Archive for the 'Keyword Analysis' Category

Continuing with my curiousity with the keyword “lyrics”, I wanted to know what are the top 50 searched terms on Google. Is “lyrics” one of the top searched terms on Google?

That question led me to explore a few of Google’s own keyword tools. I began by using Google Insights and sorting the data by All Search Terms/United States/Last 12 Months:

This provided me with an answer. But, I wanted to dive a little deeper.

Next I looked at Google Insights for the last 12 months for the term “lyrics in the category Entertainment > Music > Lyrics & Tabs.

Since Google Insights doesn’t provide actual search volume, I used the Google Keyword Tool to look at the monthly keyword volume:

Next I looked at Google Zeitgeist, which shows all of these searches which “had the largest volume on Google.com in the U.S.” within their respective categories:

I would think Zeitgeist and the Google Insights that show “Search Terms Related to Lyrics” to be the same. However, there are some discrepancies. For example, “Taylor Swift lyrics” is shown to be the 2nd most searched term related to lyrics. But, she doesnt show up at all in Zeitgeist.

Anyway, it makes sense that Lyrics is the #1 searched term, because more people are digitally downloading their music now, instead of buying physical CDs. And, since MP3’s don’t include lyrics, people must be searching for them. I guess it’d be safe to assume as digital downloads increase, so will the amount of searches for “lyrics” and related phrases.

One of the ways to measure success of an SEO campaign is based on the baseline metrics contained within your Keyword Analysis. Success metrics can include keyword ranking, visitor traffic, and conversions.

You can also measure “share of voice“. In Search Marketing, it’s more accurately called “share of searches”. A straightforward method of calculating the formula is using the monthly [Visits/Universe of Searches], expressed as a percentage.

Naturally, you need keyword data you can trust. It needs to be as accurate as possible. There are a lot of keyword tools out there. Some free. Some subscription-based. So, I decided to compare the term “lyrics” from four popular keyword tools.

Wordtracker:
They state on their site that “All search terms are collected from the major metacrawlers - Dogpile and Metacrawler.” That covers only 2% market of US and UK. Also, the keyword data generated is daily search volume. So, we need to multiply that by 30 to calculate the monthly seardch volume. In this case, the term “lyrics” was searched 407,340 times in a month. I’m not convinced this is the most accurate data.

Keyword Discovery:
KD does not use actual search volume. They state on their website: “The search counts that we provide are best used as a comparison to other search terms in our database. You should treat Keyword Discovery’s search counts as a rank, not actual total search volume.” Furthermore, Keyword Discovery gets it’s data from a few hundred small search engines.

Google Keyword Tool:
The Google Keyword Tool provides you with an actual number of search volume. They state on their website “Global Monthly Search Volume: This column shows the approximate average monthly number of search queries matching each keyword. This statistic applies to searches performed on Google and the search network over a recent 12-month period.”.

Microsoft adcenter Keyword Tool:
The adcenter keyword tool takes from search queries directly from the engine. They state on their site: “The data in the keyword research tools is based on historical performance data from Microsoft adCenter and from historical search queries (exact match type) on Bing and other MSN properties”.

Additionally, adcenter’s adlab has a group of keyword research tools that are definitely worth exploring.

Search Engine Market Share:
If you’re using the Google Tool or the adcenter keyword tool, you’ll need to make a quick calculation to get the “universe of searches”. In order to calculate the amount of the “universe of searches”, we need to know search engine market share:

To calculate a reliable number for “universe of searches” I think it’s best to just use Google Keyword Tool, and multiply that by the amount they are deficient in market share. Depending on the market research you use can alter the amount of search volume also.

For example, if MSN had a market share of 5%, then we’d multiply the number by 20 to get the “universe of searches”. That calculates to 2,717,220.

If Google has 70% market share, then multiply the Keyword number from their tool by 1.30 to calculate the “universe of search volume” for any given keyword.

Conclusion:
The Google and adcenter tools are free, and the keyword data comes directly from them. I think that’s as reliable as it’s gonna get for now. In my opinion, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery are NOT as accurate data.

After all this………Do you trust Google’s Keyword Tool? Yes/No?

Keyword research posts are numerous: we have multiple guides, reference sources and tools. However it is seldom brought to attention that it is not enough to just determine keyword phrases that people use to search for your topic. What else should be researched is your core term environment. What do I mean by that?

Words cannot be viewed in isolation. Words are only single units that build sentences and phrases. By looking at word units and phrases in isolation, we miss a huge part of the whole picture. How can keyword context be helpful?

• explore neighboring terms (get a deeper understanding of the niche);
• make your writing richer and more varied (and thus end up targeting more words);
• see the words in live context (create timely content that will be interesting to people, “speak the language of your audience”).

Let’s have a look at a few tools you can use to figure your core term context.

Research the SERPs context:

SenSebot offers a semantic analysis of Google SERP and creates a summary of it as well as its tag cloud. It also works for Google news.

Search Cloudlet is a FireFox addon that extracts words from search snippets and creates a tag cloud containing most frequent terms on each SERP. With it you will be able to see most common words that neighbor your search term in search results. If you set Google to return 100 results per page, you’ll give the tool more data to analyze and thus get more accurate tag cloud.

The plugin also works for blog search - for you to be able to analyze most recent tags and buzz.

Research related terms:

Google sets tool lists related terms for the set of words you provide. It is essential to keep in mind what is meant by “related” here. Google sets’ technology is primarily about analyzing web lists: words that often appear within <ul> or <ol> tags or in comma-separated lists should be related. This can be applied to countries or colors, for example.

Naturally, each further word in the set influences the results returned (thus, red / green (colors) and red / green / spring (nature, seasons, joy) sets are completely different).

Another way to explore neighboring terms is to check Delicious tag search: it lists related terms for any URL or tag you specify (Note: use Cloudalicious tool to organize related tags associated with any URL).

Urban dictionary is another user-generated site where you can find related tags for any term. It is especially useful if you need to research relaxed, slang environment.

Research live natural context:

Use Twitter search to understand how people use your term. It offers FireFox search plugin for easier access. Besides, it supports quite a few advanced operators allowing to control your search, among them:

• search for keyword related emotions: add smiles to your query. e.g. [seo ];
• search for the term related discussions (hashtags): [#seo];
• exclude any word: e.g. [search marketing -seo] or search for any of the words: e.g. [search OR marketing].

You can also use Twitter-based search tools - my favorite one is TwitScoop. It shows recent discussions and also graphically represents the term popularity:

This guest post by Ann Smarty, an SEO consultant. Follow Ann on Twitter!

As the years roll by and I keep honing my SEO Consulting skills, my Keyword Analysis process and documentation has gone through several transformations.

The deliverable Keyword Analysis document is on an Excel spreadsheet with several tabs. The main contents of my keyword analysis are:

1) Keyword Volume/Discovery.
2) Keyword Ranking.
3) Keyword Demand.
4) Web Analytics.
5) Keyword Difficulty.
6) Next Steps.

Keyword Search Volume and Discovery:
I use Wordtracker and cross reference with other tools like KeywordDiscovery and the Google Keyword Tool. A separate tab is created for each keyword group. International SEO demands that the foreign language Google is checked. Eg: Google.no, google.de, google.co.uk. Once all the possible keyword combinations are generated, I look for the most relevant terms that are further down the Conversion Funnel for a better return on investment (ROI). Those are the terms that I use for the next step.

Keyword Ranking:
I take the identified terms from the Keyword Search Volume Discovery tab, and plug them into Web Position. Sometimes, I double check the keyword rankings manually against Web Position. This tab is used as the Baseline Keyword Ranking.

Keyword Demand:
Next, I plug those terms from the Keyword Ranking report into a Keyword Demand Matrix. This tab contains 5 Columns: Keyword Phrase, Monthly KW Demand, Actual search referrals, Share of Search traffic, Missed opportunities.

Web Analytics:
In this tab, copy and paste the Analytics report. Basic information I like to see is Visitors, by Keywords, by Search Engine, for the last 3 months. Each month can be it’s own tab. Of course if they have conversion data, that is included. Occasionally, we need to correctly configure the Analytics software.

Keyword Difficulty & Competitiveness
At this point, I’ve usually narrowed down the keyword(s) I want to optimize for the Target URL to a couple of terms. A few factors I measure are: Domain Link Portfolio, Age of Domain, .edu .gov links, Alexa Rank, PageRank, and the Internal link percent of the Target URL.

Next Steps:
In this tab, you want to call out 3 things: Campaign Objectives, Target Keywords and their Success Metrics and the rationale behind it. The actual next steps are a Technical SEO Analysis & Recommendation document to Optimize the entire site.

My objective is to optimize the entire site for an increase in overall visitor traffic, with an additional success metric for a few specific keywords mapped to their corresponding Target URL’s.

If you’re conducting a PPC campaign that is internationally geo-targeted to specific countries, then this post is for you. Especially, if you are unfamiliar with their native language.

Let’s take a PPC campaign geo-targeting Germany. Obviously you’d want to build a keyword list in German, and run it on Google.de.

First, I tried using Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. They don’t work for building a foreign language keyword list. I generated the top 1000 search terms related to the word, “music“. The german word for music is, musik. It wasn’t listed at all. As a matter of fact, no foreign language was on the list. Just try generating a German language keywords. Or, try japanese. It’s just not happening with Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker.

Which led me to use the German Google Keyword Tool (Notice the .de extension on the url). My Google team told me within the Google Keyword Tool in Adwords, the default is United States only. “If you use the geo-targeting settings, you will be able to pull keyword data for the countries that are available. If you’d like additional ideas to the keywords that you’ve inputted, this can be done by clicking on the “Use Synonyms” option.”.

However, the Google Keyword Tool doesn’t seem to work.
I went to German Google Keyword Tool and logged in with my adwords login. Type in “music”, and “Use Synonyms” option. Surprisingly, there isn’t one german language word on the list! Google will not translate the words that are generated!

So, here’s 3 methods to generate a foreign language international keyword list.

Method #1:
You can use Google’s Keyword Tool to generate foreign language keyword lists by entering a website URL into the Keyword Tool to crawl for similar words. As a test, I used http://www.musik-service.de.

Although I have to admit, I can’t speak German, so I don’t know which of those keywords I want to bid on. Even though I can’t speak German, I’m lucky that my co-worker Carmen speaks German fluently. And, besides speaking German she is my queen of Google Analytics.

Within the tool, you can see how Google automatically groups the terms into adgroups for you. I inputted this URL into the Google Tool: http://www.realbeatz.de

Method #2:
Quantcast for “Similar sites”, then use Spyfu to mine the keywords.

Method #3:
Generate your keyword list in English, then use Yahoo Babelfish to translate all the terms.

Bottomline:
I have not been able to find a Keyword Volume Tool, similar to Wordtracker for foreign language countries. But following the above methods, you should get off to a good start.

Even after you’ve built your foreign language keyword list, unless you speak the language you won’t know how to group them into adgroups. At that point, you should make a connection with somebody who speaks the foreign language fluently.

The KEI is a component within the initial keyword analysis and is an important criteria to consider at the time you’re choosing keywords you want to optimize your site for, and the keyword competitiveness.

The Keyword Effectiveness Index is a ratio of the # Searches per month over the # of Results per month expressed as a percentage. For example: If the # Searches per month were 10,000, and the # of search results is 1,610,000, then the KEI is 0.62%.

The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, AND the less competition they have. That’s a good indication that they are gonna be easier, quicker, and less expensive to optimize than a lower KEI.

However, the KEI can be deceiving. Imagine if there are a low amount of competitors…but they had very strong inbound link profiles, and were optimized to the hilt? You’d might think by only looking at the KEI that you’d be able to perform well on this keyword, but think again. Once you’ve identified your keyword to optimize for, you’ll need to examine at least the top 10 competitors in the SERPs. And, in some cases you’ll see the first 3 pages in the SERPs dominated by very strong authoritative and SEO’ed websites.

5-Step Method to Choosing Keywords

1) Use a Keyword Generation Tool to build a keyword list of terms your website is related about.
2) Cross reference with keyword data from your web analytics.
3) Identify the keywords with a high enough search volume to make a difference.
4) Narrow the list down to the most specific & relevant terms. Perhaps you already can identify a keyword that has a high conversion rate or ROI from your PPC campaigns. Or, you can see a similar high performing organic keyword from your web analytics.
5) After you’ve narrowed your keyword list, you can apply the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) to further analyze the keyword competitiveness of each keyword before making your final decision. Although, don’t completely rely on the KEI.

Long tail keywords are typically less competitive and easier to optimize for than head terms. Long tail terms should also bring to your site more relevant and interested visitors. But, here’s the trick…If you decide to optimize long tail terms, you should use keyword phrases that are common enough that people actually use them, so they generate enough traffic to make a difference.

Depending on your business objectives, SEO budget, and keyword competitiveness, you might choose to go after Head terms instead of the Long tail terms.

“Buying Terms” that are further along in the conversion funnel should improve your chances of getting a better ROI from your SEO campaigns. A long-tail buying phrase like “buy a car stereo online”, should provide a better ROI than any Consideration term.

Choosing the right keywords can make the difference whether or not you succeed in your SEO campaigns.