpoldmaisonblogspotcom

Last time, we finished submitting locations to Google Local Business Center. Once you receive that precious little letter from Google, input the PIN number into your Local Business Center account…and you’re good to go!

Now what?

Some factors have changed in local ranking, some have not. The fact that more positive reviews help you rank better still certainly holds true today. Sure, you could just start writing reviews about your own business, but if we’ve learned anything, it’s Google is smart - so get ‘em from your customers.

How to get reviews

Different industries are going to have different barriers to acquiring local reviews. That said, there are a few different strategies – from the obvious, to a little more out of the box.

Ask

That’s simple enough, right? Think of some of your customers who had a great experience with you and contact them. Ask if they’d be kind enough to give you a review on Google Maps – or even their favorite review site. Hey, you’ll even give them one too!

Make it easy

I’m going to use a hotel as an example here, as this technique wouldn’t work for every organization. Start by setting up a computer specifically for reviews – in a hotel, perhaps at the check-in desk. Bookmark Google Maps, and after the customer checks out, ask if they’d take just a few moments to give you a review.

Or, perhaps your company already sends out monthly postcards or mailers to customers. Why not include a line at the bottom asking them to give you a review – just make sure you include the link!

Likewise, are you running an email campaign? Include a link in the bottom to your Google Maps listing, your Yelp profile, your Yellow Pages listing – whichever you want to improve. (Remember that Google Maps actually pulls reviews from a number of sites, not just their own.)

Post a sign

You’ve probably stepped into a local shop or restaurant and seen the Yelp stickers on the door. If that’s not an incentive to go to Yelp and leave a review – or at least check out what other people said – I don’t know what is.

Give them an incentive

Speaking of incentives, why not give customers a reason to help you out? Whether you offer a percentage or money off your product, free shipping, or free samples; it will be money well spent.

Obviously these tactics aim to get you positive reviews - but next time we’ll talk about what happens if you get an (eek!) bad review.

See the entire guide here.

Nicki Hicks
Local Reviewer

Photo by ropobby

Yesterday we started the submission process to Google Local Business Center. Today, we’ll finish up!

1. When are you open? Add your hours of operation.
2. How can I pay you? Add your payment options.
3. Add pictures. If nothing else, make sure your logo is uploaded.
   



4. Add video. Have a YouTube channel? Make sure that you include (up to 5) videos!
5. Any other information? Do you have free parking? Free WiFi? Let your customers know!
6. Click finish.

And you’re done! Choose whether you’d like to be contacted by phone (immediately) or by postcard (within a few weeks). You’ll have to input the code they give you either way.

That’s all for today. Tomorrow we’ll cover the next step of ranking better at Google Maps: local reviews.

See the entire guide here.

Nicki Hicks
Rank Locally

So you’ve decided submitting your location to Google Local Business Center would be a smart way to increase your visibility in local search. Couldn’t agree with you more.

Confused about where to start? Not to worry. Let’s walk through it, step by step.

1. Head over to Google Local Business Center. Make sure you have a Google account – that you want your business account to be tied to.
2. Click “Add New Business”.
3. Fill out as much as humanly possible:



4. Categories. In Google Local, you can choose up to 5 categories that describe your business. You’ll have choose at least one category, but I would suggest adding 2-3 categories available by Google, then 2-3 of your own:



5. Is your map marker in the right place? If not, fix it!

That’s it for now, boys and girls! Tomorrow we’ll finish the process of submitting your business!

See the entire guide here.

Nicki Hicks
You’re halfway there!

Over a year ago, I wrote about optimizing your website for local search. While all of those tactics are still important (and will still work), certain points have become more important than others.

So here it is. How to optimize for local in 2010…

1. Submit to local directories.

Submit to every one that you can get your hands on. And let me warn you…there are a lot. But take the time and do it, filling out as much information as you can. Here are the important ones I use:

• Google Maps (or Google Local Business Center)
• Yahoo Local
• Bing Local
• Best of the Web
• Superpages
• Localeze
• TripAdvisor (if it applies)
• Yelp (if it applies)
• Insider Pages
• Yellow Pages
• Kudzu

If you want a truly complete list, check out this post by Local SEO Guide.

1 ½. Update your local listings.

In order to truly leverage these listings, make sure you update them. Think of them as local profiles – a place where you can upload images, video, even coupons (similar to your Facebook fan page). Keep your profiles fresh – just like your website.

2. Gather reviews.

Even as things have changed in local search, the importance of local reviews haven’t. Long story short, the more positive local reviews you have, the higher you rank! So ask your clients and customers to give you a review.

Get a negative review? Not to worry; face it head on, and reply right on the thread with an apology and a promise to fix what went wrong. More often than not, they’ll remove the scathing review or write a positive follow-up!

3. Optimize those title tags.

This one’s pretty self explanatory: make sure your location is in your title tags.

4. Address & Phone Number

Your address and phone number should be on every page of the website. Not only is this helpful for customers, but also for search engines. The footer is a good (and subtle) place for your address and phone number.

5. Social Media

Nearly every social profile will have an area for location. Use that to your advantage for your business!

Not only will your social profiles rank well for queries for your business name and location, but the implications of real time social search could also play into effect in the future:

Using these tactics isn’t a sure fire way to get to the top of Google Maps, but it’s certainly a start.

Nicki Hicks
Go local