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  • Choosing Effective Keywords

    When you’re using keyword marketing to optimize your site, you can run into a lot of frustrating situations. Despite your best efforts, it’s possible that the keywords you select are just not generat-ing the traffic that you need. On the other hand, sometimes keywords that work well in the beginning will just stop working. You can tell when this happens because the numbers associated with your keywords (assuming you’re using a metrics program to track them) drop without warning or explanation.

    Many things can happen to make your keywords quit being as effective as they were in the past. And many times you didn’t do anything at all to make this happen. That’s why it’s essential to regularly develop concepts, test, and implement new keywords for your PPC programs and for your web site.


    Creating your first keyword list

    The initial idea of keyword research can be daunting. Trying to come up with the perfect combination of words to drive customers to your site, improve your conversion rate, and make yourself visible to search engines could easily give you a serious tension headache. Even using some of the techniques that have been discussed in this chapter to find the right keywords and perfect your methods of research take time. It’s not something that you can just jump into today and be successful at before the sun sets. It’s far more successful if you start slowly and build your way to greater success.

    You already know that you must first create a list of potential keywords. Brainstorming and asking customers are two ways to build that list. You can also include all of the keywords that are suggested by keyword suggestion tools, and you might even consider pulling out a thesaurus to find additional words and phrases that you haven’t considered. Come up with enough words to coverall the services your site offers and avoid broad or generic terms that are so ll-encompassing they apply to every site that’s even remotely related to yours. These words are incredibly difficult to rank high with and won’t drive quality traffic to your site. Instead, focus on words that are relevant but not overly used, and always keep your eyes open for those words that are very specific but highly targeted to your site or offerings.

    When creating your first keyword list, include all of the words that you can come up with. This
    part of selecting your keywords and phrases is actually easy. You can include everything and don’t have to worry about the quality of what you’re including until later. Unfortunately, because it is so easy to create this first list, many people make the assumption that PPC marketing is easy. This first step may be, but it does get much harder as you research and qualify words and phrases and then work those words and phrases into PPC marketing programs.

    Keywords and phrases will need constant revision, so you should always be creating that “first”
    keyword list. Keep a running list of words that will apply to your site. Each time something is changed on the site, or something changes in the field that you’re in, you’ll have to go through all
    of these steps again. If you are not constantly testing, analyzing, adding to, and removing nonper
    forming keywords and phrases as appropriate, you’ll find that PPC programs that worked really
    well in the beginning lose effectiveness over time.

    You’d better believe that your competition will be constantly monitoring and revising their keyword and PPC strategies. And if you’re not regularly taking advantage of all your keyword resources, you might as well hand over your customer lists to your competition, because they’re going to end up with all of your customers anyway.

    Keywords are what draw potential customers to your web site. These potential customers are
    either visitors who are ready to buy now or they’re browsers whom you can motivate into makingn a purchase or reaching a goal conversion that you’ve established. So remember that when you’re building your initial keyword list, you’re using a little educated guessing to get started in reaching highly qualified site visitors. Later, you can rely on specific keyword-related tools and analysis to replace your educated guesses with more concrete keywords and phrases that will help you reach your goals.

    Forbidden search terms and poison words

    When you’re creating your keyword lists, it’s important to keep in mind that some search terms will result not in higher quality visitors, but instead in either a low ranking or even complete removal from search listings. These aren’t just ineffective keywords and phrases. These are what are called forbidden search termsor poison words. These words are known to decrease your pages’ rankings if a search engine finds them in your site’s title, description, or even in the URL. These words can either kill or lower your pages in rankings.

    Here’s the problem with the forbidden or poison terms: there’s really no consistent or standard list of terms to which you can turn for guidance on the words you should not use. For example, vulgar words are usually considered to be forbidden or poison; however, you can do a search for one of these words and you’ll return a fair number of results. However, using the words in your site tag- ging as a means to rank high in a search will result in your site being buried or even omitted from search results.

    So although there are no official lists of words that search engines use for filtering inappropriate keywords, you can figure out some guidelines for yourself. Two types of words have the potential to create issues for your site if you use them as keywords within the site or for PPC marketing
    purposes:

    • Vulgar words
    • Politically incorrect words (these words are especially dangerous in countries like China and North Korea where censorship is prominent).
    Despite what seems like a simple list for types of words to avoid, it’s really not that simple. Many words can be excluded or even flagged by a search engine because those words are associated with search engine spam. When it becomes apparent that a word or term seems to be used strictly to rank highly, even when included on a page full of unrelated content or links, search engines will flag that word or phrase and will consider closely the relationship to other words and links on a page before making a ranking determination. The problem with that, however, is that as soon as search engines crack down on a word or phrase, another one pops up to take over.

    Now, don’t confuse poison words with keyword poison. Keyword poison is actually the use of keywords on your site far too many times. When you’re including keywords on your site, you should use them only as often as necessary and not one time more than that. If you throw your keywords into the site randomly, you’re poisoning the search term ranks and run the risk of having your site knocked farther down in the ranking or even having it delisted completely as spam.

    Finally, forbidden search terms and poison words are different from stop words. Stop words are those words that are so common on the Web that they are usually ignored by search engines and are completely useless in your PPC programs and other keyword marketing efforts. Here’s a brief list of some of the most common stop words, though there are dozens more that might be included:

    • A
    • An
    • The
    • But
    • E-mail
    • When
    • Where
    • How
    • Free
    • If
    • And
    • While
    • Or
    An example of how stop words are ignored in a search query is the search term “the sunny beach.”As shown in Figure5-7, when this search term is used on Google, the word “the” is ignored (as indicated by its solid black coloring, and lack of linking). The words “sunny beach,” then, are the only words that are included in the search (as indicated by the blue lettering of the words and the fact that they are links).



    Forecasting search volumes
    Once you have decided on your initial keyword list — and even after you’ve narrowed the list down some — you need to begin looking at the budget that you’ll have for use with a PPC program. One way to determine how much mileage you’ll get for the budget dollars that are allocated to your PPC program is to forecast search volumes. Forecasting allows you to control your marketing expenditures by predicting the performance of your keyword choices and desired positions. Simply put, for every amount invested, a company can predict a corresponding amount in sales. Before you get too deeply into forecasting search volumes, however, you should make a determina tion about what rank will work best for you. A number one rank is not always the best strategy for everyone. You will probably need to balance the volume of your keyword costs (clicks) withthe cost per acquisition(CPA).So, for example, if it costs you $2 per click to reach a number one slot in search results and your budget is for $100 per month, then you can only afford about 50 clicks per month (volume). These 50 clicks per month don’t equate to a great volume, therefore, you might consider a slightly lower ranking in the SERPs that will generate more volume within the budget that
    you have to spend.

    On the other hand, there is an exponential decrease in the number of clicks that you’ll receive as you decrease your ranking position. In general, there is about a 20 percent difference between the first and second ranking slots on a SERP. Each ranking slot below that increases the difference, so some experts estimate that being ranked first on a SERP might produce at least 10 times the traffic generated by a tenth-ranked site.

    Using this information and your budget availability, you can decide whether it’s cost effective to stay in a lower position, or if bidding for a higher spot would net greater click potential. Here’s the biggerquestion, however. Ranking higher will result in much more traffic, but does the additional traffic result in more goal conversions? If not, then spending the extra money to reach the top ranking slot is probably a waste of money.

    Carrying over our preceding example, if you’re paying $2 per click for a top ranking that generates 50 clicks per month, but only 1 percent of those visitors make a purchase from your site, you don’t have a good conversion rate. But if you were to change your keywords a bit to make them more specific and then reduce your cost per click to $1 for a slightly lower rank (let’s say a number three ranking slot) that generates 100 clicks per month, and those 100 clicks also resulted in a 1 percent conversion, you’re still reaching more conversion goals, and therefore making more money with the lower rank than you would be with the higher rank.


    So how exactly do you forecast search volumes and the cost associated with those volumes?
    It’s best to start by researching a keyword list that includes 100 to 300 keywords and phrases. Use a varied keyword list that includes both broad and specific terms. And during your research, use both personal investigation and keyword selection tools to determine the click volume and the cost per click for each of those terms. Using this information, you can then estimate search volumes and the cost of those search volumes, but additionally you can estimate other performance metrics that will help you to determine both the cost and the value of the keywords that you’ve selected. Those additional metrics include:

    • Projected Impressions
    • Estimated Click-Through Rate (CTR)
    • Estimated Clicks per Month
    • Average Cost per Click (CPC)
    • Estimated Budget Requirements

    Using this information, you can increase the effectiveness of the budget that you invest in your PPC program. For instance, keywords with lower CPC rates typically have less ompetition than more expensive ones. If you can select some of these keywords that are more efficient for creating goal conversions, then you’ve invested less in your PPC program for better results.

    One thing that’s important to understand, as you’re estimating your search volumes and the budget that you’ll invest into your PPC program, is that all of these projections are based on historical data. This means that you should collect data about your keywords and use it to improve your PPC program effectiveness over time. Additionally, you should know that there are many other factors seasonal changes, sales, competition, and even landing pages — that can affect your actual perform ance results. This is just another reason you should plan to constantly monitor and revise your keywords and phrases and your PPC marketing efforts.

    Forecasting search volumes and budget considerations is just the first step toward creating a PPC program that both meets your needs and fits within your budget. In addition to initial forecasting, you will also need to conduct ongoing keyword testing.

    Keyword testing is the process by which you examine keywords and how many searches they’re included in, as well as what the competition for those keywords is. Once you’ve completed that research, you begin to implement your keywords on your site very slowly, monitoring the results of your site traffic and goal conversions after each new word or set of words is added.

    It’s a time-consuming activity, but keyword testing has the potential to improve your PPC program results if you take the time do it properly. Through careful testing, you can learn what your most effective keywords are; then you can use those keywords to improve your position and impressions.

    One way to start the testing process is by understanding exactly what you are testing for. Are you testing to see how effective your most recent ad copy is? How do landing pages hold up in attracting and keeping site visitors? If those landing pages are experiencing a lot of bounces, you may need to work with them to create more stickiness. Other questions you may want to answer to ensure you understand what you’re testing for include: Are visitors reaching goal conversions? Does ad placement really make a difference?

    As you’re considering keyword testing, you may decide that you just don’t have time to efficiently forecast your PPC traffic. However, not taking the time to do the testing could result in wasted budget dollars. People add keywords to their pages, but that doesn’t mean that all keywords and PPC programs will be effective. It’s necessary to go through the proper testing steps to ensure that your PPC program is as efficient and effective as possible.
    Finalizing your keyword list

    A lot of effort has gone into creating, researching, and narrowing your keyword list so far. Now it’s time to finalize that list and begin putting your keywords and your PPC programs to work for you. Finalizing your keyword list doesn’t really mean that it’s completely final. As you’ve learned already, a keyword list (as it applies to PPC programs) is an ongoing element in your PPC program. You should constantly be changing and updating your keyword list. And this can be a very time-consuming process.

    The Long Tail of Search

    he Long Tail of Search is a concept created by Chris Anderson, an editor at Wired Magazine
    Tdefines the non-competitive keywords — usually three- to five-word phrases that site visitors use find web sites. The idea of non-competitive keywords and phrases relates to the more specific ter that you can use to describe your products or information. The concept of the Long Tail of Search is you begin any search with a very broad term. For example, if you’re searching for Italian dinner recipt that term is broad enough to return far too many results to be useful.
    Using the Long Tail theory, however, the more precise and less common keywords and phrases a usually the most effective. These are located at the end of the “tail” and are represented by a ve ry small tip (as if on the end of a tail).

    Normally, a product site gets visitors by several types of keywords and phrases:

    • Product names and brands
    • General keywords and phrases
    • Long-tail keywords and phrases
    The magnificence of the Long Tail of Search is that you don’t know how effective it is until you have optimized your site and have some content on your site to attract it. Sure, there will be some Long Tail queries in your logs, but it will be only a fraction of what could be there.

    To conquer the Long Tail of Search, you need to create a rich foundation of content. The tricky part is knowing what content to create. If your focus is on providing value to your customers, it’ll be easier for you.

    To capture the Long Tail, you need to create content that not only is relevant to your product or service, but is also related to your product or service, even if the relationship is remote. You do this because you need to target not only people who know about you and your product, or who know just what they need — that’s pretty simple — but you need to attract people who have the same problems as your target audience and who are looking for a solution.

    However, there are a few things that you can do to ensure that your final keyword list is the most effective and up-to-date list available to you:

    • Remove all of the unrelated search terms from your list. An unrelated term is a termthat doesn’t apply to your site in any way. You may have words or phrases on your list for which you have no web-site content at all. You have two choices here: Either createnew content specifically for those words, or just discard the words in favor of better targeted and more efficient PPC marketing.
    • Remove words for which the competition is too high. Unless you have an unlimited budget for your PPC program, you’ll want to eliminate keywords for which the competition is fierce. You won’t gain a number one slot by eliminating broad terms, but you may find that your job in optimizing your site becomes much easier.

    • Remove any keywords that your potential audience is likely to overlook or not use at all. You can usually tell what types of keywords your potential visitor will use when searching for our site, service, or product. This also means that you should remove any words that are industry buzzwords, but that someone outside of the industry might not consider using.
    Once you’ve narrowed your words to the most relevant keywords and phrases with an acceptable amount of competition, it’s time to start putting those keywords to work. Placing the keywords in the right place and using them properly will go a long way toward making your PPC program successful. But that’s all information that’s coming up in Chapter 6.

    by:bijeshkawan
    Choosing Effective Keywords

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