My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘keyword search’

Think of the right keywords as the Open Sesame! of the Internet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, and presto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site – or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive – decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different.

The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.

You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword “automobile body shops” would rank lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. In other words,consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase. Let’s look at another example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between “Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties. You want to find people

who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to you site.

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase.

Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business’ rewards.

Cruising along 6-lane expressway that skirts east of Kolkata, the city I grew up in, my mind wandered off to my childhood days. Kolkata was then a pleasant place, not overtly intolerant or arrogant. Life was easy, schools nearby, offices not afar, amenities close at hand. Yet, on occasions when we were to visit relatives outside city’s periphery, plans had to be readied in advance. Road connection beyond city was poor, and so moving about longer distance was cumbersome.

Today, many roads have cropped up, many are in making. Places that seemed inaccessible even a few years back, can now be reached without much of a fuss. If this is called rapid urbanization, I feel it has a parallel in the way Google has transformed AdWords. Just as I hardly thought swanky roads would ever come up in so large numbers in my city, it was similarly difficult imagining AdWords would one day be what it is today.

What it is that makes AdWords so dear? I’m not too frequent an advertiser, so I wouldn’t be commenting on campaigns, adgroups and suchlike. Instead, I’ll tell you how the keyword tool of AdWords will make you forget you ever used anything else.

How it started

For long an open secret, but barely touched upon till recent past is that keywords used by surfers have demographic variance to a largish extent. What this means is except for some obvious terms, surfers from different locales of the globe will most likely type in different search terms to look for information on the web. Even in big countries like US or India, search terms used by surfers vary from place to place. Search engines knew this for long, but it took them awhile to chalk out suitable products tailored to be effective in serving aggregate needs on the net.

Talking about Google, products like local search or, for that matter, the advantage of geo-targeting in AdWords campaign are all part of strategy accrued from search behavior pattern, accumulated and studied for nearly a decade.

What are ways to get you the most promising keywords? I’ll attempt answering this formidable question in 2 parts. In this part, we’ll discuss how AdWords’ keyword tool can help you get going. In the next part, we’ll compare AdWords’ keyword tool with some of the best out there. On to AdWords now.

AdWords opens up

Admittedly, AdWords is meant to maximize revenues to Google. What pleases the most is Google’s fatherly approach to ensure that AdWords maximizes returns to advertisers too. And how? Look at how easily you can fetch your choicest keywords from Google’s vast repertoire.

Start at AdWords Keyword Tool and after selecting the country and language you’d like to target (English and United States by default), slip below and select one of the 2 tabs, namely Keyword Variations and Site-Related Keywords. Now on, let’s go step by step to unravel a real wonder that the tool is.

Keyword Variations

If you select this tab (by default selected), just type in some keywords in the box, one in each line (pressing ‘Enter’ after each keyword to go to next line). If you want similarly meant keywords, do not forget to select ‘Use synonyms’. A good idea that, since it broadens your keyword search. For example, I found ‘top 10 ranking’, a very popular key-phrase, as a synonym for ‘top ranking’, which would have otherwise remained unknown to me. Another point stressed upon frequently by veterans is that it is better to begin your keyword search with general terms. As you progressively narrow down your keyword selection, you’re more likely to discover promising phrases along the way.

So you have a long list of keywords presented by Google based upon your few initial keywords. Watch closely, you’ll find Google saying that it’s a list sorted by relevance. What’s that? It’s Google’s way of gently prodding you to begin an AdWords campaign, for the keywords that appear at the top are the most relevant ones, should you consider ad campaign with them.

What would you do now? Well, you may start adding them as necessary, search for more related keywords (link at the bottom of the list), or even download them in your chosen format. But wait before you do anything of these. Look around and see how Google helps you with excellent tools to further fine-tune your list of keywords.

Refining your keywords

Move to ‘Show columns’ and in the accompanying drop-down list, you get to select eye-popping options. Wow! What a help! Choose the first option, ‘Keyword popularity’ and you’ll simultaneously see 2 adjacent columns of data. Click a column heading, the list re-arranges in decreasing importance. In the column ‘Advertiser Competition’, the list shows which of your keywords are hotly sought after. Similarly, the column ‘Search Volume’ gives you a measure of popularity of respective keywords. Still want more specific info’? The generous Google is there for that. How? Amble to far right of the columns and alongside ‘Match Type’, select ‘Broad’, ‘Phrase’ or ‘Exact’ and watch how the scenario changes. What are broad match, phrase match and exact match? Help is just there (a question mark). Click on it to know more.

We’ll now move on to third option in ‘Show columns’, which is ‘Global search volume trends’. This is a recent addition. When you select this, you’ll get to see an amazing display of how keyword popularity changes globally (not only US) through the year in the form of bar-charts. Once again, hook on to ‘Match Type’ (spoken above) and refine your search further.

Start an AdWord campaign?

If you do not contemplate starting an AdWord campaign, you may skip the other 2 ‘Show columns’ options. In case you do plan one, first select ‘Cost and ad position estimates’ and in the ensuing page, choose your currency and mention your maximum CPC. This is the maximum cost you agree to bear each time your ad is clicked on when displayed for your chosen search terms (note this is different from another oft-used term, CTR, the click-through-rate). As you finally hit ‘Recalculate’, your list will turn up myriad combinations of ad position and average CPC for your keywords. If your max CPC is too low, you may not see any value for average CPC.

The remaining ‘Show columns’ option is ‘Possible negative keywords’. This is a tool that assists your keywords to maintain a sharp focus in an ad campaign. Depending on campaign strategy, one has to decide whether or not to include negative keywords. To give an example, for my web marketing website, if my keyword ‘top ranking’ fetches other probables like ‘top 10 ranking’, ‘uptown top ranking’, ‘top ranking universities’ and so on, I might decide to include ‘uptown’ and ‘universities’ as negative keywords, but certainly leaving out the term ‘10’. This would mean that if I select ‘top ranking’ as broad match or phrase match, my ad will not show up for search terms that included negative words ‘uptown’ and ‘universities’. More often than not, expert campaigners will choose one-word broad match and then work on a long list of negative words to disallow unwanted ad impressions.

Site-Related Keywords

Till now, we’ve spoken about keywords you chose and ways of refining them. Suppose you are eager to know what keywords your competition is using! Well, why not? If indeed so, AdWords Keyword Tool comes to your assistance. To start, click the other tab ‘Site-Related Keywords’, enter the URL of your competition in the search box and hit ‘Get keywords’. Don’t forget to check ‘Include other pages on my site linked from this URL’. As you set Google to work, it dutifully comes up with a list of keywords, grouped by common terms with number of occurrences in the entire website within parentheses for each group.

Grouping keywords by common terms is a great help as you’ll find, and each group lists related keywords as in earlier case. If you uncheck grouping option, Google will fetch you a scrolling list of keywords, which may often be uncomfortably huge if you happen to spy on a giant competition. Once there, similar to Keyword Variations, here too you can start working on your keywords with abundance of tools at your command.

AdWords, a facilitator

Keyword Tool is great because it is very easy to use. No doubt Google intends it that way so as to make AdWords less and less daunting for potential ad-campaigners who are afraid to cross threshold for the fear of making unknown mistakes. Let’s remember, businessmen incline to take risks on known parameters, and not something that is difficult to comprehend. To that extent, the newly-designed keyword tool is a good facilitator.

In the next part, we’ll look at how AdWords’ keyword tool fares with other keyword finders.

Adsense is considered as one of the most powerful tool in a website publisher’s arsenal. It enables a person to monetize their sites easily. If used properly, it can generate a very large and healthy income for them. However if you are not using them rightly and just maximizing the income you squeeze from it, you are actually leaving a lot of money on the table. Something all people hate doing.

How you can start earning money with Adsense can be done easily and quickly. You will be amazed at the results you will be getting in such a short period of time.

Start by writing some quality content articles which are also keyword incorporated. There are a lot of people given the gift of being good with words. Writing comes easy for them. Why not make it work in such a way that you will be earning some extra cash in the process.

There are actually three steps to put into mind before you begin writing your ads and having an effective Adsense.

Keyword search. Find some popular subjects, keywords or phrase. Select the ones which you think has more people clicking through. This is actually a keyword selector and suggestion tool that some sites are offering to those who are just their Adsense business.

Writing articles. Start writing original content with keywords from the topics that you have achieved in your search. Take note that search engines are taking pride in the quality of their articles and what you will be writing should keep up with their demands.

Quality content site. Build a quality content site incorporated with Adsense ads that is targeting the subject and keywords of your articles and websites. This is where all that you’ve done initially will go to and this is also where they will prove their worth to you.

The proper positioning of your ads should be done with care. Try to position your ads where surfers are most likely to click on them. According to research, the one place that surfers look first when they visit a certain site is the top left. The reason behind this is not known. Maybe it is because some of the most useful search engine results are at the top of all other rankings. So visitors tend to look in that same place when browsing through other sites.

Some of those who are just starting at this business may think they are doing pretty well already and thinking that their clickthrough rates and CPM figures are quite healthy. However, there are more techniques and styles to generate more clicks to double your earnings. By knowing these techniques and working them to your advantage, you will realize that you will be getting three times more than other people who have been previously doing what they are doing.

Finally, Adsense has some excellent tracking statistics that allows webmasters and publishers to track their results across a number of site on a site by site, page by page, or any other basis you wanted. You should be aware oft his capability and make the most of it because it is one powerful tool that will help you find out which ads are performing best. This way, you can fine tune your Adsense ads and focus more on the ones being visited the most rather than those who are being ignored.

Another thing you should know. Banners and skyscrapers are dead. Ask the experts. So better forget about banners and skyscrapers. Surfers universally ignore these kinds of ad formats. The reason behind this is that they are recognized as an advert and advert are rarely of any interest that’s why people ignore them.

To really start making money with Adsense, you should have a definite focus on what you wanted to achieve and how you will go about achieving them. As with any other kind of business ventures, time is needed coupled with patience.

Do not just ignore your site and your Adsense once you have finished accomplishing them. Spare some time, even an hour, making adjustments to the Adsense ads on your sites to quickly trigger your Adsense income.

Give it a try and you would not regret having gotten into Adsense in the first place.