Archive for the 'Keyword Research' Category

Yahoo search trends

Friday, November 19th, 2010

Yahoo! Clues is a new tool that offers insight into search trends. Think of it as a version of Google Trends that only provides a month’s worth of data. It does try to provide additional demographic information such as gender and income breakdown, but this data almost certainly only applies to the very small portion […]

Customers are right, you’re wrong

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

You know your products and services inside and out. This knowledge can be a critical challenge when communicating with customers. They may not be experts, or they have a perspective and terminology that’s different from yours. The good folks over at SPOS recently wrote about this and gave an excellent example: Customer language is often […]

Google synonyms and natural language processing

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Google just blogged about synonyms as they related to searcher intent. They provide several examples of how a concept as simple as a synonym complicate natural language processing. This also brings up some important recommendations for site owners with respect to SEO. Prospective customers type in all kinds of variations on your most obvious keywords […]

See what users search on in AdWords

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

AdWords has added the ability to see what keywords are triggering ad impressions without running a Search Query Report. Simply open up an ad group to view the keywords, and a button will appear above the keyword list that says “See search terms….” Clicking on it will present you with two options where you can […]

Keywords as markets for SEO and PPC

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

This post was prompted by many discussions with clients in which we attempt to summarize SEO and PPC performance in practical, easily digestible forms. There is frequently a tendency for clients to oversimplify evaluations to “it works” or “it doesn’t” based upon summary data. For SEO, we try to summarize performance in terms of increases […]

Finding Negative Keywords

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Here’s a tip for finding negative keywords for PPC campaigns as well as websites to link to for linking campaigns. Set up Google Alerts for those keywords your advertising on. Depending on the popularity of your keyword(s) you should start receiving emails from Google pretty quickly with links to various articles, blogs and websites. It’s […]

Assessing keyword competitiveness

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

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 Zeitgeist 2007

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

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 […]

Using Google Webmaster Tools

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

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 […]

More Caveats for the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool

Monday, June 5th, 2006

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 […]