Whether your search marketing campaigns are managed in-house or outsourced to a specialist agency, there are many useful tools you should be aware of, some of which I will be exploring in this post.
Keyword research is the most important element to get right in your search strategy, way before looking at website architecture, internal linking or URL structure. Keywords are the foundation of your paid search campaign and key to natural search.
Below is a list of some keyword research tools you should be considering.
Keyword research tools
Google UK keyword research tool
Useful for determining the traffic volume for your target keywords, helping you decide which keywords to target. It also gives approximate search volumes for broad, phrase and exact match searches, volume trends and advertiser competition.
Search volumes for the broad match term holidays (click to enlarge)
Google’s keyword tool is telling us that there were approximate 20 million ‘Broad match’ impressions for ‘holidays’ in the UK. We can refine this option further by changing the Match Type filter to ‘Exact match’ which gives a more realistic view of the search volume.
Search volumes for the exact match term 'holidays'
The above shows us the ‘Exact’ match search volume for ‘holidays’. We can see that the exact match search volume for the UK is at 1 million impressions and the peak month historically for the search term ‘holidays’ is in June. If we compare to the broad match example the peak month for traffic was January and July. As you can see, seasonality has a big part to play in search volumes.
But ‘holidays’ is a pretty generic search term, so the next step might be to research into some more specific destination based keywords, find out where the peak demands are and make sure you can attract some of that traffic through to your website and most importantly, service visitors needs with offers and content relating to those destination terms.
A useful tool for keyword expansion by looking at synonyms on a graph. So we do a search for holidays and it brings up the following screen:
Keyword Map for the search term holidays
The bottom right branch shows the different keywords related to ‘holidays’, the bottom left and top right shows us additional keywords with holidays. If we click on walking holidays, this updates the image to the following:
Keyword Map for the search term walking holidays
Great! we are starting to get more specific and its helping to identify some keywords for consideration. Visually this tool will give the user a better understanding of where to group keywords in paid campaigns and similarly for natural search the key phrases to target in your web copy.
Other free keyword tools:
* Online thesaurus - great for finding further synonyms
* Online dictionary - great for creative inspiration
* Log analysis & website analytics - Fantastic free source of keyword research
The free keyword research tools mentioned above are great to get your search campaigns off the ground; however you will always need to do more than just basic keyword research. Organisations planning to launch new products, additional services or into new markets will need to go beyond keyword research and look at competitive intelligence.
Also, once you identify your keywords its important to considering just how competitive each keyword is. Chances are ‘holidays’ is super competitive and a tough target, but more specific destination based keywords may be more achievable and therefore providing a better return on investment.
Paid keyword tools & resources
Wordtracker Is one of the most popular external sources of keyword research data, its database is sourced from several meta engines, slightly different to Google’s source where they gather data from the impressions generated by their advertisers.
The data from Wordtracker accounts for less than 1% of all online searches, however this is still a useful tool for keyword research as it often includes additional keywords Google may have missed out, but are still worth considering. It may also help to confirm trends that you may have uncovered in other keyword research tools.
Other useful features of this tool includes the level of competitiveness of a keyword based on the number of search results.
This tool is fantastic for gathering intelligence on your competitors, although not exclusively a keyword research service and comes at a cost. The kind of data that Hitwise can retrieve includes:
Keyword gap analysis - Analyse keywords that is driving traffic your competitors site from both paid and natural search. Once you identify the gaps, you can:
* add missing keywords into your paid search campaign
* target high volume search terms in your organic campaigns
Upstream traffic - Measure the most popular websites that send visitors to your competitors and not to you.
Why is upstream data useful?
For example, you are one of the top 5 retailers in the UK, and you want to analyse the upstream of traffic to amazon.co.uk, one of your main competitors.
From the list of referring sites driving traffic to your competitors, you could consider using further tactics to capitalise on some of this traffic for your own site. For example you could:
1. Use an online PR strategy to place content on these sites, a) with the intention of driving additional traffic and b) for the natural search by embedding links within the articles placed on the referring sites
2. Consider site targeting as part of Google Adwords.
In Summary
The above tools will give an indication of potential traffic volume, to measure the success of these keywords you should be using analytics to measure the performance and understanding how these keywords related to user journey on your website.
As with most tools they are not all 100% fool proof, sometimes Google’s tool will even leave out the most obvious keyword combinations which need human intervention.
By using a combination of free and paid tools along with common sense and a bit of work you will have a extensive keyword list to kick-start your search marketing campaigns, allowing you to better focus your efforts.
And if you know of any other useful search marketing tools then why not post a comment and share them!
Tags: Chee Lo, natural search, paid search
