In Paid Search, Keywords Are Key by Kevin Lee, 24 November 2006

Email

From: Kevin Lee, Did-it

To: Susan Webster, Virginia Veg

Susan,

Search marketing is one of the most powerful forms of advertising for an Internet business. Imagine a television commercial that interrupts a viewer’s show the second he or she thinks about your product or a print ad that pops up when a customer wants to buy your product. That is the power of pay-per-click advertising. When a user searches for a term or phrase that relates to your business, your ad appears. And you pay only when a user clicks on your ad.

But those ads appear only on the terms and phrases you select. In other words, when it comes to paid search, keywords are key.The more keywords you have that your customers are searching for, the more business you get.

So how do you find the right keyword lists? You start at the beginning. What is your business about? What does your website and other advertising copy say? What do you think your customers are searching for? For Virginia Veg, you can easily build a quick keyword list. Your site appeals to vegetarians who want to buy vegetarian food for their dogs. Keywords that obviously jump out are “vegetarian,” “dog food,” and “vegetarian dog food.”

There are a number of free and paid-for services that will help you extend your keyword lists. Let’s look at Overture, Google’s Keyword Sandbox, and Wordtracker.

Overture

The pay-per-click search engines all have their own keyword research tools. Overture—which provides PPC results for Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, and other search engines—provides keyword data from the previous month. Enter a term and Overture will tell how many people searched for that term in the previous month, and how many people searched for all variations of that term. Clicking on any variation will drill down into that term, telling how many people searched in the past month for variations of that keyword or phrase.

Clicking away in Overture’s Inventory Tool provides a large number of possible keywords, down to the “tail end” of the search distribution, where you encounter terms so rarely searched for that Overture doesn’t even bother listing them. Of course, since related terms always include your original term, you need a basic keyword list to get started. Using your original keywords, you should be able to grow a large list from Overture - and quickly pick out the most promising words. I can see that your potential customers are also searching for “natural,” “premium,” “raw,” “organic,” “healthy,” and “homemade” dog food. Many users are even searching for vegetarian dog food – and some obviously couldn’t find any and were looking for recipes to make their own.

Google’s keyword sandbox

Google also has a keyword tool, called the Keyword Sandbox, which differs from the Overture tool in many significant ways. Overture’s tool is very helpful in determining what keywords were popular in the past month. Keywords that do well seasonally might get left out if you do keyword research at the wrong time. Google’s Sandbox uses lifetime data to give keyword suggestions – but doesn’t give any popularity data. More types of keyword suggestions are returned with the Sandbox, including more specific terms, similar terms, and additional keywords. Fewer keywords are usually gained via this method, as you can’t drill down as easily as in Overture. However, you don’t need to start with as many words as Overture requires, as you will get keyword results that are related to your original terms without containing those terms.

Using Google’s Sandbox, you’ll find that most searchers look for specific brands of dog food online. Many dog owners also looked for general nutrition information or recipes for their dogs. The Google Sandbox also reminds us that “vegans” are looking for appropriate dog food as well.

Wordtracker

One of the most powerful tools for keyword research is the subscription-based Wordtracker. Wordtracker provides lateral data based on titles, meta information, and body copy of similar pages online, along with a thesaurus to find synonyms. Once you find words that relate to your business, you can see popularity data for those terms based on the Wordtracker database.

Wordtracker also allows you to drill down into any related keyword to see more related and specific terms and phrases. Wordtracker is perfect for pay-per-click marketers, as it allows you to add desired keywords to your basket as easily as shopping in an online store. Wordtracker data includes misspellings, word stemming, word separation and compression, pluralization, and many other word forms. You can even compare the number of keyword searches to the number of competing pages in that engine to determine a competitiveness score for that keyword in the organic search results. Wordtracker helps you work with multiple project support, extensive reporting, and the ability to email keywords.

Using Wordtracker, you can pick up popular misspellings of vegetarian (vegatarian) and variations of “dog food” (dogfood). You can also find that customers want comparisons of dog food brands and even “holistic” dog food. Those same searchers also looked for “organic” and “certified” dog food, and were in search of places to buy it from.

With all this data, you will be able to craft a paid-search campaign that will quickly draw the right types of customers to your site. While some longer, more detailed phrases will bring in only a few customers a month, thousands of those terms combined can create a very successful campaign. Revisit these tools every month, looking for new trends and capitalizing on terms and phrases you had previously ignored, and drop keywords that don’t work.

This is page seven of the HMTL version of Wordtracker's Free Keyword Research Guide.

Keyword Research Guide in PDF

Contents

• Introduction
• Why Keywords Matter by Ken McGaffin
• What You Can Do With Wordtracker by Ken McGaffin
• Not This Saturday (offline keyword research) by Ken McGaffin
• Convert Traffic Using Wordtracker by Bryan Eisenberg
• It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Emotion by B.L. Ochman
• Gauge the Size of the Market by Stephen Mahaney
• In Paid Search, Keywords Are Key by Kevin Lee
• Find the Keywords and You’ll Find the Marketplace by Ken McGaffin
• The Wordtracker Breakthrough by John Alexander
• Adopt a Healthy Position by Neil Davidson
• Designing an Online Marketing Strategy by Robin Good
• Only People Buy by Nick Usborne
• Where To Use Your Keyword Phrases by Ken McGaffin