Keyword Research

Spending time researching which keywords to target for SEO purposes is imperative to the long-term success of any search marketing campaign, and yet it never fails to amaze me:

1. How few online businesses actually allocate time and resources to doing it
   
2. How misguided the research and subsequent results can be
   
3. How companies often ignore the ‘goldmine’ of existing data at their fingertips.

I would like to concentrate on (3).

We find that many of the companies who come to us for SEO advice and services have already embarked on some kind of Pay Per Click campaign, whether it be through Google Adwords or some of the other click providers. Adwords in particular gives the advertiser a wealth of information at keyword-level, including search volume, click through rates, the value of clicks and the earnings per click for individual keywords. So why not use this data and integrate it with your keyword research?

Essentially, keyword research should be used to identify viable target keywords based on:

• Search volume
  
• Relative competition
  
• Relevancy
  
• Commercial viability

Well a successful Adwords campaign can tell you the EXACT number of page views on the Google listings a search term will receive, and it enables you to spot and nurture the ‘golden’ keywords – those that convert and give you the greatest return.

So, use this data! Remember that keyword research and Pay Per Click data are not mutually-exclusive concepts and delve into those PPC stats to find the clues. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes!

In the old days when people still used to point at aeroplanes, proficient web developers were constantly optimising and measuring the loading speed of their landing pages. This was critical because, with dial-up internet connections, you could begin to load a webpage, then go for a quick cuppa, walk the hound, build a shed, and listen to Dark Side Of The Moon in its entirety before the page would finish loading.

In short, the internet was all about optimising landing page speed, and if your website loaded quicker than your competitors website, it was you who would spend the day having grapes gently lowered into your mouth by semi-naked supermodels.

Then came broadband, and we all cared less about speed, and more about graphics, video, and Flash. Image size became less important and many a bad-habit was born into Arnold the web developer who was more swayed by adding 24 dancing iguanas onto his site than optimising for load speed. After all, this is broadband.

Well, let me take you back to basics for a second to give you some news. Google looks closely at landing page speed, and although it doesn’t penalise dancing iguanas, it does give additional Adwords quality score to landing pages that load quickly.

So, next time you are assessing how you can improve your quality score, try doing a speed test on your landing page. You may not realise it is loading slowly, but Google does.

Big Brother is alive and well and living (nowehere near Elvis) in Adwords land, but many advertisers who employ Adwords managers don’t seem to know it. Now, I am going to disclose how simple it is for advertisers to check that ‘Arnold the Adwords manager’ is actually worth those 20 hours a month he has been charging for.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are some very reputable and professional Adwords and Pay Per Click management companies out there, endlessly toiling away for the good of their happy clients who are experiencing the promised land of super-conversions whilst procuring small islands in the Caribbean.

But, I have seen the work (or lack of) of too many charlatans in the PPC management space to know that all is not as it may seem. Indeed, my little ‘secret’ can be not only revealing but SHOCKING.

So, I am going to disclose the secret (to many) that the less-than-scrupulous don’t want you to know. In fact, after disclosing this, I may have to go into hiding so that these people don’t hunt me down and try to eat my head.

It is super simple (but generally overlooked):

1. Login to your Adwords account

2. Click ‘Reporting’

3. Click ‘Change History’

Voila! Now you can spy on exactly what changes have been made on your account by date and even by activity!

Has, the ‘constant optimisation’ been constant? Has the ‘ongoing split-testing’ seen any testing? Has the ‘keyword bid manipulation’ been manipulated? Now you know, and you can manage your manager’s management like a monkey in a manger.

After all, there is nothing wrong with a little transparency if you have nothing to hide…

So, I speak to a lot of affiliates.

Some have the PPC experience of a geriatric turtle whilst many are only just starting out with testing PPC campaigns, landing pages, ad-copy, and fine-tuning all of these factors as a means of maximising profit. With this in mind, one thing that never fails to amaze me is the frequency of which I speak to affiliates who have not thought through the raw figures of the campaign they are spending their hard-earned wonga on.

Let me give you an example.

I recently spoke to an affiliate who was using PPC to promote a videogame store on a sales campaign. The store paid out 5% commission and he had been told that the average order value was £26. So, it doesn’t take ‘Arnold Cleverbugger’ to calculate that every successful conversion will be worth, on average £1.30 in commission to him.

Now, videogames retailers have more competition than the Olympic Games, so there is a fair chance that conversion rates (unique visitors/number of sales) wil be no higher than, let’s be really generous, 3%. (TOP TIP: this is the conversion rate to PPC traffic, not other types of traffic that may have higher conversion rates and distort the figures.)

So, following our example, every 100 clicks purchased will yield £3.90 in affiliate commission.It follows then that the affiliate must be buying clicks for less than 3.9p per click to be showing an operating profit.

Can this be done? Possibly, but the affiiate I was speaking to had his maximum bids (all of them, as he hadn’t heard of keyword tracking/identification) set to 10p per click, paying on average 9p per click. So, for every 9p he spent, he would earn, on average, 3.9p.

Now that is a very quick way to fall out of love wth PPC, not to mention your bank manager who wants his pound of flesh and your new lady-friend who has her eye on those new Jimmy Choo footwarmers.

So, the moral is to look at the simple mathematics first and select campaigns from there. Then, with split-testing, accurate trcking, and ongoing optimisation, the rest will follow.

It really is all just very simple mathematics.