Designing a great looking website is good. Putting it on a strong information architecture is better.
Rolling out a newly optimized website is good. Checking it first is better.
Investing in SEO is good. Investing in ROI is better.
Optimizing your e-commerce site is good. Using optimized concantenation schema is better.
Keyword research is an important part of the optimization process. There are thousands of ways, tools and resources to do keyword research. Every SEO has their own methodology, favorite data and ways to organize and sort through that data in order to create solid keyword lists for their SEO campaigns.
But there is more to keyword research than just the research. You have to be able organize and sort your keywords into groups that will allow you to optimize them most effectively into your website.
This post will walk you through the organizational side of the keyword research process, using a customized keyword research spreadsheet I have created to make the process easy. You still have to do the research, but this tool helps us create keyword lists for on-page optimization.
Let’s get to it.
In the first two parts of this series, we looked first at how the online audience differs from the traditional off-line audience. There are several distinct characteristics one has to take into account before pushing content out onto the web that was designed for print.
Next, we looked at the goals of online PR in order to identify key things that online PR must do that are both similar and different from offline PR. Good writing is still good writing, whether you are on- or offline, but when writing online content, you have to treat each piece a bit differently.
Marketing on the web is demand-driven. Searchers are looking for answers. The best way to dominate the game is to become the best answer to their questions. This is why it’s important to do dynamic keyword research instead of static keyword research. (Read that post before the rest of this one)
It’s also why you don’t copy and paste the same ads into all of your ad groups talking about yourself and what makes you great.
Google has this tool called Insights for Search. At first glance, it looks like a pretty simple, fairly unsophisticated tool that just tells you if search volume is going up or down for a particular keyword or group of keywords. Not many insights there, right? I mean, all you really have to do for search engine marketing is keyword research with one of the many tools available to you out there and you can easily line up the keywords that you want to go after by search intent and volume, right?
But, here’s the problem with your keyword research. It’s static. You get a number and you compare it to other numbers at a single point in time. That’s great for that day, that month, or even that year. But as you know, your industry changes. There’s new advances, new challenges, new demands, etc.; and part of winning is staying ahead of your competition.
Engaging in competitive research before and during your SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Link Building campaigns is smart business. As they say, “information is power.”
But, too much information can also cause a handicap. It’s not too difficult to be so inundated with info. that you get information overload or conflicting advice. That leads to decision paralysis. You don’t know the right course of action to take, or you can wind up using good information to make bad judgment calls.
All right, I’ll admit, the title is somewhat over dramatic. But, when you don’t have much to offer, hype it up anyway! Kinda like the movies!
This post started from talking about How NOT To Do An Interview: The Basics. What was originally going to be an intro paragraph turned into a full post. When this happens, I just do what I often do… take one idea and make multiple posts out of it. Love it!
What follows are 15 questions I felt were important for a business audience to know about SEO. And, now that I know what I meant when I wrote them (see introduction), I can provide the answers I intended. 
Here are questions 1-5:
In my last post, I shared using a fishing metaphor to talk about stepping your PPC game up to the point where you know how to use it to build your online business for the long haul. So, let’s start looking at some of the “tricks of the trade” to do just that.
Trick #1 – Use Keywords Correctly
A great misnomer among PPC advertisers is the belief that the foundation to success for an account is found in picking the right keywords. While picking good keywords is important, it’s not the foundation. The foundation is knowing how to use keywords to find search queries that you can use to attract customers to your website. That’s right, keywords are different than search queries. Search queries are the phrases that real users actually type into the search engines. Remember, keywords are like nets that you throw into Search Engine Sea to find the fish (search queries) that you will then use to prepare dinner.
One of the great things about PPC advertising is its immediacy. You can start running ads right now and see almost instantaneous results; whether good, bad or just ok. But, the trap that we don’t want to fall into when running our accounts is limiting our thinking just to what can be gained right now. The fact is, PPC is a great way to help build all areas of your online business long-term. And with the continuous expansion of features and avenues being offered in this channel today, the possibilities continue to grow.
But for this series of posts, I want to focus on keyword advertising. I want to take you through a theoretical progression of how solid PPC search campaigns are started, developed and used to build a foundation for the long-term growth of your brand and website.
Operating an online business has a lot of advantages over brick and mortar shops. But, contrary to what many believe, being online is not the holy grail of business success. Brick and mortar stores have been successful, to varying degrees, for millennia. Comparatively, the web is barely a twinkly in Al Gore’s eye.
Unfortunately, many would-be business owners plunge ahead in this new marketplace as if it were some magic beans that will suddenly grow into a giant money tree. To be fair… for some, it has. But for the most part, these online business successes are rooted in the old-school business brick and mortar business philosophies. What has changed are the methods of marketing and advertising used to generate new and repeat business.
(Don't wait for the movie!)
E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing & Marketing Your Website Online
