Internet Marketing Blog

Given enough time, personnel, and money it is theoretically possible to improve rankings on just about any keyword. However, few us have the luxury of unlimited resources. Under ordinary circumstances, we have to choose what keywords are likely to provide the most benefit for the least effort. This is where assessing competitiveness is so critical: […]

Google recently released their 2007 edition of Zeitgeist, an assessment of popular search terms and trends for the year. While this has little actual utility for most organizations, it is entertaining.
Among our observations of their observations:

Searches spiked for several notable events, including Anne Nicole Smith’s death, the Virginia Tech shooting, nude photos of Vaness Hudgens […]

Google’s Webmaster Tools shed light on how your website is seen by Google and do various indexing-related tasks.
Like the Yahoo Site Explorer we described earlier,  the best functionality is limited to those who can upload a file and thus “verify” themselves as site owners. Once you have done so, you’ll be able to do the […]

Today I was conducting some keyword research on specific health topics, and I was collecting data from the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. As noted in previous posts, the tool’s stemming can result in significant ambiguity. Another big problem is that the data comes from Yahoo’s search network which Search Engine Marketers like us often request […]

I’ve been doing keyword research for a client and found this little gem of a bug (feature?) in the Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. Try searching on “space background” and compare the results to what you find with “space backgrounds”. Note the first result in each case (as of May 31, 2006) shows 70,799 searches. Well, […]

I took a brief look at Google Trends in a previous post. A recent blog comment over at SEOmoz has me thinking more about its potential utility.
Stemming
The comment points out how Google Trends is a great stemming research tool using this example. While the trends tool doesn’t provide absolute traffic statistics, their is substantial […]

Search Engine Watch has been playing with the new Google Trends tool.
I was eager to see what kinds of numbers it provides. Answer: none. Everything is shown relative to itself, no absolute numbers, no keyword versus keyword statistics.  However, if you want to know what cities, regions, or languages dominate a keyword, you can now […]

Google has made their traffic estimator accessible without an AdWords login. The tool is a bit misnamed in that it estimates ad clicks and costs; it does not provide an estimate of the number of queries.
It may be possible to elicit some useful keyword statistics from this tool, particularly the relative popularity of different search […]

What other explanation can there be? For at least the past month, Overture’s keyword suggestion tool has not shown any results for keywords that include “analysis”. According to the tool, there are not enough searches on business analysis, keyword analysis, data analysis, etc. to register. This is obviously wrong. Note that it does work for […]

Remember these numbers:

Pre-owned cars - 2,124 searches
Used cars - 1,143,275 searches

One of the maxims of product marketing is that it is very difficult and expensive to educate potential customers, hence it is usually better to describe products with language already in use for similar products: Less differentiation and more imitation. This is particularly true for […]