Advanced Keyword Research and Google AdWords Tactics
Day 4 at Search Engine Strategies New York focused on Search Engine Marketing training. One of the downsides to a lot of conferences is that one hour sessions don’t allow a deep dive into the topics we really want to discuss. No fear here, as these are four hour long sessions. Here’s what we learned...
The ever increasing dependence on search means that we desperately need to leverage it, whether we are SEOs, SEMs, or even Social Specialists. But what keywords to use? In order to find that, you have to master the art of keyword research. Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance, fresh off of leading multiple sessions at SES, led students through a great overview of the keyword research space. The list of external keyword research tools are many, from Google’s family of Keyword Tool, Webmaster Tools, Insights, Trends, Search Based Keyword Tool, and Sets, as well as Google’s Search Options such as Related Searches and the Wonder Wheel, to Microsoft’s adCenter Labs Tools, Yahoo’s Buzz, and search sites such as Clusty, Ask.com, Quintura, to services such as WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, SEO Book, Wordspy, there are a wealth of ways to find just those keywords that are right for you. Social Media has created an enormous mountain of data that is invaluable for keyword research purposes. VisWiki, Twitter Search, Twitscoop, TweetVolume, siteVolume, Yahoo’s Sideline, TweetBeep, Twhirl are fantastic places to get keywords from Twitter and other social sites.
Let's see what happens when we use one of those tools, for example, Google's Keyword Tool, and have it pull keywords for IntraLinks.com:
| Business Sale | IT Demand Management |
| Business Software | Online Collaboration |
| Credit Card Processing Software | Online Credit Card Processing |
| Data Room | Online Payment Solutions |
| Data Rooms | SharePoint |
| Data Site | Virtual Data Room |
| Data Warehousing Solutions | Virtual Data Rooms |
| Demand Management Solution | Virtual Office |
| Due Diligence Data | Virtual Terminal |
| Due Diligence Process | Workflow Management |
| Information Exchange | Workflow Management Solution |
A lot of these keywords are spot on and directly speak to what we're doing, whether they are "Virtual Data Room", "Online Collaboration", or "Information Exchange". Some of these, like "Credit Card Processing", are just way off. So make sure you are only selecting keywords that are right for your business, don't just blindly add the entire list to your campaigns. Also, be careful about things that are too generic. Obviously, we have a SharePoint Connector, so "SharePoint" is a valid keyword for us, but it might be too broad.
Of course, once you have those keywords, what do you do with them? The most popular keywords are likely to be the most challenging for PPC advertising, in terms of competition, quality score and price. For that, you’ll need long tail terms. Hitwise’s Bill Tancer has shown that three and four word search queries are increasing in popularity, thus necessitating the use of the longer keywords in order to find that great traffic. But how do you do that? You need to expand those keywords in order to generate that delicious long tail. You can do that in a bunch of ways, whether adding comparison words, adjectives, some intended uses, product keywords, brand keywords, location keywords, and action keywords (such as “buy” and “find”). Don’t forget some other things to correct, such as misspellings, abbreviations and slang, modifiers and also plurals and synonyms. There are some useful keyword permutation tools out there that can do this for you such as Aaron Wall’s SEOBook Permutation Tool. Let's go back to Google's Keyword tool and pop in one of our keywords, "Virtual Data Room" and see what some of its suggestions are:
| Merger Acquisition | Dataroom Provider |
| M&A Data Room | Dataroom Providers |
| M&A Forum | A Virtual Data Room |
| Dataroom | VDR |
| Data Room | Free Virtual Data Room |
| Due Diligence Data Rooms | Due Diligence Engagement Letter |
Again, some big hits here, such as "Dataroom", "Due Diligence Data Rooms", "Dataroom Provider(s)" and "M&A Data Room". Some that completely miss (even though they are relevant to our company) such as "Due Diligence Engagement Letter" and "Merger Acquisition". Remember, you don’t only need to research the keywords you want to advertise on from a PPC standpoint, you also have to research the keywords you don’t want to advertise on! Known as “Negative Keywords”, you want to make sure that keywords that you don't want to appear on are blocked. If your product costs money, any keyword with “free” in it is definitely somewhere you do not want to be, for example, "Free Virtual Data Room" from the above list. If you are using a keyword which has another use that isn’t your product, you need to exclude those as well. A good example from this list is "VDR". Why? Well, you’ll find far more people typing in VDR to search for consumer electronics, as VDR is an acronym for “Video Disk Recorder”.
Your competition is an additional critical source of data. Who is showing up for your keyword terms? Even more critical, who is running PPC advertising on your keywords? Competitive intelligence is the key. The massive proliferation of competitive intelligence tools such as Hitwise, ComScore, Trellian, SEOmoz, SpyFu, Compete, SEMRush, KeyCompete, KeywordSpy and AdGooRoo can be highly useful to see what keywords are driving traffic for your competitive set.
So now you’ve got your keywords, and you’re running them on Google. What’s next? Well, you’re going to want to do everything you can to improve your ROI with Google AdWords. For that, Brad Geddes, Founder of bg Theory’s session was aptly named “Google AdWords Tactics to Improve Your ROI”.
Keywords are only a small part of the challenge. Compelling ads are critical, as Brad points out. Stick to unique selling points and benefits, which will get those consumers on those keywords you’ve carefully researched to click on those ads. Carefully test your ad copy to improve it and not only increase the click through rates, but make sure you’re improving your ultimate conversion rate. Add calls to action to your ads! Pre-qualify people, even if you sacrifice some click through rate in exchange for the increased benefit in getting better quality users to your website. When carefully reviewing ad copy, make sure to not forget the display URL. Sometimes it will look like yoursite.com, but you may want to be a bit more specific such as yoursite.com/Product to reinforce that keyword’s relevance to your site. One suggestion was to avoid www. in many cases. Capitalize, to make your words within a URL stand out.
You can also leverage dynamic keyword insertion in ads to help increase the relevance of the ad to that user’s query. One tip to dynamic keyword insertion which people forget. Let’s say you want an ad to look like: Buy {Keyword}. Seems reasonable enough, since for many keywords, you’ll be fine. But what if the keyword is “online virtual data room electronic mergers and acquisitions”? That’s going to cross the character limits. You can solve this with something like {Keyword:Data Room}, which will show “Data Room” in that ad, should it be too long. Did you know {KeyWord}, {Keyword}, {keyword}, {KEYword}, {KEYWord}, {KeyWORD}, {keyWORD} and {KEYWORD} all function differently within Google? Brad does. But beware, dynamic keyword insertion really only works well when others are not using it, lest that keyword get a bit repetitive on the search engine results page.
But what about Quality Score? Quality Score is astonishingly critical in how Google processes ads. The ad rank is simply the quality score multiplied by the max CPC. A lot goes into calculating Quality Score, for example: click through rate on Google.com, normalized by position, display URL click through rate, relevance of the keyword to the ads in a specific ad group, relevance of the keyword and ad to the search query, landing page, account performance in geographic region, account history as well as other relevancy factors.
A great trick to see what Google considers relevant for a particular keyword is to search for “~keyword –keyword” the “~keyword” portion brings back pages related to “keyword”, while “-keyword” excludes that exact keyword from the search results. Improving quality score will go a long way towards improving the ROI and ROAS of your Google AdWords accounts, and ultimately, make search engine marketing a far more successful business.