Advanced Keyword Research

SEARCH & SOCIALBeyond Keyword Research

David SnyderSearch and Social Media Strategist

JRDunn.com

Co-Founder of Search & Social

Organizer of Scary SEO

Blogger:

SnydeySense.com MarketingPilgrim.comSearchandSocial.com/seo-blog


What do you do after your site is built?

After you have already started to build content?

Do you let your site simply sit with your chosen terms?

Sinking or swimming on the information provided by the keyword tools you used?


Tweaking is needed, beyond keyword research.

The importance of our optimization efforts is always conversion and subsequently cash.

It is wonderful to rank #1 for a competitive term, but if your conversion rate for that term is below 1%, what is the point?

Keyword analysis is something that should be a constant not simply a primer.


We will be taking a look at three ways to continue to enhance your keyword performance after your initial research:

1) Utilizing Analytics

2) Competitive Analysis

3) Heuristic Evaluations

SEARCH & SOCIALSEARCH & SOCIALBeyond Keyword Research

We will start with our on-site analytics.

The first, and most obvious place to take the use of your analytics as a keyword tool, is to look at how the initial use of your keywords, in content, on your site, has effected your rankings for your broad terms, as well the longtail terms your content has produced.

You can also see the initial interaction of the viewers using these terms to find your site, and the site itself.

The most important metric to look at here is bounce rate.


This simple metric, calculated by taking the total number of of visitors bouncing off of your site (a bounce is a single-page visit to your website) and dividing it by the total number of visits, can tell you just how useful your site is in terms of your visitors’ needs. Accordingly, if you are working with a blog, this metric is almost useless to you, as the concept behind the blog is quick digestion of information. However, this metric can be very powerful for the measurement of other content based properties and especially e-commerce web sites.


I usually view a successful bounce rate for a keyword as being at or below 35%. If you are below 50% you are on the right path but may need to tweak the content on your page, or reestablish the why? behind your users visit.

Anything over 50% I think you can safely say that the page and content you offer is not what a search user utilizing that term is looking for. Even if it is a term that gets great traffic, and you are only getting 1/3 of the traffic you acquire from this term to stick to your site, think about how that remaining 33.3% is going to convert.


While analytics programs can lead you to quality longtail terms, Hittail.com, offers a real time look at keyword behavior via Javascipt tags. This analytics product also offers you the ability to export the longtail terms that you harvest for direct pasting to your paid search account, which makes it incredibly useful for PPC purposes.


One data source you will find useful after your initial site optimization is SEODigger.com. This site offers users a look at the terms, within the top 60 million search queries, that their site ranks for in the top 20 results in the Google SERPs. With this ranking information, SEODigger.com also displays the Wordtracker and Overture keyword popularity data for that term.

SEO Digger, like all applications, has its issues. I often find that the keyword popularity data found in its reports does not match what Wordtracker itself produces. Also the listing of the Overture and Wordtracker data side by side can lead to confusion for a person just setting out in keyword research.


Competitive Analysis

By examining the keyword rankings of our competitors, we not only will find out the terms they are actively optimizing for, but we may also get a glimpse at their overall optimization strategy, including how they are funneling their conversions.

Pay special attention to their long tail terms. Just as these are your most conversion driven words, they are also your competitors.


Quantcast

Free option. Flawed, but will give you some keywordinformation.


Hitwise Competitor Report

Hitwise offers a very different level of competitive analysis than Quantcast. This service is state of the industry, and its research store offers individual reporting options for businesses that cannot justify the extremely high end subscription option.


The Cadillac of competitive keyword tools comes in the form of Hitwise Search Intelligence.

Hitwise describes this product:

Hitwise Search Intelligence™ provides extensive insights on how people successfully search for products and services in over 160 industries, across all major (80+) search engines. This unique data gives Hitwise clients a competitive advantage when planning, monitoring and measuring search marketing campaigns.

Hitwise Search Intelligence allows you to Identify which search terms have driven traffic to competitive websites, analyze the search patterns and behavior of your consumers, customize reports based on your needs, and export and manage terms for campaign execution.


SEOmoz.org offers a great tool that finds the most used anchor tags that correlate to a site. You must get the Pro membership at the site to utilize the tool, but the money is well worth all of the great tools and information you gain from Rand Fishkin and team.

Checking Anchor Tags of Inbound Links


Heuristic Evaluations are basically any non-data driven experimentation done to learn, discover, or solve problems. These types of experimentations are a key component of Avinash Kaushik’s “Trinity” concept, a web analytics approach that goes beyond basic clickstream data. This type of learning and problem solving allows you to enter the mind of the user, the reason behind your website, and can unlock terms that simple data based research my have left hidden.

Heuristic Evaluations


Talk to Experts

Your group of experts are going to vary dependent on your websites concept. The one thing that is likely to be true across markets is that these individuals often rest in the trenches.

They are the group of people that have the best understanding of your end user, and thus will allow you to get inside the head of that group and better your websites user experience.

If you are an e-commerce site your experts will be your sales people. If you are a service related website your experts will be your customer service professionals.


* Once you have decided who your experts are going to be you should call a meeting with that group of individuals.

* Prior to this meeting choose several different search actions that you would like to see your end user make.

* Have chart paper or some type of idea sharing medium available, along with a computer and projector.

* Begin to work through each of your search actions with your team. Present each as if they were the customer, and chart what they would do to complete each task.


Charting semantic groups

While you have your group of experts together it would be a smart idea to build a semantic web for the keywords for your site.

I would prepare for this by taking the twenty terms you perceive to be the best from your competitive and on-site analysis, and putting each one in the center of a sheet of chart paper.

With your experts, begin to brainstorm keywords that closely relate to the main keyword on the sheet.


Quintura.com: Cool Semantic Tool


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Twitter: @davesnyder

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Advanced Keyword Research

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Transcript of Advanced Keyword Research