Niche Research
Your main task here will be to determine which niche(s) of your chosen topic have an active market base that you consider are worth pursuing. As a general rule, the more competitive a market is, the tighter your niche will need to be.
The basic idea is to collect and analyse macro-level data.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
If you want your pages to rank high for popular searches on Google, then you need to know what keywords people are searching for, how many of them are doing it and how much competition you’ll be up against for that term. But don’t stop there, to make SEO an effective strategy you’ll also need to categorise your keywords (find topic ’clusters’) and use them to develop an appropriate link structure for your site. You’ll also want to spend time considering keyword intent – just because a keyword is showing high traffic numbers, doesn’t mean you’ll want to target it on your site.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns
PPC campaigns focus on huge lists of long tail keywords with specific intent (usually looking for keywords people use when intending to make a purchase, although that varies with the goals of the campaign) and emphasis on negative keywords to rule out irrelevant matches. The more relevant the keyword is to the specific intent of the campaign goals, the more valuable that keyword becomes.
Identifying keyword trends across multiple social networks
There’s no need to limit keyword research to search engines any more - people can find your content in many ways and social media networks are every bit as important for many bloggers. Analysis is a little different here, depending on the social network you’re interested in, it could be more ‘topic’ based, rather than keyword specific, but your ultimate aim is to identify ways to categorise or present your content to give it the best chance of becoming popular.
Competitor/Peer keyword analysis
It’s always good to have a look at what keywords your competitors (and peers) are targeting and ranking well for. It’ll give you more ideas about how to manage your link structure and categorise keywords, but taking this a step further it also helps you to identify which sources you should be targeting for links or guest posts for particular topics.
If you’ve got an article that targets a specific keyword, then it makes sense to get it visible on the site(s) that have a better presence for those keyword terms… it also helps you to identify these possible sites in the first place.
Finding the questions people need answered
Finding questions people are asking isn’t about driving traffic to your site (although it will help with long tail searches and building relevance to your main keyword themes), it’s about keeping them there and identifying valuable content to blog about. If a reader searches for something specific, and you provide a comprehensive answer, then you’ve provided closure on that train of thought. It gives them time to stop and see what else your site can offer them rather than click away immediately and continue looking for what they were after in the first place.
Research for an individual posts
Keyword research is an ongoing process - it’s not just something you should do prior to launching and then never look at again, each post you make gives you further opportunities to maximise your keyword exposure. There are two main aims when researching keywords for an individual post, finding the right way to structure the title, and identifying related keywords to add relevance to your main subject.
Before I finish up, another reminder of the importance of setting your keyword research goals… it’s not all about SEO, or about finding a niche – to get real value out of keyword analysis, you need to consciously have that end point in mind, the better you can define what you’re looking for, the easier it will be to find.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 9:46 AM
Introduction
Back in July I wrote about keyword research for SEO. Although researching keywords for SEO is similar to that for PPC there still are many core differences.
In many cases using the generic targets with high searches can be very costly in the world of PPC. While they can offer a good return, often long tailed, very specific phrases can offer more qualified traffic at a lower price.
Categories
When it comes to any form of keyword research an Excel spreadsheet can be your best friend. I highly recommend using this to sort out your ideas before entering them into the PPC platform to prevent timely rearranging in the future.
Before you begin thinking of and gathering long lists of phrases, first decide where you want to drive traffic to in your site. This could be determined by anything from products or services, to specific informational landing pages and you may have a single destination or several.
Create columns in Excel that each will represent a specific category of phrases. Where you want to send traffic to will vary widely on the type of website you have. These categories will ultimately be used to define various Ad Groups in your PPC campaign.
If you are a real estate agent in Seattle, some appropriate categories may be; houses, condos, town homes & commercial. In this case you will want unique target phrases relevant to each category.
Geographic Targeting
Once you have your categories figured out you need to ask yourself what areas you will be targeting your ads to. Do you offer your services on an international level, or are you limited to a single country? Perhaps your services are limited to a specific city or state. These factors will contribute to your keyword choices.
Sticking with the real estate example, if you are selling real estate in Seattle, the generic phrase "real estate" would be a huge drain on your budget resources and would deliver a very low level of qualified traffic. In most cases targeting this phrase would simply make no sense. If, on the other hand, you are only displaying your ads to the geographic area of Seattle, the level of qualified traffic increases dramatically because only those searchers in the Seattle area will see your ad, and, if they are interested in real estate, your site and ad will be highly relevant.
For any campaign served up nationally where you are trying to gather traffic for a specific geographic region it is important to, in most cases, stay away from generic terms. Be sure that your ad copy also uses some form of qualifier such as a location, to help discourage clicks from searchers that are unqualified.
If you decide to go with a national or international campaign, you will most likely want to rule out the generic terms, and instead use more specific phrases such as "Seattle real estate" or "Seattle Washington real estate". This way, for someone searching from Miami for a property in Seattle they will view your ad as relevant.
Initial Phrases
Now that you have an idea of the categories and geographic targeting, it is time to start working on your keyword lists. Start by rattling off as many relevant phrases for each category that come to mind and list them in your Excel sheet.
Once you have exhausted all possibilities, go visit your site and the destination pages for each category. Are there any phrases that you have missed that will suit your needs well?
When it comes to PPC long tailed phrases can sometimes be very effective. While they may deliver a limited amount of traffic, this traffic is often very well qualified and more likely to result in a desired action. "Seattle 3 bedroom house for sale" may work well as a long tailed phrase, but remember, as your phrases become more specific, so should your landing pages. With this example, for optimal performance you would want to ensure that the visitor is directed to a page with listings for 3 bedroom homes.
If you find that your phrases under each category are closely related, but would require different landing pages, as in the above long tail example, you may want to add an additional column to the right, and beside each phrase paste in the most relevant URL for your site. You can later use this URL to ensure that each phrase drives traffic to the best possible location on your site.
What is PPC campaign Management?
Whether you are a newcomer or a seasoned player, Pay per Click has the potentiality to fetch you money. It can garner innumerable clicks to your website and with the proceeding upholds your online image. Following is a brief about pay per click, its importance and methodology.
As the name suggests, pay per click is ‘pay for the clicks and clicks only’. As a visitor clicks on advertisement of any website, he will be taken to its sales page or affiliate marketing site. However, for a successful PPC campaign, you need to have a link with keywords in your advertisement.
PPC Keyword Analysis
The keyword is considered as the most important part of any PPC advertisement. You need to bid for keywords. And in order of the bid value, your advertisement will be placed in the respective website. Select perfect keyword that describes your service/product at its best. In order to get the most relevant keywords, conduct a rigorous research and come up with the right answer.
Pay per click Publisher Networks
When it comes to selecting a suitable publisher netowrks for PPC campaign, you have several options at your disposal. Major PPC service providers are Google and Yahoo. However, before selecting any service provider for PPC campaign, make sure you know your target well and understand the marketing credibility of service provider. Provide them details of your requirement. Tell about your product, target audience and area.
PPC with all flexibilities has turned out as an effective medium for propagating yourself through online media. Everyday innumerable people are benefited with PPC campaign. What it needs to succeed in PPC is a good understanding of the subject and up to date information about the occurring. Once you have the knowledge, you are about to count profit through your PPC advertisements.
Pay per Action: Pay For the Clicks That Fetch Money
Next to pay per click, pay per action is the big buzz from Google. The search engine giant with this new keyword is all set to expand its reach in the field of online advertisement. Pay per action, unlike any other advertising program is truly target oriented, methodical and gives numerous flexibilities to advertisers as well as publishers. What’s special about pay per action and how it is an out of the box idea? Let’s get inside the article to track down the facts.
What is Pay per Action
Well, at the very onset, let’s mull over the word ‘pay-per-action’. As the name denotes; pay-per-action means pay for the action which is done. Here, an advertiser pays only when a specific/defined action is done by a user and which in turn increases his (advertiser’s) sales for e.g., the advertiser will pay once a user makes a purchase, signs up for availing any service or generate revenue etc. Thus, pay per action is more specific. You need not to feel the pain of those clicks which go unproductive without fetching you money.
Pay Per Action Publishers Netowrk
Pay per action advertisements appear on the sites of publishers, who are already in Google content network. Here publishers can choose those ads which are well-applicable for their website. When an advertiser prepares a pay per action advertisement, he is given a chance to enter a serious of keywords that best describes his product or service. These keywords will now propagate their (advertiser’s) services to publishers of Google content network. Publishers are also allowed to browse advertisements either by product category or by viewing entire advertiser inventory.
Pay Per Action Media
As long as pay per action advertisement is concerned, an advertiser has the flexibility to create several sorts of advertisements. Text ads, image/display ads, text link ad format and many more; an advertiser has plenty of options around him when selecting an ad for pay-per-action campaign.
Pay Per Action Pricing Model
Now a little bit about the pricing of pay per action advertisements. Well, here an advertiser is the king who define ‘what’ and ‘how’ meaning an advertiser himself defines a fixed amount of money that he would like to pay. Under pay per action program, an advertiser pays only when a defined action is completed by any user. In no way, he is bound to pay for the action which remains unfinished or end up with a mere click. For example, as an advertiser you may wish to pay $2 once a user fills out a form on your site and $6 whenever he made a purchase agreement.
Pay Per Action a Win-Win Situation
Potent with possibilities, Pay per action is indeed a much-applauded advertising program framed by Google. It is beneficial for both publisher and advertiser. Taking the above under consideration, it would not be wrong to say pay per action is likely to open up new avenues for advanced online advertising programs.
PPC Management Tools / Pay Per Click Optimization
PPC (pay per click) Management can be a very daunting task when it comes to managing a campaign having several themes and thousand of keywords. Professional PPC Management Tools have come to relief to help you manage these campaigns with precision and ease.
Top PPC Management Tools
- Atlas Search is a very effective PPC management and Pay per click optimization tools. Atlas Search’s exclusive allows rule based bidding to set bidding on keyword to meet marketing goals with less hands-on management and resources.
Atlas Search support pay per click search engines like Google, Yahoo, GoClick, SearchFeed, MIVA, Kanoodle, Enhance Interactive, Mirago, Search123, Ask Jeeves, and Turbo 10.
2. BidRank is a PPC campaign management tool for desktops. BidRank works on rank range, maximum bid for each individual keyword listing, update frequency, and target rank. The bids can be updated every 60 seconds to every 24 hours.
BidRank Plus supports Google AdWords, Enhance Interactive (formerly ah-ha), BrainFox, MIVA, Kanoodle, SearchFeed, 411web, Turbo10, Mirago, 7Search, Mamma & QuePasa!
- PPC Bid Max is a keyword bid management and optimization tools. The key operation of PPC Bid Max are:
- build your keyword list
- manage your keywords
- automatically monitor your keyword bids
- URLs at all major pay per click search engines.
- PPC Pro is again a PPC Bid Management Tool for desktops. PPC Pro, is a rank monitoring and setting PPC tool. One can set keyword position that you wish to maintain and it update your bids to ensure that you rank at your choice of position.
These PPC management tools are great to help you optimize your PPC campaigns and the choice of the tool can depend on your marketing goals and strategy.
Smart Tips PPC Management?
Effective PPC advertising need a good strategy to make a PPC campaign pay for itself. A Campaign that is not well managed can cause more good than harm. This article is targeted at offering some good ppc campaign management advice to help you bid better and help you define keyword research strategy.
How to decide on a PPC Campaign Bid?
It is important that you know how much can you bid for your keywords per click, as there are keywords that can cost you upto 5-6$ per click. To understand how much you should be bidding for a keyword you need to understand your conversion rate which s typically around 3% for an average website. Which means you will spend $220 dollars to close a sale.
So what is the solution is that we target a less expensive keywords in huge volumes to get you the volume of traffic that you need to run your business. So by targeting less popular keywords, one can manage the same amount of traffic by reducing the cost.
Managing PPC Keywords
Although we have a solution but it can be difficult to manage a large list of keywords. So one needs to make sure that the analytics are strong and one has to keep track of which keywords are sending in traffic and conversions.
An alternate to this can be using PPC bidding management software, These software can help you track your keyword listings, and can help you adjust your bid amount to manage rankings.
- Bid Rank
- GoToast
Another option is to outsource the PPC management to seo companies who offer PPC management services.
Organic SEO versus PPC Management - Part -2
In reference to my earlier article regarding SEO verus PPC Advertising, Let us move forward in understanding the up and downside of PPC advertising on the internet in contrast to organic seo.
PPC Advertising (pay per click):
With the rising competition on this medium for quicker traffic to the website this medium is slowly and steadily becoming difficult to master and optimize. A closer look into the PPC advertising model will give you an insight in to the dynamics of PPC campaigns.
- The cost per click of the keywords are rising day in day out, reaching upto 2-50$ per click, and is expected to go even higher in times to come.
- Fraud click also takes a toll on your budgets as the competitors click on your ads, although these networks have algorithms to monitor but this cannot be fool proof.
- A need of a PPC expert is slowly becoming mandatory adding to the cost of the campaign.
- Management of the keywords and their cost per click is again a daunting task as you might be paying more than you are required to, as there are no defined rules for bidding cost per click.
PPC Bidding Management Advantages
I might have sounded very negative hear but with all the above facts there is an upside, but i would like to put that PPC is the rich mans way to traffic.
- If you have the budgets ranging from 1000$ and above for a month you can benefit from PPC.
- PPC campaign offer quick traffic if managed well by a PPC expert.
- PPC campaigns also give an impression to the end user that you are spending money for the ad so you must be related.
- PPC campaign can be highly targeted as you can select what keywords you wish to target, while these can be very competitive when it comes to organic search results.
In short how i would like to summarize the article is that if you have the money PPC is the way to go, and if you have the right SEO team to carry out your SEO then their is nothing like it.
Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)
Introduction: Many people new to marketing think that Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) is the magic formula to achieve high ranking in the search engines and thereby secure a steady stream of money. The claim is supported by the documentation of almost all keyword research tools and has been repeated by thousands of inexperienced marketing people.
I say that if anyone says that the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) is great to find good keywords/search terms, without expalining any of the drawbaks, then they are either out to cheat you or they just don’t know better.
Definition: Keyword effectiveness index: A mathematical representation of the popularity of a keyword compared to its popularity mesured as the number of pages in a search engines index.
Description: KEI is a statistical formulation that reveals the most effective keyword phrases and terms to use in optimize your web pages for. Efficiency can be many things. According to KEI, it is efficient to optimize for keywords that have many searchers, but only a few competing pages.
The lower the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. That means that you might have a better chance of getting to the top in the search engines and receive a good number of searchers for your effort.
Example: Suppose the number of searches for a keyword is 821 per day and Google displays 224,234 results (pages) for that keyword. Then the ratio between the popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is:
224,234 divided by 821. In this case, the KEI is 273.
Example on the opposite: Suppose the number of searches for a keyword is 2 per day and Google displays 11,224,234 results (pages) for that keyword. Then the ratio between the popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is:
Explanation: According to the KEI definition, the best keywords are those that have many searches and that don’t have much competition in the search results. A low KEI is therefore preferable.
In our example, it is clear that the keyword with a KEI of 273 sounds as a good keyword to optimized a pages for. It is just as clear, in the example on the opposite, that the keyword that has lots of competitors and a low number of searchers which gives a KEI equal to 5,612,117 is a tough fight for a small prices (unless the two searchers are very valuable).
However, the KEI makes no statement about the quality of the competition. While there might only be a few competitors in the search results, these competitors could be big players with big SEO teams and thousands of back links.
The number of search results cannot really tell you whether it is easy to get your web site listed in the top 10 results for that keyword or not. It’s much easier to move your web site from position 20,000 to position 12,000 than from position 190 to position 6.
In addition, the KEI factor is not a scientific number. It is more like a rule of thumb.
We will expect:
• The KEI for a keyword to increase if its popularity increases. Popularity is defined as the number of searchers.
• The KEI for a keyword to decrease if it becomes more competitive. Competitiveness is defined as the number of sites which a search engine e.g. Google displays when you search for that keyword using exact match search.
As a general rule, it isn’t advisable to select or deselect keywords wholly on the basis of numbers like KEI.
Keyword statistic has some uncertainties attached. Keywords relevancy has to be the most important, some of your keywords you are able to rank for in the search engines and others will give your users a good experience.
History: There haven’t been many successful metrics that have been calculated by two or more variables. The Keyword effectiveness index has been the most succesful.
Future: There is a need for more useful variables in SEO and I predict there will come many in the future. I personally will develop at least a handful of methods to select good keywords, but I need to finish my research before I make them public.
How to practice: When you have a keyword phrases, with a high, medium or low KEI, you need to be able to answer: Is there a reason why the KEI might be giving an incorrect picture?
There can be many reasons why KEI are showing you something you can’t use. Here are some of the reasons:
1. The position of the words in the keyword phrases is unnatural.
Ex. “keyword report” has 534,000 pages in Google’s index, and the more unnatural “report keyword” has 29,100 pages. This doesn’t mean there is 18 times less competitions for “report keyword”.
2. More words in a keyword phrases, means a much smaller changes to find them in a webpage.
3. The most search engines don’t give the accurate number of pages in their index.
4. The number of searchers isn’t an accurate number and many times known keywords are inflated by the use of automated tools like webmastergold.
By blindly using KEI to select keywords, you run the risk to select keywords that have keywords in an unnatural order, long keyword phrases and known highly competitive keywords where it is mostly automated tool that search for them. Not good if you were looking for keyword phrases with little competition and many searchers.
Tips: Always ask yourself if there is a good reason why a keyword phrase has a low number, before you get all excited.
Some keyword phrases convert badly to customers and therefore it is easier to rank for them. Do you want to put a big effort to rank for low value keywords?
Links: Keyword, Keyword Demand, Keyword Phrase.
Conclusion: Use Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) carefuly. Is there any reason why KEI shows it is a good keyword to use, but it is not?
Keywords: Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), Number of pages, SEO, SEM, keyword phrase, keyword tools, keyword popularity, keyword selection, keyword lookup, keyword phrase, Keyword, search term, Key phrase, single keyword, choosing keywords, search engines index, search phrases, keyword list phrases, long keyword phrase, seed keyword list, define keyword phrases
What is your experiance with Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)?
Do you like to use Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)?
Do you have any alternative methods to find good keywords/search phrases?
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