Foundations of eMarketing Chapter 1

Keyword Research, Targeting and Tracking

“If it’s worth doing it’s worth measuring”

Dan Jondron

The Problem: Most companies have optimized their websites for key phrases that they think are the phrases that people use to find their product or service when they haven’t actually done the keyword research to insure that they’re targeting the right phrases. (I wrote this article originally in 2005, taught this topic to companies around the globe and yet this is still frequently overlooked. This is the 2011 update. If you’ve already got this nailed, it’s still worth a quick read for information about the tracking spreadsheet.)

So why oh why would want to be reading an article about Keywords? It gives you an excuse to put your feet up on the desk, sip that iced tea or coffee and learn something that can move your company forward in the branding and marketing arena with very little effort or cost. The good news is that so many companies miss this basic piece that you have nowhere to go but up. When your boss sees the increases in requests coming off the ‘Net and he knows he didn’t have to add bodies to the budget, he will think you have been working very, very hard. That’s a good thing.

Let’s skip right to the goodies now. Our project for today is foundational. If you haven’t already done so, you need to create a relatively simple spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is the basic tool you are going to use to track two things for the rest of your eMarketing career, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and position and Pay Per Click (PPC). If you expand on it just a bit you can use it to create a pretty clean dashboard of graphs that will track the most important aspects of the internet side of your business. Smaller businesses (all businesses, really) can use impeccable tracking of metrics to quickly get a handle on what works and what doesn't, adjust strategies quickly and measure the success of those adjustments. (See Harvard Business Schools, Competing on Analytics. http://hbr.org/product/competing-on-analytics/an/R0601H-PDF-ENG)

Do this. (Note: I use 'keywords' and 'key phrases' interchangeably.)

First, write a list of all the key phrases that you can think of for your product mix. Let’s use my favorite as an example; Sparkplugs. Your key phrase list would consist of phrases like spark plugs, sparkplugs, spark plug, sparkplug, Honda sparkplug, igniter, iridium spark plug, NGK, Champion, iridium sparkplug, etc. In the first column of the spreadsheet, enter all of these key phrases. Note that I have included sparkplug as one word and as two words. It matters.

Next, Set up an account at www.adwords.google.com. You can use your own credit card for this if the boss is out of town, because we aren’t going to spend any money with it. We are going to use it to track down some additional key phrases and get the numbers of actual searches per month for each of these key phrases. Once you are in and have established an account, go to keyword tools and start entering your brainstormed key phrases one at a time. The Google key word tool will tell you how often searches are performed for your key phrases and suggest additional key phrases. Add the additional ones to your spreadsheet. You may obviously need to start grouping the phrases by general topic, for instance spark plug types vs. spark plug brands.

In the second column of your spreadsheet enter the number of times per month that each key phrase is utilized. For one company that had a relatively narrow range of products we ended up with several hundred key phrases, for a retailer selling all performance parts for almost all performance makes and models we had fifteen thousand key phrases by the time we completed the keyword spreadsheet. You want to be thorough because you may very likely use some of the more obscure key phrases due to lower competition for these phrases.

Finally, Create columns to track your rankings on some of the search engines. There are a number of tools available that you can use or you can actually go to each site and type in the key phrase. One free site is http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/. There are a number of software packages and paid sites that do a more thorough job. SEOMOZ, an eMarketing consultancy has one at www.seomoz.org.

You are going to check your rankings on each of the search engines you choose. See the example below:

Key Phrase	Searches/Month	Google	Yahoo	Google	Yahoo
		1/2011	1/2011	6/2011	6/2011
NGK Spark Plug	3862	3	5	2	5
Performance Plug	4190	0	0	0	0
Honda Sparkplug	5583	0	0	23	0
Champion Spark Plug	5600	2	0	1	1
Oxygen sensor	6325	0	0	0	0
spark plug	10456	16	0	14	10

These are clearly important key phrases for this business as evidenced by the number of searches/month performed for each. In the example above, you can see that through a combination of good SEO, appropriate Pay Per Click and a bit of luck that we moved up 1 point for “NGK Spark Plugs” over the five month period at Google. We went from non existent to first at Yahoo for “Champion Spark Plug”, climbed two points for “spark plug” at Google and also did very well for the same key phrase at Yahoo. When you multiply these incremental position increases by the number of times a search is performed, the resulting traffic is significant.

Again, these charts are the foundation for all future eMarketing projects. If you want to build traffic to a number of different websites, then you need to build a sheet for each website. In future articles we’ll expand on this simple format so that you can use it to track all ebusiness-critical metrics and provide at-a-glance dashboards for decision makers.

After over a decade of user studies it’s still clear that the majority of users are unable to determine a paid search engine result from an organic search engine result (I know, duh, right?). In the most recent surveys approximately 60% of users will prefer an organic result to a paid ad. The significance of this is that you can’t ignore either. Some 75% of users will find your websites through directories and search engines. Unless you’re going to ignore about half your market, you must do both search engine optimization AND run Pay Per Click advertising. Obviously the Pay Per Click ads have to be generally cost effective which will be covered in a subsequent chapter. What this means to you is that your keyword research is a critical and integral part of both efforts. For now, we’ll focus on organic or natural search results.

Basic Search Engine Optimization
Search engines vary in the way they use the information on your website to rank your pages in natural search results. Clearly, site popularity for a given key phrase is the most important aspect for search engine ranking. But what does that mean exactly? It’s simple if all you sell is NGK spark plugs. Seemingly all you have to do is rank well for the key phrase ‘NGK spark plugs, meaning you have to be one of the most popular websites on the Net for that phrase. To get top ranking, more people would have to come to your site when looking for the ‘NGK spark plugs’ phrase than any other site. Simple. But if you’ve just launched your website you’ll be ranked one of the least popular sites for that term because no one has been there yet! And if you sell lots of different products or services then you have the issue of a very complex keyword set. Page content, some invisible to the reader, helps the search engines decide the value of your site for specific searches.

Page titles. What does it say in when you hover over the title tab for your website? This is controlled by a tag within the code called, duh, the title tag. The title tag is an important way for search engines to determine the relevance of your website to a particular search. The earlier the key words appear in your title tag, the higher your ranking (generally) for that key word. If your title bar says, Welcome to the fantastic website of Wingding Industries, maker of tail lights for your car and truck, then your title tag is optimized for the words “Welcome”, “to”, “the”, fantastic”, in that order. Use your keyword master spreadsheet to position your important keywords toward the beginning of your title tag. If ‘tail lights’ is your important key phrase, then try “Tail lights for your car and truck made by Wingding Industries”. Try this yourself. I just punched in the key phrase, “Chico Restaurants” in the Google Search Engine. Chico is a small town in Northern California, population 90,000 or so. Yahoo lists 324 restaurants in Chico and they’re missing quite a few. Page one at Google lists 9 websites that are lists of Chico restaurants and only one actual restaurant, The Italian Cottage. Looking at the source code for the Italian Cottage website, the title tags, meta keyword tags and meta description all say,
“The Italian Cottage Restaurant in Chico California - Italian Cottage”
In fact, this phrase is repeated several times in each location. They could and should have written a better description tag, which we’ll cover in a moment, but there’s no doubt about why they’re the only restaurant website that shows up for this phrase.

Meta Keyword Tags. Despite the fact that Google no longer uses Meta Tags to determine relevancy to a particular search, some other search engines do. This issue isn’t as important as it used to be, but there’s no good reason to leave them out. In your web page code there is an HTML tag called, “Meta Tags”. This is an area of the code where you can list all of your important key words or phrases, thereby increasing the possibility of a higher position when someone searches for those words and phrases. It is recommended that you don’t use a particular key word more than 3 or 4 times as you may be penalized by the search engines for trying to spam them.

Meta Description Tag
From the official Google Webmaster Central Blog
“Why does Google care about meta descriptions?
“We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet (sic). And it's worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't affect your ranking within search results.”

OK, let’s translate: Although the description tag doesn’t affect your Google ranking, the description that you write shows up in the Google search results between the title tag for your website and the actual URL, but ONLY if the key phrase that the searcher used is ALSO in your description tag, OTHERWISE (sorry for the caps) Google will snatch some text off of your webpage to display as the description. So how then do you write a good description tag and what is its value?

The value of a good description tag is to increase user click throughs to your website. It is ad copy! If you’re a chocolate chip cookie company your description tag might say, “Our chocolate chip cookies are so awesome and affordable that once you’ve tried them, you won’t want any other.” Google truncates descriptions over about 155 characters, so you have to live within that parameter. In this case if someone entered the search term ‘peanut butter cookies’ your description copy would still show up due to the word ‘cookies’. If they used ‘crunchy deserts’ as a search term, Google would grab content off your webpage to display instead of the meta description you wrote (although your odds of even showing up in the first few pages of search results would probably be minimal unless you have content about ‘crunchy deserts’ on your web page). Got it? It’s a valuable opportunity to get users to actually look at the search results and click on YOUR link instead of someone else’s.

Content. Content has become increasingly important for a number of reasons. First, it is our belief from monitoring all of the various search engine commentators that key words that appear high on the webpage in text format are utilized by the search engines to determine relevancy of the site for those key words. In other words, if you are a site whose important key words include sparkplugs and oxygen sensors, those words should be used in the text that appears near the top of your web page. If those words are imbedded in a flash box or some other script format, chances are the search engines won’t be able to utilize it.

Secondly, the more content you have about a particular subject, again let’s use sparkplugs as the example, the more relevant the page actually is to the person searching for information about sparkplugs. Your site will gain in popularity among those looking for sparkplug information and will therefore be ranked higher by the search engines when they display results for sparkplug-related searches. This is true for content that is in the form of chats, forums and blogs as well.

One further point about search relevancy. It is a process. If you do a really great job on your page titles and meta tags and provide valuable content for a particular topic, over time, your website will continue to rise in the search results. Success begets success for search results ranking. Consider you website from the user’s perspective. Do you have information that the user wants and needs? If not, address that issue.

Let me mention one further idea. You can’t rank highly for a huge amount of diverse keywords, but you can build web pages targeting a specific topic. If you sell Sparkplugs and Oxygen sensors, you might want to build a set of pages devoted to sparkplugs and a second set of pages devoted to oxygen sensors. You can build these within a single URL or develop separate URL’s for each topic.

Next up:
Chapter 2 - Expanding the keyword master spreadsheet to track additional business critical metrics.
Chapter 3 – Pay Per Click Ad Management

Thanks and stay tuned!