SEO World

It’s important when you start your keyword research that your first few keyword lists are created using a broad keyword as the seed. If you start with too long tail or niche of a keyword, you won’t be able to come up with enough viable (and actually searched for!) variations. It’s also important to not let company ego get in the way when conducting keyword research and only use keywords the management likes.

Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!

For more keyword research lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing keyword research video lesson archive.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal

So you have determined that SEO is right for your company website. You have also come to the realisation that SEO is a full time job and takes a lot of effort, time and expertise. So, the next step is researching and short-listing SEO agencies. Here are some tips on what to look for when short-listing and researching SEO companies:

1. Case-studies of clients

How do you know if an SEO company is the real deal if they don’t have any case studies examples or success stories? You want to make sure that an SEO company has a reputable reputation and has evidence of its strong performance, so take the time to check out any testimonials or client case-studies that they may have on their website. But beware that some SEO companies have testimonials that are not valid ie. using testimonials of their OWN websites. On another note, it is all well and good to have client examples on a website, but are they performing well? Do a quick search on Google and type in some keywords for that particular client and see how they rank on Google.

2. Keep an eye out for spam ‘SEO Professionals’

We all receive a flood of spam email every day. Try and stay away from overseas / spam email “SEO Professionals” that look particularly suss, as there have been known cases of clients having their site hacked with spam codes and the entire site wiped off Google’s index. If you are dealing with an out of country SEO provider that turns out to be a cheat you will generally have very little chance of prosecution or recovery of your money. Even at Arrow we receive emails all the time from SEO companies who will use scare tactics, such as “Your site map is incorrect and missing – get help today” These dodgy emails are very general and not looking at your specific case. Our advice is to keep your con blinkers on and stick to the legitimate seo experts.

3. Proof is in the pudding

If you go to a hair dresser you generally assume that the hairstylist has a great haircut – right? Well, the same goes for when researching SEO companies. Type in ‘SEO Company” or ‘SEO [insert city]” into Google. It is a very good sign when an SEO company can get themselves a high ranking on Google. If they can’t do it for themselves, can they really do it for you? Proof is in the pudding!

4. Don’t be swayed by pricing

‘You get what you pay for” should be a continual thought that goes through your head as you research SEO companies. Yes, there will always be companies out there who have budget pricing and claim to spend as much time on your website as other higher priced SEO companies. But, this is generally not the case. SEO is a time consuming process and demands ongoing effort. The rules are continually changing and while it may seem simple, it requires staying on top of ever-changing search algorithms. You want to make sure you get the best results, otherwise what is the point in hiring an SEO company. Cheap SEO can actually be a costly affair as you are spending money on being optimised but are not ranking high enough – Getting up to page 2 is not good enough. Try and keep in mind that return on investment is more important than looking for the cheapest deal.

Do you lack the time to even research an appropriate SEO company? At Arrow Internet we can answer any questions and concerns you may have about enlisting an SEO company. We know it is a big decision so we are here to help. Call us today on 1300 766 665.

Check back soon to see our next blog on “Top questions to ask an SEO agency”

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SEO Blog by Arrow Internet Marketing – Company Blog

Conducting market research is often the starting point for key components of businesses’ marketing and sales strategies. It’s what helps you draft personas, clarify your marketing messaging, set product marketing direction, and build your sales playbook.

But when you’re tasked to sit down and actually … do it … many marketers draw a blank. Do we round up Don Draper and set up an expensive, time-intensive focus group behind two way mirrors? Isn’t that what the big guns do when they conduct market research?

The big guns — and even smaller companies — certainly use the two-way mirror approach, but consider that we also have this amazing thing called the internet. That means we can all conduct market research for less money, across a larger sample size, and with less time investment. This post will explain both the methodology you should implement when conducting any market research, and highlight some of the tools and tactics available to you to easily glean more insight into your target audience.

First, How to Conduct Market Research

Before we get into the tools and tactics you can use to conduct your market research, let’s talk about a solid methodology with which you should approach your research.

1) What do you want to know? The first key to conducting market research effectively is identifying something specific you’re trying to figure out. Trying to answer everything in one round of market research usually means you won’t get meaningful answers to anything. Here are some of the things many businesses are trying to figure out when conducting market research — be sure to drill down into these categories to make it specific to your business.

• Whether you’re solving a problem people actually have
• What competitors your target audience is using for their current solution
• What people don’t like about their current solution
• How much someone is willing to pay for a solution
• Whether a new product or add-on is enticing
• Demographic and psychographic information
• How your target audience likes to communicate and consume information

2) Draft your questions and hypotheses for how people will answer. This will help you think through logical flows and the potential follow-up questions you should ask to get a comprehensive set of data. There’s nothing worse than conducting your market research, and upon analyzing the results, realizing there was an entire branch of logic you hadn’t anticipated that requires you to conduct your research again. For example, if you’re doing market research to determine whether an add-on service would be interesting to your current customers, you’d probably want to ask different follow-up questions to those who responded positive, negatively, and indifferently. Walk through hypothetical conversations with each of those groups, and document all of the questions you’d like to ask before beginning your research.

3) Find the right group of people for your market research. Is your research targeted toward customers (as opposed to leads or the general public)? If so, what qualities should those customers possess? For example, if HubSpot was gauging interest in an add-on service, we might only need feedback from customers that use the Professional package of our software, and eliminate those using the Basic or Enterprise levels of the software. Or if we wanted to gauge whether the inclusion of that add-on service would help convert more leads, we might consult leads in our database only within a certain business size that we know are interested in the Professional version of the software.

4) Determine the best method to ask your questions. We’re going to get into tools and tactics in the next sections of this post, but selecting the right method for administering market research is key for getting the best results. For example, if you’re like our very own Laura “@Pistachio” Fitton and you have a large Twitter following, it might make more sense to leverage that Twitter following to do market research rather than creating a survey. Or perhaps you have an extremely engaged segment of your email list that also happens to be the target audience for this research — consider using email as a key tool in your market research instead!

5) Analyze your findings. After you conduct your research and collect your findings, it’s time to get analyzing. Depending on what type of data you’re pulling in — quantitative or qualitative — you may need to set a threshold that helps you determine your next steps. For example, if your research is quantitative and you were looking to gauge interest in that add-on service we keep talking about, what number of people need to respond positively, negative, and indifferently to pursue or nix the project? Or perhaps you’re looking for more qualitative feedback — like different ways someone would use one of your products. Look for new ways people are using the product you hadn’t considered to drive the improvements you make and identify problems you didn’t even realize people had that you could solve.

How to Craft Your Market Research Survey

Surveys are the most common method of administering online market research, so we’re going to start by digging deep into the right and wrong way to administer them — because there are tons of little things that make a big difference in the results you get!

Surveys are fantastic for quantitative research, especially since most survey tools like SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang (both tools I’ve used successfully in the past) come with reporting options that sort the data for you, and allow you to export and manipulate the data as needed. But you can also easily loop in qualitative analysis, or use survey tools for future in-depth qualitative analysis that becomes necessary as you learn more from the data you collect. (Tip: If you’re just looking to get quick insights, Google has just launched a tool called Consumer Surveys that lets you ask a question and get aggregated responses and accompanying data for $ 0.10 per response.)

When drafting your survey, take pains to ensure every question you ask truly needs to be asked; if your survey is too long, you’ll suffer a lower rate of completion. There are two things you can do to help respondents fill out the survey in its entirety. First, include a progress bar so respondents know there’s an end in sight — otherwise, they could be one question away from completion but think they’re several minutes away, causing them to abandon the survey.

You should also set expectations up front for how much time the survey will take. If after editing out questions you don’t truly need to ask, you are still left with a survey that will take 5 minutes to complete (which is pretty long for an online survey), that’s okay! Tell respondents that the survey should take 5 minutes to complete, that their feedback is valuable, and why you need that feedback from them specifically. For a long survey, this up-front admission will result in less people starting the survey, but a higher proportion of those who begin the survey will complete it — giving you higher quality results for your market research.

Online survey tools are also fantastic research mechanisms because of the built-in logic functionality in most tools. This allows you to better target your questions to survey respondents as they self-identify through their answers to your questions. For example, perhaps you’re trying to beef up your buyer personas a bit. Your lead intelligence tells you the industry and company size of your leads, but you really need to get a handle on job titles, too, because your personas really revolve around the C-suite and middle management. The logic in survey tools will let you begin with a question about job titles, and based on the response, send respondents down two different logic trees with two different sets of questions. So while you may think your market research is limited to your lead intelligence, online surveys tools with logic functionality let you segment on the fly for higher quality information.

If you’re conducting qualitative research in your online surveys, you’ll need to be careful with the way you phrase your questions. There’s a fine balance between being open-ended so as to encourage honesty, and being vague to the point of confusion. On the other end of the spectrum, survey questions can often be so specific that they’re unintentionally leading — infusing the answer the marketer expects to hear right into the question and answer choices. For example, a survey question might be structured:

Would you use product X for Y, Z, or other?

While you provided “other” as an option, you’re already planting a couple ideas in the respondents’ minds about the correct way to use your product that they may not have had without your direction. Instead, phrase a question of this nature more open-ended, like:

Explain some of the ways you might use product X when at the office.

This phrasing lets respondents answer your question without the preconceived notions that come with your product knowledge, but also limits the scope of the answer by adding a clause like “when at the office” at the end to help narrow their frame of mind enough to provide a detailed answer. (Tip: When asking open ended questions, you’ll need to use a text box. Make the size of the text box commensurate with the length of answer you hope to receive. If respondents see a two-line text box, you’ll probably receive a short sentence. If they see they have 8 lines of space, you’ll likely receive a more in-depth response.)

Finally, once you analyze the results of your survey, you may find you’d like to follow up with your respondents verbally. Prepare for this instance by including a question at the end of the survey asking if the respondent would be willing to speak with someone from your company on the phone to hear more about their opinions. While not everyone’s cup of tea, plenty of people are excited to share their thoughts on the phone — it makes them feel special and engaged with your company! If you do administer phone interviews, it’s recommended that you record those calls (disclosing the recording to your respondent, of course) so they can be transcribed by a third-party service. This frees you from the burden of note-taking during calls, lets you focus on asking the right follow-up questions, and lets a larger group analyze what was said objectively, not what you think you heard the respondent saying.

Market Research Doesn’t End With Surveys!

While online surveys are the most common way marketers and business owners collect market research insights, there are other ways to get the intelligence you need. You’ll probably find, however, that a mix of these tools with more calculated online surveys is a helpful approach to stay connected with the opinions of your leads, customers, and the general market.

Hop on Social Media

You’ve probably heard plenty of success stories about using social media for feedback (we’ve written an entire blog post on how to do it), so why not make use of it for your market research? Social media market research is ideal for getting qualitative feedback, and getting it quickly. And luckily, social media is getting better and better at targeting — in fact, just yesterday LinkedIn announced more robust targeting functionality for users! Couple that with Twitter’s list functionality, Google+ Circles, and Facebook lists, and you’ve got the ability to get your questions out to the exact audience you’re targeting for information.

Dive In to Your Marketing Analytics

Market researchers can get more quantitative insights from their marketing analytics — about everything from how people consume information, to what they think of your product, service, or brand, to what problems they’re facing in your industry that you might be able to solve. For example, instead of setting up a survey to determine which offer is more enticing, you can simply set up an A/B test to see whether a BOGO or 30% off coupon gets better conversion rates. Or if you’re trying to identify opportunities for expanded service offerings, you might take a look at your search analytics. Looking at the search terms people are typing can help you understand not only the problems people face, but whether they consider your product a solution for those problems.

Perhaps you notice that there’s growing volume around the search term “how to treat a unicorn with a gluten allergy.” Whoa, did you know that gluten allergies are on the rise in unicorns? Is that a space you want to play in? If so, and you begin creating content and solutions for it, take a look at whether the traffic that comes to your site on that term actually converts. If not, perhaps you haven’t designed a solution that meets the needs of the gluten-allergic unicorn community.

Leverage Public Records

You can even make use of public records to get the market information you need! Inc.com compiled a fantastic list of government resources that provides demographic information, three valuable ones which I’ve listed below:

1. FedStats: This site publishes government statistics, like statistical profiles of states, cities, and counties.
2. The Census Bureau: This site gives you access to census data.
3. The Census Bureau’s Quick Facts: This site gives quick facts about people, businesses, and geography.

Finally, think of market research as an ongoing process. Often, the insights you glean result in more detailed and interested questions you’d like to ask. Continue to communicate with your target audience and customers so you can learn what their needs are and what you can do to meet them.

What tips do you have for marketers looking to conduct market research?

Image credit: janoma.cl

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

I was in the process of performing an overall account-level audit on a client AdWords account; keyword research – or keyword auditing – was an integral part of this process. I am aware that there are a number of posts covering this very topic in a number of different perspectives. But I thought I’d share with you my method when performing keyword research on a fairly mature account. Also, please note that my client operates within a niche B2B market and to a certain extent, within an oligopoly. If the business operates within a fairly specialised sector like my client, then it would be a good idea to get your client involved in the keyword research process as well. This is so that you could tap into their expertise about what they sell, and what keywords matter to them. This is a two way process, so at times, the client may propose keywords that may require your critical analysis and recommendations. For example, what does “asset management” mean? Are you referring to the process of protecting your assets? Or are you referring to “asset management” within the financial industry? If your client’s core competence is in asset protection and security, is it still worth competing for this keyword even though competition will be extremely fierce? Discuss this with your client and decide on next course of action.

The first thing I did was to take printouts of all the keywords separated by ad groups. I also took printouts of the corresponding adverts. This helps to give a clear visual representation of the keywords that we are bidding for and the corresponding adverts we’ve created. Make sure you also have key metrics alongside keywords such as CTRs, conversions, conversion rates, and CPAs (among other metrics that are important to you). Make sure you have at least a year’s worth of data in order to make more of an accurate assessment. This will help you see straight away which keywords and ads are better targeted and matched. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have these same metrics on softcopy; I’d strongly suggest that you also have the softcopy along with the printouts so that you could sift through data that’s important to you. For example, you could see on spreadsheets what keyword has the highest number of clicks, but with the lowest number of conversions, you might want to rethink whether you’d want to still bid for that particular keyword.

Next think about your keywords based on intent and ask yourself if the keywords fall under the following categories. Based on these categories, think about your ad copy and think about which landing pages you’d want to divert traffic to:

Buyer or information seeker?
“Holiday in Asia” sounds like a wish, whereas “hotels in Arugam Bay” looks like a serious quest.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that singular and plural keywords often point to big differences in desired outcome. Someone looking to buy a pet golden retriever, for example, would probably type “golden retriever” rather than “golden retrievers”.

Awareness of the user
Are these users familiar with the industry terms or are they new to the industry? For example, I was looking for bins for the SEOptimise office last week, and was a bit overwhelmed by the host of different sizes and models – at one point I had to describe what I am looking for with hand gestures and facial contortions because I’m not familiar with bin brands, models or even sizes, apart from “big bin for an office?”

For example, someone looking for vacuum cleaner accessories might type in “dust bags”, but someone typing in “s4212 bags” is more market aware. The savvier the user, the more knowledgeable you must appear about the market and product choices.

Problem or solution conscious?
“Get more business” is a problem, whereas “social media monitoring tools” might be a solution to that problem. How do you want your ads to appear when people search via these keywords?

Price or feature shopping?
If someone searches for “Canon pixma MP280 inkjet printer”, you could bet that they are looking for a price, shipping information, and store they can trust. Compare that with a search for “all in one inkjet printer” – which indicates more of an interest in general printer types and price ranges than in specific brands and features.

Timeframe
Does the user need the product now or is it a future need? Based on this understanding, you could send your prospects to a “buy now” page or a “more information” or “sign up for a 30 day trial” page.

Once you have segregated user intent, you could then begin performing a keyword cleanup.

Use your web server and/or AdWords search query reports to find out what exact keywords users typed in to reach your website. You can then decide if you want to include, set as negative keywords, or retire these keywords based on CTRs, conversions, conversion rates and CPAs (in case you haven’t noticed, for me personally, these metrics are the most important when gauging performance). By monitoring the actual phrases that trigger visits to your site, you can eliminate many irrelevant searches by choosing only the keywords that qualified prospects are typing.

Also, of late, I have been using SEMRush which is proving to be an extremely powerful paid tool for gauging the competitiveness of the Search Engine Marketing neighbourhood. Unfortunately, apart from SpyFu and Ahrefs, I am not aware of any other free or at least partially free tools that would provide you with the same insightful stats. If you do know of any, please feel free to pop down to the comments section and share with us any free tools you might be using.

But with SEMRush, you’re able to find figures for some of your most lucrative and important keywords (see below stats for keywords “golden retriever” and “asset management”):

As you could see above, the neighbourhood’s not too competitive and you’d have a decent chance of dominating the ad space. However, compare that with the stats below for “asset management”.

What’s even more interesting is that you can obtain a “related keyword report”, “organic results” and “ads” report. These allow you to gauge who you’re competing with and how competitive the neighbourhood really is, and thereby make better and more informed decisions about either including the keyword to your keyword list, negative keyword list or retiring it.

Related keyword report – this provides you with other keywords that people are looking for which are related to the original keyword. With a less competitive neighbourhood such as “golden retriever”, you’d see similar obvious “related keywords”, but just glance through the “related keyword” list for the keyword “asset management”:

Golden retriever

Asset Management 

As you could see above, there are some big players that dominate the “related keyword” report, and none of these keywords actually include the terms “asset management”.

Organic search results and paid search results - I find this to be the most useful of all its features, helping me gauge who exactly my competitors are. Once again, having a quick glance at the number of advertisers and the brands that are competing, you can get a reasonable feel for the level of competition and thereby, adjust your strategy (increase bids, lower bids, retire keywords or include keywords). Also with ambiguous keywords such as “asset management”, by glancing at the organic listings you could gauge what Google thinks people are searching for, and by analysing what competitors are advertising, you could make a judgement on whether you’d actually want to bid for those keywords:

Organic listings for “golden retriever”

 Ads for the keyword “golden retriever”

 Organic listings for the keyword “asset management”

  Ads for the keyword “asset management”

When it comes to paid search, keywords are the commodity that you’re purchasing. Making sure your keywords are relevant and fresh is a continuous process. However, in the whole frenzy of managing a large and complex account, it does help to allocate at least a day every six months, in order to have a look at the account with a completely fresh perspective. Putting yourself in the shoes of the user is one of the toughest challenges for search marketers. Hopefully the above tips will help you better evaluate your existing keywords. Obviously this topic can be covered in many different ways,  so dear reader, as always, I’m looking forward to hearing your comments, opinions, questions and views in the section below.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 5 Ways to Optimise Your PPC Keyword Research

Related posts:

1. How to Use Google Correlate for Keyword Research
2. Keyword Research – SMX Advanced London 2011 Presentation by Kevin Gibbons
3. 9 Ways to Sharpen Up Your Paid Search

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SEOptimise » blog

Getting found in organic search is one of the most cost-effective means of lead generation, so it’s no wonder marketers and SEOs spend plenty of time optimizing their online presence to get ranked in the SERPs for important keywords. And whether you’re just starting out with SEO or it’s been a part of your internet marketing strategy for a while, you’re probably familiar with the need to conduct keyword research to inform the content and SEO strategies that help achieve that rocking organic presence.

The thing is … there are kind of a lot of keywords out there. So which ones do you choose? How do you even approach researching and selecting keywords to target in your content creation and link building (posicionamiento web) efforts when you could realistically have hundreds of thousands in your arsenal?

While it’s not a bad idea to keep an eye on a lot of search terms — you know, to see if some become more or less important to your strategy over time — you won’t get far spreading your efforts so thin. So here are some common mistakes to avoid when conducting your keyword research so you don’t end up with too many keywords, the wrong keywords, or an unhealthy mix of keywords to target in your SEO strategy.

Selecting Keywords That Don’t Reflect How People Actually Search

Sometimes the search terms companies target reflect how they think about their industry, not how their target audience does. Are your search terms full of industry jargon that aren’t even part of your leads’ vocabulary yet? Are you targeting branded terms that describe your specific solution that many searchers aren’t familiar with yet?

For example, not all of the traffic that lands on HubSpot’s site actually knows that we sell inbound marketing software. In fact, some don’t even know what “inbound marketing” is. But they do know they want to learn more about a component of inbound marketing — like how to use social media to generate leads. So while it’s important to target a search term like “inbound marketing,” it’s crucial to also target a long-tail term like “how to get leads with social media.” That lets us capture traffic for the long-tail term and educate those readers about how generating leads through social media relates to inbound marketing.

If you’re having trouble getting inside the minds of your target audience, it’s time to get social — in every sense of the word. Talk to your leads on the phone, ask employees on the front lines with your leads and customers how they talk about the concepts in your industry, and watch how leads and customers on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks talk about your industry. This will give you a good indication of the language and terms they use to describe their questions. That being said, it’s important to confirm that the keywords you brainstorm are on point — you know, that people actually use them as search terms. Simply check the search volume using HubSpot’s Keyword Tool or the Google Keyword Tool. If your search term yields little or no monthly search volume, you haven’t hit the mark. If the search term turns up hundreds or even thousands of monthly searches, congratulations! You’ve got a great new search term to target.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t target jargon and branded terms in your search strategy — you should! But it should also be balanced with the typically longer tail variations of keywords that people use when they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for (but you know what they’re looking for is you!).

Failing to Perform Competitive Keyword Analysis

One of the reasons you’re optimizing your organic search presence is so you appear higher up in the SERPs than your competitors. Research from Optify shows that websites that appear in listing position 1 in Google had an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4%. It drops to a CTR of 12% in position 2, and a 9.5% CTR for position 3. Do you want your competitors getting those clicks, or you?

If you don’t perform competitive keyword research, two things may happen: you could end up targeting keywords that don’t actually help you capture any competitive market share, or you miss important search terms your competitors are targeting but that you forgot to include in your keyword arsenal. Let’s take a look at the “Competitors” function in HubSpot’s Keywords Tool, for example.

This indicates the company in question is 17 listing positions away from beating its competitor for the term “using facebook for business.” Is this an important keyword with an appropriate level of competitiveness for your business? That is to say, could you realistically move from position 18 to the top 3 for this search term, or is the search volume so high with so many other sites trying to rank for the term, that you would need far more content creation and link build resources than you have to be successful? For this term, there are 1,600 searches, so moving 17 positions is likely well within your grasp.

Not Focusing on Profitable Terms

No matter what your competitors are doing, you should always focus on whether the search terms you’re targeting affect your bottom line. If your biggest competitor is in position 1 for a term that doesn’t actually yield you any leads or customers, who cares, right? Use closed-loop analytics to determine which search terms generate that great traffic that converts into leads and customers so you can prioritize your optimization efforts.

First, take a look at which keywords are driving conversions. In the example below, the keyword “free advertising” yielded a lead, but the keyword “don corleone” didn’t give bunk (wonder why?).

Prioritize the keywords that have the best conversion rate from lead-to-customer, and then take it one step further: look at which keywords drove the most customers. Traffic and leads are good, but customers are better. Based on the closed-loop analytics below, it wouldn’t be wise to spend time creating content and building links around the term “lil wayne,” despite the fact that it led to some website visitors. Though for what, I can’t be sure.

Having an Uneven Distribution of Keyword Difficulty

Not all keywords are created equal; some are extremely difficult to rank for, and others will be a quick win for your business. The key to seeing constant gains from your organic strategy is constantly targeting keywords of all difficulty levels. If you target only competitive terms — head terms with search volume in the hundreds of thousands — maybe you’ll see significant gains in several months. Or you could target keywords with low search volume that are easy to rank for — typically long-tail keywords, which do drive highly qualified traffic — but never see that big win that comes from ranking for a hugely important head term with tons of traffic.

So the best inbound marketers target both, and they let the long-tail keywords they target feed their campaign to rank for important head terms. So if you’re trying to rank for the (possibly) highly competitive head term “unicorn farms,” you can spend time improving your rank for it while also generating traffic from long-tail terms like “unicorn farms in boston,” “unicorn farms with good reviews,” and “best unicorn farms for kids.”

Not Knowing Your Geography

This first little detail is easy to overlook — before targeting a search term, ensure the traffic originates in your area of business. If you only sell to customers within a certain geographical location, what good is it to rank for a search term that is searched largely in a place you don’t do business? You can filter your searches by location in Google’s Keyword Tool.

And if you’re a local or regional business, get proactive with geographic search terms. If you’re one of just a few unicorn breeders in Michigan, for example, you may be fine to just target terms like “Unicorn breeders in southwest Michigan,” “Unicorn breeders near Detroit,” and “Unicorn breeders in Michigan.” If you’re in a much more competitive market, though, like unicorn insurance providers, your geographic terms should be more granular. Consider terms like “Unicorn insurance providers in Royal Oak,” “Unicorn insurance providers on Woodward Avenue,” and “Unicorn insurance providers 48201.”

Not Monitoring Search Trends

When considering keywords to target, consider how their popularity trends over time so you can get ahead of a potential search boom before your competitors. This is also a crucial research tactic for seasonal businesses so you have enough content written in advance to rise in the search rankings during the off-season, and keep you in the top when your season is in full swing. You can use tools like Google Insights for Search to see how a certain search phrase performs over time — you can see when the search starts to increase for “halloween costumes,” for example, in the graph below.

This is also crucial to consider because of the way Google presents search traffic — as a 12-month average. If your business’ search traffic has major seasonality swings, the search volume estimates you’re receiving could overstate or understate the current importance of targeting any given search term.

Failing to Maintain and Adjust Over Time

Just as you should monitor the search trends of keywords over time, you should also monitor your performance for keywords over time. First, see if your content creation and link-building efforts are helping you improve your listing position in the SERPs for the search terms you’re targeting, and whether that improved listing position is actually driving traffic, leads, and customers.

But, just as important, is watching how your performance tracks for search terms that you’ve already gained top positions for. Often, marketers stop optimizing for search terms that they are always in the top of the SERPs for, because come on, they already made it to number 1! But you can easily slip from that position if competitors ramp up their efforts to rank for that term. Continue to create content and build links around these terms, or you could find yourself struggling to regain lost positions — and all the traffic, leads, and customers you lost with it.

What other pitfalls should marketers avoid when targeting keywords for their SEO strategy?

Image credit: Danard Vincente

Connect with HubSpot:

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

B2B websites have to be sure to include those long tail, niche industry keywords in their B2B keyword research. Even if those keywords don’t have a high search volume, it’s important that your website be positioned well for when someone does search for those B2B keyword phrases. Someone using those highly targeted keywords is most likely your exact target audience.

Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!

For more keyword research tips and advice, check out the Brick Marketing Keyword Research Video Lesson Archive.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal

A recent study via MarketingProfs by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, and Georgia Tech took a look at which types of tweets provide value to readers, and which types of tweets are generally disliked. The study surveyed 1,443 Twitter users who rated 43,738 tweets during a 19-day period. Results showed that only 36% of tweets are worth reading, 39% are mediocre at best, and 25% of tweets are not worth reading at all.

These results are extreme and beg the question, why don’t people find value in tweets? Luckily, the study broke down some of the reasons tweets just aren’t striking peoples’ fancies. Let’s dive into what causes people to dislike tweets, and what marketers can do to be better at providing the kind of content that people want to read on Twitter.

The Tweets People Hate, and Why

Before we get into some of the most offensive types of tweets, let’s take a look at how survey respondents rated all the tweet types they were asked about.

Some of those probably seem pretty familiar if you’re an avid Twitter user. Let’s dive into three of the tweet types these respondents found most offensive, but with one caveat — we’re not asserting this content should be totally eliminated from Twitter. It should simply be used with extreme moderation (that’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one). It’s okay to occasionally post about these topics, but if your tweets are too heavy with this type of content, you will be seen as less relevant and credible to your Twitter followers.

Personal Conversations

Tweeting a long-winded personal conversation back and forth will make readers less likely to value your tweets. Yes, it is important to engage with other Twitter followers, but if all of your tweets focus on this, other readers will not feel connected to your tweets because the conversation isn’t relevant to the majority of them. Take a look at this sample Twitter conversation, for example.

Hi @PersonB! What are you doing tonight?

 Hi @PersonA! I’m going to dinner. You?

@PersonB Same. Do you want to go to a movie after?

@PersonA Definitely! What do you want to see?

@PersonB Whatever, as long as it’s not too late a show. Have to get up early.

@PersonA Really? What do you have to do in the morning? What about a horror flick?

And on, and on, and on. If your conversation is that long winded, take it to direct message so you’re not clogging up peoples’ Twitter streams. Use your public tweets for something more valuable to the general audience.

Updates About Your Mood

Many people use Twitter as a way to complain about something that has gone wrong. Maybe they woke up with a headache. Or had a bad day at work. Or just want the weekend to come. Either way, it is not something tweeters reported enjoying reading on Twitter. Twitter is about spreading interesting content and engaging with others in a meaningful way, not complaining about things that have gone wrong for you, personally. Consider the difference between these two tweets, for example.

Such a long day at work, ugh.

and

Such a long day at work; looking into marketing automation solution @HubSpot to make lead nurturing easier going forward.

The second tweet lets you comment on your mood, yes, but also provides information that people might care about. Now your readers understand that your day was so long because of inefficient marketing automation, and there’s a solution that may help you solve that problem — and could also help other followers with a similar problem fix it.

Updates About Activities

As location-based marketing grows, so do the check-ins that are posted on Twitter. Though some of the mobile check-ins can be interesting, tweeters reported that usually they find it to be overkill. For example, posting to Twitter that you went to breakfast, the gym, your house, work, a restaurant for lunch, back to work, out to dinner, out for a drink, and home overwhelms and annoys your followers. Occasional public check-ins provide value if they’re accompanied with information followers can benefit from — like sharing information about a sale going on at a local restaurant, or tweeting something insightful from the keynote speaker at an event.

7 Things You Should be Tweeting

Now that you know what not to tweet about, take heart in knowing there are a lot of valuable topics that you should tweet about. Consider these tweet formats to provide valuable content to your followers.

Links to Other Content

No obligation, no risk, totally free inbound marketing assessment of your marketing system from @HubSpot – ow.ly/9uInJ

— HubSpot (@HubSpot) March 11, 2012

Talking about content — whether your own, or others’ — in your tweets is key to starting conversations and gaining new followers. Twitter is one of the best tools to share content and hear other opinions about it. Including lines from a blog post or your opinion on what you read along with a truncated link to that content is a great way to provide value. This is also how companies generate leads on Twitter — by sending leads to a landing page on their own website to download content assets behind a form.

Questions to Your Followers

who should follow your account? what kinds of people? what will they get from following you? how will they describe your account to friends?

— Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) March 8, 2012

Part of interacting with people on Twitter is asking them questions and soliciting their feedback. Who doesn’t want to give their two cents? Posing a question to your followers is a great way to start discussions and forge new business relationships. It can also give you valuable insight into your own business — Twitter is an ideal social media network to gain real-time feedback from leads and customers. You can read more about how to use social medial for instant feedback in our blog post on the subject.

Answers to Tweeters’ Questions

@tinybadass they took away the ability for you to add a call to action, form or coupon on your homepage

— Mike Volpe (@mvolpe) March 1, 2012

In addition to asking questions, you should also make sure to answer other peoples’ questions, especially when they are directed at you. Answering questions directed at you is just good form — you should be monitoring your social media accounts vigilantly, because people will use them as customer service mechanisms whether you like it or not. But answering questions that are just out in the ether is how you gain credibility as an industry thought leader. The more helpful you are, the more people will return to both your Twitter account and your other online real estate (like your blog and other social media accounts to which you’ve linked on your Twitter account, right?) to get answers to their questions. And that’s how a mere Twitter follower turns into your brand evangelist and future customer.

Intellectual Engagement with Tweeters

@CarriBugbee @HubSpot I blush! Hmm. Content marketing done right for tech geeks. Something Reddit-like?

— Rebecca Corliss (@repcor) March 8, 2012

Engaging with followers is important — it shows your followers you care, and encourages others to join in on your conversation. But doing so intellectually can seem difficult in just 140 characters. Don’t be scared to abbreviate, skip the formalities, and take conversations offline or to direct message to help fit more value into less characters. This is another instance where it’s great to link to other content that helps answer questions in more detail. You can use your own content, or content from another site. When referencing other peoples’ content, pull them in on the conversation on Twitter. It will strengthen your connection with them, too, when they see you’re promoting them as a resource to your followers.

Offers and Promotions

Download The 2012 State of Inbound Marketing hubspot.com/state-of-inbou… via @hubspot

— Jeanne Hopkins (@jeannehopkins) March 1, 2012

Twitter is an excellent way to promote offers, events, coupons, and other lead and customer generating content. Social media followers expect brands to tout their offers, and it’s one of the reasons they’re following you — to get the insider’s deal. Your stream shouldn’t be all coupons and freebies, but you should regularly pepper these offers in to help your own bottom line, and reward Twitter followers for remaining engaged with your content.

Data and Research

Facebook’s new “Reach Generator” guarantees that 75% of your fans will see your brand’s content each month! – ow.ly/9uIdq

— HubSpot (@HubSpot) March 8, 2012

Twitter loves data. Twitter loves infographics. Twitter loves research. Sharing content of this nature is extremely valuable for your followers, because exposing this information makes it really easy for them to look smart to their networks. What’s easier than a RT with a piece of compelling data or original research? And if the data includes research about social media, it proves to be even more valuable on Twitter. The example above is especially effective to Twitter users as it shows how to get more clicks — and possibly more followers — on Twitter.

Additional Content on Retweets

Absolutely! And from people outside your company. MT @FernwoodResort: do follow up posts that answers ?? raised during event #inboundchat

— Rachel Sprung (@RSprung) February 21, 2012

Part of providing value on Twitter is building on other valuable tweets. Even though you only have 140 characters to work with, adding more valuable content to other peoples’ tweets is beneficial to your followers and helps open yourself up to relationships with new people. You may have to modify the tweet to fit your addition into the character limit. In these instances, type ‘MT’, which stands for ‘modified tweet’, instead of ‘RT’.

What type of content do you love (or love to hate) on Twitter?

Image Credit: Fanie

Connect with HubSpot:

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Brand new websites that are just beginning their SEO campaigns should undoubtedly begin with onsite SEO, the first step of which is keyword research. The keywords you choose (based on the content of your site) will ultimately help determine what search phrases your site rank for and what kind of searcher will find your site. Because new site’s don’t have 6 months of analytics to jumpstart their keyword research, here are 4 tips to keep you on track:

Use your competitors as a starting point.
If you’re website is relatively new, you don’t have a deep pool of analytics and data to base your keyword research on—the numbers just aren’t there yet an it’s hard to pull the right keywords from thin air. In order to get started with your onsite SEO, take a look at the competition and see what keywords and keyword variations they seem to be targeting. Older, more established sites that have been around the SEO block a few times have a pretty good idea on how their target audience is searching. While you shouldn’t assume their keywords are an exact match for your site, it’s as good a place as any to get started with your keyword research. You can always go back 6 months down the road and swap out under-performing keywords for new ones.

Don’t assume industry jargon is the best way to go.
A well optimized website should use a mix of broad and long-tail keywords, including industry jargon. Just because you know the language of your industry, company and products, that doesn’t mean your target audience does. They might be using a completely different set of keywords to look for your product/services. If you fail to take user intent into account when conducting your keyword research, you’re bound to miss the mark.

Consider who you are targeting.
Who is your target online audience? How do they use the Internet? What sites do they frequent? What are they looking for online? The better you can understand your online audience, the more you can think like them and the better you can steer your keyword research in the right direction. Just like any other marketing tactic, SEO is designed to make your website appealing to your audience. If you don’t know what they are looking for and how they are looking for it for you’ll never get your website off the ground.

Give your keywords time to perform.
Don’t assume that just because one particular keyword isn’t driving hundreds of visitors to your site overnight that you’ve completely missed the mark with your keyword research. SEO is a long term process and it can take a while to ramp up. I would recommend giving it at least three months before going in and really analyzing the data you accrued over that time. If you change keywords too quickly you’ll never really know what is and isn’t working.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal

Posted by thogenhaven

Two weeks ago, Tom Critchlow suggested that we work to close the gap between inbound marketing and content marketing communities. It's time to build bridges again, this time between inbound marketing and research. In this post, you'll find research on participation patterns, how to spot high-value users, seeding content in a new community, how to bring new life to old content, and a little bit of gamification.

Some research is already being shared with the inbound community. Bill Slawski from SEO By The Sea does a great job reading and condensing patents from the search industry. But there is so much more research waiting to be tapped.

I am currently in a PhD program and therefore attend academic conferences. They are different to MozCon, SearchLove, SMX, Blueglass and the other conferences we all usually go to. And different means different perspectives. Last week at CSCW, 160 researchers from private companies and universities presented a paper. Topics include social media analysis, collaboration, gamification, incentives, recommender algorithms and online communities. For better or worse, I did not attend 160 presentations. So this will be a very limited summary, focusing on online communities.

Why Should You Care?

Universities and private companies like IBM, Microsoft and Google do some legit research. Being familiar with this research is a competitive advantage and will help generate new ideas.

In this post I focus primarily on community building. At SearchLove last year, Rand had a slide stating a 34% growth in 4 months, primarily from Q+A, YouMoz, the blog and user profiles. Add to this that community members are some of the best link builders you'll ever find. Getting community right is a huge win.

Who Participates In Online Communities?

Previous research offers two perspectives on participation patterns in online communities:

1. Some people contribute, and others do not. It is an inherent, personal trait like hair color.
2. Lurking is a development stage toward being an active member. All people potentially contribute, after the learning/socialization phase: users lurk for a while before participating.

Michael Muller from IBM presented fascinating research on a study on 8,711 online communities covering diverse topics with 224,232 unique users. The insight of the research shows a completely different pattern than the conventional wisdom above: 84 % of those users who participate in one or more community, lurk in others. However, the majority of members' lifetime contributions are in the beginning on their membership. Thus, many users start off contributing like mad, then stop. This means retention is key.

(Graph is printed in Muller, 2012. See references in the bottom of this post).

Design implications: Do whatever you can to grasp new members. There are many ways to do this: Make sure they get encouraging feedback to their initial comments/contributions. Assign them a mentor. Send them nice emails. Reach out to them on social media.

Spotting Talent

Despite the overall participation trend identified by Michael Muller, some people are more likely to contribute more to new communities than others. In fact, only few people end up participating in the first place. Google+ VP Bradley Horowitz once wrote about 90-9-1 principle, describing how 1% of community members are creators, 9% are synthesizers, and the remaining 90% are users/lurkers who do not directly add anything to the community.

Rosta Farzan and colleague from Carnegie Mellon University and University of Minnesota developed an algorithm to identify potential high-contributing members. The algorithm uses the following metrics to spot a potential high value member.

• Quality
• Motivation (quantity, frequency, and commitment)
• Ability (knowledge, trustworthiness, and politeness and clarits)

Those identified as potential high-contributing members participated 10 times more actively than those not classified.

Design implications: sometimes the gold is right in front of us, but without our knowing. Identifying high potential members early on can help us reach out and retain these creators.

Starting A New Community

In inbound marketing, one often hears the advice: go build a community. Yes, we'd all love to have flourishing communities, right? But how to get critical mass? One solution often used is seeding a site with (third party) content. This is supposed to show that the community is lively and thereby encourage users to contribute. Jacob Solomon and Rick Wash from Michigan State University tried this form of bootstrapping when starting a new wiki.

The results show that users contribute more when they are given a blank page, than they do when they see a seeded page. This makes sense, as there is more work to do on a blank page. However, contributions made on a blank page tend to be unstructured. If the users see a page with some content (e.g. headers, text chunks, objective content, opinionated content etc.), they tend to contribute content similar to the seeded content.

Design implication: If you want users to create a special kind of focused content (e.g. replies of a certain length or with a special focus), seeding can be good. The bad news: seeding content is not a shortcut to start a community as it might actually reduce contributions. Two weeks ago, Rand and Dharmesh launched Inbound. When the site was launched, it was already seeded with many good articles. According to this paper, this seeding reduced contributions, but made them more focused on the kind of articles Rand and Dharmesh want. Sounds plausible.

New Life To Old Content

This one might require a bit engineering power. But it is really neat. Aditya Pal and colleagues from University of Minnesota created an algorithm to detect expired content on a Q&A site. The algorithm uses metrics such as

• TF/IDF
• Reference to a specific time (e.g. date, month)
• Fixed vs relative time reference (ago, after, before, today, tomorrow)
• Reference a date in past
• Tense of the question

Design implications: Such algorithms are not only useful on Q&A sites. On enterprise websites, it can be used to flag content that ought to be updated, removed, rel=canonicalized or 301 redirected to new content. This creates better and fresher content on websites, as well as help avoiding old and irrelevant pages rank in Google. It can also help scale some of Cyrus Shepard's advices on fresh content, and help you rank for QDF keywords.

(This illustration is made by Dawn Shepard for Cyrus' post mentioned above)

Gamification Over?

Gamification has been a hot topic in the last couple of years. For many websites, the question is no longer if gamification systems should be implemented, but if it should be kept. Jennifer Thom and collaborators from IBM studied the removal of gamification points from IBM's internal social network. The researchers found that removing the points system made users contribute significantly less than before.

Design implications: You might (also) be tired of hearing about gamification. But it kinda works… So you might want to take a look at these gamification slides from Richard Baxter:

Curious for more?

The ACM Library is very good. In fact, so good that Matt Cutts blogs about it. To access the articles, you might have to go to a library or a university. But many researchers are happy to share their research, and link to it directly to their own work from their personal websites (The authors have the rights to share their own articles for free). So a little Googling can usually provide the article.

References

Michael Muller (2012): Lurking as Personal Trait or Situational Disposition? Lurking and Contributing in Enterprise Social Media. Proceeding to CSCW 2012

Aditya Pal, James Margatan, Joseph Konstan (2012): Question Temporality: Identification and Uses. Proceeding to CSCW 2012

Jacob Solomon, Rick Wash (2012); Bootstrapping wikis: Developing critical mass in a fledgling community by seeding content. Proceeding to CSCW 2012

Rosta Farzan, Robert Kraut, Aditya Pal, Joseph Konstan (2012): Socializing volunteers in an online community: A field experiment. Proceeding to CSCW 2012

Jennifer Thom, David Millen, Joan DiMicco (2012): Removing Gamification from an Enterprise SNS. Proceeding to CSCW 2012

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

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SEO Book.com