3 Simple Ways to Multiply Keyword Effectiveness: Immediately!

A big part of my philosophy for strategic keyword management centres around three core activities:

• Knowing how people become aware of your site;
• Tracking how many of them actually visit your site;
• Observing what they do whet they get there.

Retailers who have primarily a bricks and mortar establishment can substitute "site" for "shop", "salon", "showroom", "office", and so on. The principle is the same; this isn't about pure SEO.

So, why are these three aspects of keyword research so important?

Keywords Help People to Find You

It doesn't matter whether you are the author of a book, a web site owner, or run a seaside café, people find you because they have needs or desires.

They will express those needs and desires in keywords; whether they want to ask someone in the street, or search online.

Someone who is looking for a latté in Bournemouth is going to be a lot more interested in a café that has a big sign in the window saying "Best Latté in Bournemouth or Your Money Back!" than one offering "Cut Price Cream Teas for Students".

It's the same online.

When someone performs a query, they're only going to click on a site that appears to confirm their needs or desires through the use of keywords. Not just the keywords they type, by the way, but also those that make one sit more attractive than another.

Knowing what keywords people have used to find your site (whether they've clicked through or not) is useful. It's also a measurable statistic provided by the Search Console, and also, via integration with SC, in StatCounter.com (although they still call it GWT!)

And, this metric is also useful offline: just ask customers how they found you, and from that you'll quickly work out what internal keywords they had in their minds when they made the decision to choose your establishment compared to the others on the high street.

Doing this analysis -- and acting on the results -- takes you from merely advertising, to attracting.

Measuring Attraction Helps Build a Better Campaign

Once you know which keywords are getting you visibility, you need to know which of them are also getting you visitors, or better still, customers.

Typically, a keyword campaign can have one of several goals:

• building awareness;
• attracting new customers;
• re-attracting existing customers;

In the first case, all you want to know is whether your brand is getting seen. Search engines are making that a lot easier these days by including extracts from the landing page associated with a keyword alongside the result.

Managing that meta-data is a vital part of SEO.

The second case is linked to actions. You need to know, having gained awareness, which conjunction of keywords and search entry lead to action. That means putting non-active keywords in the meta-data so that it is displayed.

A non-active keyword is one that is not part of the keyword phrase which defines the primary motive for a search user: for example, the query "latté bournemouth" will return a page of results, and if one of the displayed meta-data snippets contains the word 'free', that café may well find the attract more custom, but "free" is not an active keyword.

The resulting campaign may well be a combination of the active and non-active keywords, for example, a PPC campaign using the keyword phrase 'free latté bournemouth'. 

(I'm not saying that's necessarily an example that will work in the real world, by the way, but if you go through the motions, the result may well be positive!)

Finally, using trackable keyword phrases in your re-activation campaigns also helps to improve them; re-attracting customers by email or physical mailing is much easier if you have researched the keywords that your target market uses to find your competitors.

All of these work online as well as offline. Offline measurement methods just tend to be a bit more involved. Offline or not, however, measuring the behaviour that stems from a simple customer visit provides the best measure of how effective a keyword campaign has been.

Behavioural Analysis Measures the Effectiveness of Keywords

There used to be -- actually, I still use a variation -- a measure called KEI. This stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, and was supposed to represent the relative ease with which it was possible to score highly in the SERPs.

It was a simple measure: all it really did was manipulate the anticipated volume and number of competing sites to try and gauge your chances of hitting the top 10.

Here's a funny anecdote, though.

On one of my own sites that I use for researching strategies, I have a highly effective keyword that isn't in the top 10. It's barely in the top 100. And, in terms of the CTR alone, it's reasonably effective:

What's more, as you can see from the screen shot, it's also not an isolated case; there's one right next to it with a similarly impressive CTR.

When I dig into the "Visitor Activity" log provided by StatCounter.com, I can see that, for the target market, these queries both have above average engagement based on the landing page:

• higher visit time
• more pages viewed
• repeat visits

This view is derived from knowing which page a visitor is likely to land on as a result of the query (by conducting a live query) and reviewing the Visitor Activity for that URL.

Expanding the search to related pages confirms that this query is more effective than many that appear nearer the top of the SERPs. That is, for the pages that are also returned as a result (but even lower down the SERPs) they also show high levels of engagement and conversion.

This is part of the attraction of the so-called long tail, of course. More specific pages with highly niche information that don't necessarily attract the most traffic are quite often the most effective when measured in terms unrelated to pure volume and cost.

Bigger, as they say, is not always better.

For a solid, step by step approach to keyword research that has consistently proven to be unaffected by algorithm changes, download the Keyword Research Blueprint!

On Tools & Conversion Rates: Notes from the Trenches of Strategic Keyword Management

Today, you get a twofer: as in, two for one.

Firstly, an update on this post about tools being put beyond use. Now, I'm not going to name names, but two of the tools I pay for and use regularly have been put beyond use (albeit temporarily) thanks to an AdWords change in the Keyword Planner.

Remember that I postulated that this was, at least, one tool that wouldn't be changed in a hurry?

It turns out I was partially wrong. In their recent article "Google says bots are the main target of Keyword Planner changes", Search Engine Land's Ginny Marvin says the following:

"The reality is that Google’s keyword research tools were designed to help advertisers develop their search campaigns. The availability of the External Keyword Tool for years, however, set expectations that it should be open and available to all."

For those who are unaware of the pending changes -- I say pending, because not everyone will be affected straight away, and it's likely that different accounts will be affected in different ways  -- they centre around restricting data to accounts that have been designated as research-only.

In other words, if you don't spend with AdWords, then you don't get the data.

Economically, with my academic hat on, it makes sense. Strategically, though, it's a bit at odds with Alphabet's Don't be Evil mantra, and the SEO / KWR part of me can't help but think that limiting data that helps content creators research what people are looking for, and willing to pay for, is only going to result in content blanket bombing and post-publication keyword research.

In other words, we're going to go back to speculative content spinning around known search terms, just to see where the content gets placed in Google's index (via the Search Console and Analytics reports) rather than pro-active keyword research.

While reactive keyword research -- as I call it -- certainly has its place in your keyword research toolbox, what we don't want is a sudden glut of spun content designed to test the viability of keywords, and provide no real value.

Meanwhile, the tools I mentioned? They rely on API access, and seem to be being throttled, either by the tool's creator, or by the API limits, such that they have ceased working. I'm sure a fix is in the works, and I have standby techniques that, while a bit more long winded, get me to the same place.

A case of do as I say, and as I do, for once!

Meanwhile on a more positive note...

There's a great graph on Jason Tabeling's Search Engine Watch article "Online-to-offline search value is exploding with 'near me' searches"that illustrates something that I've been pushing out to retail clients for a while now.

In a recent post "How Keyword Research can help High Street Retailers", I pointed out that many people are now comparing retailers on the high street whilst actually being on the high street with mobile devices in hand.

The anecdotal evidence is borne out by Tabeling's research, and it turns out that "near me" searches are pretty likely to be conducted on a mobile device, which is interesting.

More interesting from a retailer's point of view is his assertion that advertisers "are paying 30% more for 'near me' searches compared to searches with other terms, even though our data showed literally ZERO conversions for 'near me' terms."

Readers of my "Cheat Sheet" eBook will know that part of the strategic management of keywords pivots around PPC campaigns, and looking for the money in the market (think Search Volume x Cost Per Click).

Tabeling's research shows that 'near me' searches attract a very high CPC, have solid volume, but don't get the clicks. In other words, advertisers are spending for the sole purpose of exposure -- probably with their physical address -- near the top of the SERPs, or in AdSense side-bars.

He suggests that it's time for all advertisers -- and I would say, clicks'n'bricks retailers especially -- to review how they track conversion rates for so-called online-to-offline traffic, as in this new digital advertising reality, conversion "might not be from the traditional online search, but from a find a store visit or a click-to-call action."

Measuring the ROI might not be the simplest part of strategic keyword management, but as in other aspects of retail, it is vital to know how much you are getting back for the spend that is being forced upon you.

What if All Your Keyword Research Tools Disappeared Overnight?

How To Avoid This Often Terminal SEO Mistake

Recently I had a client whose favourite -- indeed only -- keyword research tool had been put beyond use.

Behind the initial panic was the growing realisation that they didn’t actually know how the tool did what it did. It was selecting excellent keywords, and had served her well in the past, but she had no idea how it worked under the hood.

To be clear on this point: “put beyond use” can mean any one of the following:

• A temporary glitch;
• The provider went out of business;
• The fees went up beyond your capacity to pay them;
• The source of the data that the provider was using was put beyond use.

The first is easy: it’s a waiting game. Just make sure that you are always a few days (or weeks) ahead of the data point. In other words, don’t leave it until the last minute to have a basket of keywords to work with: use seasonal and outlier analysis to keep ahead of the game!

The rest of the items in the above list are catastrophic if you have no idea how to replicate the service manually.

So, here’s the first lesson: don’t use metrics provided by third parties that you can’t replicate manually. Any services you use should merely be time-saving conveniences; if they have special sauce, one day you’ll be left with only a dry bowl of pasta.

You’ll still eat, but it won’t be pleasant...

Make Sure You Have An SEO Plan B

Even if the absolute worst case scenario is manual calculation using the most basic tools, it’s better than nothing. With the right preparation, it can be outsourced, releasing you to perform business functions that add value to your proposition.

For every SEO action -- from keyword research to social posting and link building -- make sure you have an alternative to the time-saving tools you use on a daily basis. There are some that you can’t do without (Google Search, AdWords, and the actual social networks themselves, for example) but make sure that these are:

• In the minority;
• Unlikely to be put beyond use.

In the keyword research field, we often deploy third party tools that gather up data and then present it in a way that lets us draw conclusions. For example, the AdWords Keyword Planner, or SEMRush analysis tools pull together a number of data points -- some proprietary, some not -- as a way to save time.

Decision tools such as Market Samurai, and automation tools like KeywordTool.io and Power Suggest Pro*, also fall into the category of must-haves for people embarking on serious strategic keyword management projects.

As long as these are used as labour saving devices, and not crutches, that’s okay. In fact, although I used -- and have paid -- for some of the above, I never use them for anything except baseline research: just the numbers.

For decision-making, I prefer to rely on my own metrics, which sometimes includes charting the data and just using my eyes. However, I do have three so-called ‘first cut’ metrics that I’ve rolled together to help make sure I weed out the non-starters.

These are automated, but could be done manually, if my toys get taken away from me!

Create Your Own Keyword Research (and SEO) Metrics

Probably the most important metrics are those I call ‘first cut’. The idea is to cut away a first set of keywords that aren’t likely to be useful. The metric that you use tends to be one of the following:

• Pure volume - search volume vs. results returned;
• Market value - amount of free advertising capital in the niche;
• PPC Campaign - reducing the cost of a PPC campaign for maximum exposure.

Obviously, to calculate these, you will need tools. For example, my own go-to metric for a pure volume project is to emphasis the addressable market over the sheer number of searches: sometimes referred to as the KEI.

To calculate the KEI, you will at least need two numbers:

• Search Volume
• Number of Results

The second of these is easy enough to scrape from a Google Search (either manually, or with a simple script) but the Search Volume is only really available via the AdWords Keyword Planner.

The same is true for the market value metric, where the anticipated cost per click is used to test a keyword for available advertising spend against search performance, and picking outliers for inclusion.

Again, Keyword Planner is the only real source; luckily it is unlikely to be put beyond use for the foreseeable future, as it supports most of the Google keyword economy.

That’s good, because the last first cut metric, specifically used to remove expensive keywords, is almost the opposite of the market value metric, and specifically uses data from Keyword Planner.

Tools can help apply all of these metrics: for example, Market Samurai can be set up to filter for commerciality, or cheap keywords, and remove everything else. However, if you don’t know how to do the work manually, and those tools are taken away, you’ll be unable to replicate the results and you’ll have to start from scratch.

Learning how to calculate first cut metrics isn’t a good thing to have to do in a hurry. The best advice is to start now, and roll your own set of metrics: not only will you have a safety net, but you'll also learn a lot in the process. I guarantee it!

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