Natural Search Blog


New Tool to Annualize Google Keyword Data

Do you use Google’s AdWord Keyword Tool for your keyword research? If not, you might be missing out. Like all keyword research tools, it may not be the end all be all, and it isn’t without its own little quirks, but it is still rich keyword data whether you use it on its own or in relation with the other keyword tools you are using.

Google has modified the tool over time, and one of the great additions was the ability to see the monthly demand via a small little bar chart. This can be very useful for factoring in seasonality or growing demand for certain phrases. Wrapping your head around the actual numerical data is a bit more challenging. The Local number is just for the most recent month while the Global number is a monthly average. This is further complicated in that the Global number includes the world essentially while the Local number may factor in your campaign settings and locality (based on your AdWords campaign configuration).

To help tighten up data and provide a little more insight into the Local numbers, I just released an Excel spreadsheet that can take your Google Keyword Tool’s export and annualize the Local demand numbers. In some cases, this may dramatically change the order of importance of keywords to target.

Best of all, this tool is free to use so give it a play. The link below will take you to the download page for the tool as well as more detail about how it works and an example.

Google Keyword Tool Annualizer

Key to Relevance: Title Tags

I recently penned an article at Search Engine Land on Leveraging Reverse Search For Local SEO. In it, I describe how in certain exception cases, one may benefit from adding the street address into a business site’s TITLE tag. It’s not the first time that I have mentioned how TITLE tags are key to relevance in Local Search — I’d previously mentioned how critical it is for local businesses to include their category keywords and city names in the TITLE as well.

Yet, a great many sites continue to miss this vital key to relevance, and they wonder why they fail at ranking for their most apropos keywords. Keywords for which they’d otherwise have a very good chance at ranking upon!

Key Relevance: Title Tags
W3C calls the TITLE the “most important element of a quality web page” (more…)

Should Businesses Rename Themselves For Better Search Traffic?

Mike Blumenthal has a great article this week, going over some aspects surrounding how businesses may opt to rename themselves for purposes of local search engine optimization within Google Maps.

As he mentioned, I’d previously listed this idea in my somewhat tongue-in-cheek post on “Extreme Local Search Optimization Tactics” some time back.

While my Tactics were intended to be a bit over-the-top, the tactic is indeed likely to work to varying degrees in different search engines and internet yellow pages directories, as Mike outlines. I should note that I only endorse the engineering of business names for purposes of branding and for purposes of targeting business-category/product/service terms for which the company involved is actually providing. (more…)

AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran

The San Francicso leg of the American Marketing Association’s Hot Topic Series on Search Marketing this past Friday was really great! The crowd was intimate, which allowed all of us speakers to mingle and have some quality discussions with folx, and the seminar/conference/workshop was excellently organized.

Read on for more details about the AMA Hot Topic Series day’s sessions.

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Sneak Peek: Chasing The Long Tail of Natural Search

Phew – After 7 long months slogging away, we will finally officially release the long awaited white paper “Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search” next week Monday (Aug 7th) at SES San Jose and the Etail Philadelphia show.

One is always a little cautious about postulating grand theories into the wide world. But after studying over 1 million unique unbranded keywords across 25 major retailer search programs, we couldn’t resist – referring to the concept we outline as “Page Yield Theory.” This is an underpinning notion that the “long tail” of unbranded search keyword traffic is inextricably linked to the website’s number of uniquely indexable site pages. To those of us who subscribe to the “every-page-should-sing-its-own-song” philosophy, that seems like an obvious statement.

Yet the challenge behind it, and the impetus for the research, arose from the fact that many (unoptimized) well-branded multichannel retailers have 10’s/100’s of thousands of unique and indexed website pages. However most of their natural search traffic (usually over 90%) comes from searches related to their own company name. How could such strong brands and massive websites produce such little traffic for generic terms, terms other than the company name?

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How much traffic does the top keyword position garner on Google?

Have you ever wondered how much traffic the top keyword position on Google can bring a site, for a hotly-contested term? Or, how much traffic does the top slot get you, compared with the second slot?

Most of the major SEOs and top companies keep such figures as closely-guarded secrets. Even the search engines keep the numbers of searches by various keywords secret, using various techniques to hide actual values.

The much-touted Eye Tracking Study conducted by Enquiro and Did-It show that the first listings on Google SERPs are looked at and clicked upon the most by users. Most pros already concluded this through common sense, but it’s difficult to get actual traffic amounts associated with the rankings of listings on SERPs.

I’m going to change this situation right here, right now, thanks to new data that Google has graciously begun providing to the public, and thanks to a brief reshuffling of rankings on a top keyword for one of the sites that I manage. Read on, and I’ll elaborate.

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The Keyword Index Is Out: $1.39, On Avg.

Interestinghttp://battellemedia.com/archives/002496.phpFathom’s quarterly index is out, and prices “eased� a bit (3%). Average keyword price is $1.39. From the release:
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Google’s new keyword suggestion tool

Undoubtedly the brand new Google Suggest service was built for the benefit of users not SEOs (search engine optimizers), but us SEOs can certainly appreciate the elegance and utility of Google’s new creation. The way Google Suggest works: start typing and it suggests search keywords. With a few keystrokes you have alternate search terms (keywords) to consider chasing in your SEO efforts. For example, if you’re an online music store going after “buy cds” as a keyword you can quickly see that “buy cd” and “buy cds online” are two alternative keywords to potentially chase as well. Just to the right of each search term is the number of search results competing for that search term. Looks a like it could be sorted in order of search popularity, too. Thanks, Google!

http://masterconsistency.ru/

Google Desktop: Total Search Recall

Google Desktop Search gives customers “Total Search Recall” capabilities – altering search engine optimization as we know it

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Dubious data from Trellian’s keyword research tool

On the face of it, Trellian’s PrioritySubmit.com keyword research tool is quite cool. Paying subscribers can get a full year’s worth of historical keyword popularity data. Finally, a way to quantify the seasonality of various keyword markets!

However, I have to say after using it, I’m not real impressed. The main problem I have with it is that I just don’t find their data to be believable. Too many discrepencies, too many gaps. Let me show you some specifics…

For starters, witness a huge spike in searches for “Christmas shopping” mid-year. Then it’s relatively flat during the Christmas buying season?!? This next one leaves me totally incredulous: no activity whatsoever throughout the year for the search term “holiday shopping” except April, May, and, to a lesser extent, December. Finally, for the very popular search term “shopping,” the month of April appears to have been totally lost.

Christmas shopping keyword search popularity
holiday shopping keyword search popularity
shopping keyword search popularity

So, although the PrioritySubmit tool sounds good in theory, until their data starts looking a lot more credible, I’ll be relying on WordTracker, Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool, and Google’s Keyword Sandbox for studying keyword popularity with search engine users. (In case you’re curious, according to Overture’s tool, keyword searches across Yahoo! and the rest of Overture’s network during the month of October for “Christmas shopping” was 13985, for “holiday shopping” was 2751, and for “shopping” was 2273098.)

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