The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

If you are about to start out in business and you intend using search as one of your main sources of traffic, you may find yourself confronted by several hurdles.  Organic search can take months of tight optimization before you see any results. Before you can even begin to optimize, you need to research keywords that will attract traffic to your website. Pay per click advertising is one area that can help you test those keywords.

Using pay per click to test keywords has its own pitfalls and these need to be considered carefully. These pitfalls include:

• Cost – pay per click can be expensive if you don’t set limits or choose your keywords carefully.

• Accuracy – while pay per click can help identify keywords that do or don’t convert, that data doesn’t always relate to how organic search converts for the same keywords.

Having considered those negatives, you should also bear in mind the positives that come with pay per click. These include:

• Income – while testing keywords, you should be receiving traffic that converts into sales. That income may sustain your business while you are waiting for organic search results to improve.

• Data – although keywords don’t always perform the same on organic and paid search, you can identify keywords that are real duds. You may also find keywords that are real gems.

• Direction – there are many businesses that thrive on pay per click marketing. Rather than relying on the ups and downs of search engine optimization and organic search, they rely on pay per click with any organic traffic being the cream.

The bonus to using pay per click to test keywords is the income you can potentially receive when find good converting keywords. You do need to use care with this form of marketing, otherwise you will find your marketing budget gone in days. Set limits and do as much testing as your budget will allow.

Every now and then I read an article that claims that keywords are obsolete and that search engines now rely entirely on semantic language indexing. The truth is, that’s all wrong. Let’s deal with a few facts.

• Semantic language indexing is not new. Google has been doing it for years. They’ve gotten better at it, of course, and other search engines have started to incorporate it as well. But none of them have abandoned keywords.
• Type a search query into any search engine and see what comes up. Your first results will almost all incorporate the exact keyword phrase that you typed into the search engine’s search box. That’s evidence itself that keywords are still important.
• Keyword densities, the process of counting keywords and ensuring that you have the right mix of keywords in your content compared to the number of overall words, are not important. In fact, for about five or six years now, they haven’t been. This fact could be the reason for the myth that keywords themselves are not important.
• How many keywords you have in your content is not important. Where those keywords are located within the content is much more important.
• Most search engines these days rely on both keywords and semantic language indexing to some degree.

The advent of semantic language indexing has not made keywords obsolete. It does mean that keywords for the sake of keywords are not important. It makes keyword stuffing much more difficult. Besides that, keywords are still important and I wouldn’t throw them out of my search engine marketing efforts completely.

Before you begin a pay per click campaign it is always a good idea to get a PPC evaluation, which is a way for your PPC manager to see what you’ve done, how it’s affected your ROI, what worked, what didn’t, etc. There are 5 key elements to a good PPC evaluation.

1. Website Evaluation – There are certain aspects to your website that are important for consideration when you use PPC to drive traffic to it. First is usability. Do your visitors find your website usable or is it difficult to navigate? How about conversion optimization? Are your landing pages ready to receive orders? And we’ll also take a look at your page load times to ensure that your PPC ads have a high quality score.
2. Existing PPC Accounts – Do you have existing accounts? How effectively were they managed? What potential issues are there in those accounts, what are your missed opportunities, are you targeting the right keywords, etc.?
3. New PPC Accounts – You’ll need to outline your PPC strategy, estimate your average cost per click on each keyword, set your monthly budget, and define your marketing channels.
4. Google Analytics Account – Do you have one? We’ll set one up for you. You also need to set goals and establish lead funnels.
5. Custom Pricing – Finally, you’ll need to get your pricing set for your campaigns. Not a one-size-fits-all budget, but the cost for your campaign.

If you’ve been struggling with PPC and you’re ready to take on a campaign that will be successful, get a PPC evaluation.

SEO is not just writing content and hoping it gets ranked in the search engines. There is a specific strategy that you should follow to get your pages where you want them so that you can have traffic delivered to your website. Here are 5 aspects of SEO that you cannot ignore and hope that your efforts are working.

1. Every SEO campaign should begin with keyword research. If you don’t know what your most important keywords are then you’ll never be successful at SEO.
2. Local business listings provide a natural opportunity for most businesses, particularly small businesses that operate within a specific geographic community. Don’t ignore local search. Some of your best opportunities will be right under your nose.
3. Link building is a time consuming task, but if you want your web pages to rank highly then it’s a necessary task.
4. Before you build links and after you’ve done your keyword research you’ll need to create content. This is the most important aspect of SEO. Do it wrong and you won’t rank for the right keywords. Do it right and you can rank even without links.
5. Call it monitoring and reporting, analytics, or metrics. Whatever name you give it, it is significant. You’ll never know if your SEO campaigns are succeeding unless you continue to monitor your progress and track your results.

Start and end your SEO efforts on the right foot. Begin with keyword research and end with tracking and monitoring. But don’t leave out the cream in the middle either.

Internet marketing is about one thing – primarily. How you employ your fleet of keywords. But what makes a good keyword?

If you don’t know, a keyword is any word (or phrase) that a searcher would use to look for information that would be found on your website. Ideally, you want them to find your site and not your competition’s website. So how do you make that happen?

In a word, it happens when you effectively manage your keywords so that you use keywords that have high conversion rates and that you acquire at lower costs.

So the question is, How do you find these keywords?

There are several methods for finding keywords. Some of them are good and others are not so good. Your real goal is to find your best keywords at the best prices. So what are your options?

• Your first option is to go at it blind. This isn’t a very good option because if you can’t see your target then you aren’t likely to hit it.
• You can use a keyword research tool to help you narrow down your list of keywords. This is a great way to find an initial list of keywords, but it’s limited in giving you information on the effectiveness of those keywords.
• You can evaluate the websites of your competition and come away with some reasonable keywords, but those are keywords that your competition uses. They may or may not be good keywords for your business.
• Or, you can wage a small scale pay per click campaign to test your keywords and see which ones convert better at lower click prices.

Our preference for finding the right keywords for your business is the last option. It will narrow down your list of keywords to the best keywords, tell you which ones convert the best, and provide you with information on expected click-through rates and click prices.

Effective keyword management begins with a good list and from there you narrow it down to the best keywords.

If you are running any PPC campaigns and are looking for places to find keywords outside of the traditional keyword research tools, is there help for you? Actually, yes, I think there is. You don’t have to use the same old keyword research tools to find your keywords.

Here are a three places you can find additional keywords for your PPC campaigns:

• Twitter – There are two ways to use Twitter for keyword research. You can look at Twitter trends, which is real telling for what is hot right now. And then there is Twitter Search. Either way will tell you what is popular on Twitter or what is happening on Twitter.
• Analytics – Take a look at your website’s metrics. What keywords are people using to find your site? Those keywords could be ripe for a PPC campaign.
• Competitive Blogs – What are your competitors writing about? Better yet, pick the top three blogs in your niche and read the comments. What are the readers saying? They are the same audience you are trying to reach. Pull out some niche-related keywords for your PPC campaigns.

When it comes to PPC campaigns, you don’t have to be like everybody else. You have to do what is right for your business. It starts with keyword research.

Search engine optimization is a multi-tiered marketing approach. You cannot simply add a couple of keywords to your search engine marketing campaigns and think that is going to be enough. The most important thing to know about search engine optimization today is that natural language optimization, or semantic language, is the road to success.

What does that mean?

Natural language writing is a style of writing that uses keywords for text enhancement, but it is not keyword-centric. In other words, you are not writing keyword-based content. You are writing content in such a way that it reads naturally, which is the way that people talk in normal conversation. Then you spruce it up with the right mix of keywords.

How do you know what is the right keyword mix? You settle on a primary keyword. That is the keyword you ensure appears in your title headline and multiple times on your page. Then, pick a secondary keyword and a tertiary keyword. Make sure they are related to the primary keyword, but not a variation of it. In other words, you wouldn’t use “truck driver”, “truck drivers” and “truck driving”. You’d be better off with keywords such as “truck driver” “eighteen wheeler” and “Big Rig”.

You don’t want your secondary and tertiary keywords to overshadow your primary keyword so use them but use them sparingly. And make sure that your SEO content reads naturally, not forced.

To truly understand how SEO works today you need to have an understanding of the history of SEO as a marketing strategy. Search engine optimization did not develop in a vacuum and it won’t evolve into what it will be tomorrow without the developments that are occurring today. There is a continuum and it can be traced.

To begin with, SEO did not really get its name until after Google came on the scene. Before Google, Internet marketers were optimizing their websites but they didn’t really call it that. However, that “optimization” was very primitive compared to how it’s done today.

Meta Tags, Backlinks And The Rise Of Google

At one time, pre-Google, all you had to do was add a bunch of keywords to your meta tag list and you’d rank well for those keywords. It didn’t even matter if those keywords appeared in your page content or not. You’d still rank. Hardly seems fair, does it? That’s why Google rose to such prominence as quickly as it did. The company introduced a whole new paradigm.

When Google came along, no one was interested in analyzing back links. Today, that seems intuitive, but at one time no thought it was important except for two guys with the software to make it happen.

Those two guys started Google, whose search ranking algorithm was based largely on the number of inbound links pointing to a particular web page. Soon, Internet marketers started dropping their meta tag strategy in lieu of a backlink strategy. Back links became the new currency.

From Backlinks To Semantic Natural Language

Over the years, Google has tweaked its ranking factors to include more than just an analysis of the number of inbound links to your site’s pages. Quality of links, relevancy of links and link diversity are important too. And there are more than 100 other factors Google considers as well. And then there are Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask and many other search engines. Each one has their own ranking criteria.

One consideration that the major search engines look for today is natural language, or semantic language, syntax. While keywords are still important, successful web page do not need X number of one keyword phrase per Y number of words on the page, what marketers call “keyword density”. Instead, it’s important to put your keyword phrase in the right places on your page and in proximity to other important elements on the page. And to write naturally for your site visitors just as you would if keywords were not important.

In essence, the search engines are looking for the best content for every keyword phrase they rank pages for. If you stuff your pages with keywords just for a ranking then you are doing yourself and your site visitors a disservice. It’s basically shooting yourself in the foot. Trust me, that hurts.

New pay per click advertisers often wonder where they should get their keyword list. The obvious answer is from your initial keyword research – the same place you get the keyword list for your organic search campaigns. But that’s a little too pat. And the answer is not so cut and dry. There are other ways to get your keyword list.

• Borrow from the competition – Have you analyzed your competition’s PPC and organic search campaigns? If not then hop to it. It’s a great resource for your own keyowrd list.
• Your own referrer logs – Study your referrer logs from time to time to see what key phrases people are using to find your site. You can often find phrases that you haven’t targeted. If some of those phrases turn out to be popular phrases then you’ll have a few gems in the rough.
• Google Zeitgeist – This little known product from Google will show you what search queries have trended each day.
• Google Trends – Another product from Google. It allows you to look at trends over time, which can tell a story all its own.
• Twitter Trends – Twitter Trends tells you what is popular right now. This is real time data and if you hit your new keyword trends just right you might find a gold mine.

There is really is no right or wrong way to find new keywords for your pay per click campaigns, but if you think creatively then you can likely find your own.

There are two reasons why you might want to know what keywords the competition is targeting:

• So you can target the same keywords
• So you can identify keywords they are missing and capitalize on them

The competition is certainly targeting keywords. But are they targeting the right ones? Are they targeting the keywords that you should be targeting?

Keywords are not all created equal. Some of your competitors may actually be targeting the wrong keywords. Your goal should be to identify the right keywords and to go after those aggressively. That means studying the keywords that the competition is (and isn’t) using and studying the keywords that searchers are searching for. The right tools can make that process much easier for you. And your competitive intelligence initiatives will go a long way toward making you successful.

When it comes to gathering competitive intelligence, the information you can obtain legally and ethically is only as good as the tools you use. One good tool for gathering information on your competition’s organic SEO campaigns and PPC campaigns is KeywordSpy.

KeywordSpy allows you to search for information in several ways – Domain, Keyword, Destination URL, and Ad Copies. You’ll probably use the Keyword search most often, but the others do come in handy.

When you search for a keyword at KeywordSpy you get a boat load of information on several competitors. You get keyword statistics on PPC competitors, including CPC and search volume. There is even a nice pretty graph to show you the history of your competition in PPC.

You also get an overview of related keywords, which is nice because it also shows you the CPC and search volume for each of those keywords. Then you get samples of PPC ads from your competition.

Another great benefit is an overview of your top competitors, comparing organic SEO information and PPC information on each one. You get a nice list of the keywords for each of those competitors and how many keywords they are using for PPC and SEO.

I would definitely recommend KeywordSpy for conducting competitive intelligence before embarking on any PPC or SEO campaign.

If you are new to pay per click marketing, you might be wondering how important are keywords. In a word, they are very important. You can’t manage an effective PPC campaign without focusing on the right keywords for your campaign.

But how are keywords important?

Keywords in PPC are important in three ways:

1. They ensure that your ad is shown for the right keyword queries in the search engines. Targeting. Plain and simple.
2. Keywords are important for matching your ads with your landing pages. Your prospects will want to know that what they have queried is also what you are offering.
3. Keywords are important for bidding and budgeting correctly. You’ll get to bid on your keywords, placing a value on each one. Consider this value carefully.

Don’t ignore the importance of keywords in PPC marketing. They are just as important as keywords for SEO.

Google is getting stricter with its quality score. Recently, the search engine announced that you will hurt your quality score if you try to target too many keywords with one ad. The search engine wants you to target a specific web page with each keyword. The result for many webmasters could be a new PPC campaign for every keyword they want to target.

But that’s not to say that you’ll have to target a different keyword for every PPC campaign under every circumstances. In most cases, a tight keyword group within a PPC campaign will boost your quality score and give you maximum performance,l but you have to manage the campaign in the right way.

Your targeted web pages should be managed around a tight keyword group consisting of keywords that are related. We’re talking about a small keyword group – about 5 or 6 keywords. If you try to manage a single PPC campaign around hundreds of keywords that are broadly related then you will hurt your quality score and your ad rankings and click-throughs will suffer.

Content, links, meta tags, keywords … it’s all a sea of confusion, right? Which SEO factor is most important?

Links are important. They build link popularity. Relevance, page authority, anchor text, link age, they’re all important, right? Yes, they are all important. But links are the not the most important thing for SEO. Without at least one inbound link to your website, it won’t get crawled and the search engines won’t index it. But for search engine ranking purposes, links are not the most important SEO factor.

How about meta tags? No. In fact, Google doesn’t even consider meta tags for ranking purposes. Yahoo! and Bing still consider meta tags, but they aren’t the most important ranking criteria.

Is it keyword density? SEOs still talk about keyword density. In fact, keywords get a lot of airplay all around. Keywords in title tags, keywords in alt tags, keywords in anchor text. Yes, they’re all important. Even keyword density, to some degree, is important. But not the most important thing.

Content.

Quality, original content is the most important SEO factor online. There’s a reason “content is king” is the Internet’s chant. It’s not a campaign slogan. It’s reality. Content is the most important SEO factor. Over links. Above keyword density. And higher than meta tags.

Make your content shine and dress it up with great links, meta tags, and keyword considerations. But make your content the king.

Search engine marketing is the process of using search engines to drive traffic to your web pages, primarily through search and paid search platforms. Crafty Internet marketers do this by focusing on niche-related keywords in their marketing efforts. How does that work exactly?

For starters, you’ve got to build value into your marketing campaign in your keyword research. This should be your first step in the process. Look for the best and most profitable keywords for your niche and focus your marketing efforts on those. After you’ve identified the best keywords, put them into a list and build your web pages to focus on those keywords with each page focused on a primary and a secondary keyword. Then build links using your keywords as anchor text.

Try a PPC campaign as a test campaign on one or two of your keywords and attempt to drive traffic to a keyword-based landing page. As you do this, note your CTR. If you are getting a high CTR on any keywords then focus on those keywords for building more web pages and for increasing the search engine presence of others you’ve already built.

Search engine marketing is not hard, but it is tedious. You can build value into any niche if you know the basics.

Search engine optimization is a process that seems to be getting more and more sophisticated as time goes on. Used to be,  a webmaster could toss in a few keywords on the web page, add some meta tags, and all was well. Today, there are more than a couple of hundred ranking factors to consider. And what gets one website high rankings may be completely different for another website. Generally speaking, it’s better to focus on principles than specific techniques.

However, there are some best practices that are, across the board, very effective. Savvy search engine optimizers know that putting your keyword in your title is very effective. They also know that inbound links can make a mediocre site a great one. And your URL is important in many ways as well.

But there are certain factors that today may not be important while being extremely important next year or five years from now. A good search engine optimization specialist should be able to look down the road and predict, with some fair amount of accuracy, where search is headed – and begin to optimize web pages for the future of search as well as for today. You don’t need a crystal ball, just a good handle on the playing field. Can your SEO boast of that?

One of the most important aspects of competitive intelligence is keyword analysis. One of the simplest parts of competitive intelligence, it is also one of the most involved. There is more to keyword analysis than simply checking which keywords are the most popular searches in the search engines and which are the most sought after in terms of competitive business. Those are important, yes, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

One very important piece of the keyword analysis puzzle is the keyword meta tag. It’s relatively easy to scour the competition’s website and extract their keyword meta tags. The danger is that your competition may not have optimized their meta tags well and you’ll just be getting garbage, but if your competition has done a good job at producing optimized web pages, including the meta tags, then you can get their full list of keywords just by visiting their websites.

When using meta tags, you have to visit each page of your competition’s website individually. That’s because they will likely have optimized every page for one, two, or three keywords. The meta tags, if done properly, will show up to 10 important keywords for each page (5 is better) and each page will be optimized for different keywords. So you can see that there should be some overlap from page to page.

At any rate, while the keywords meta tag is not the only place to go for competitive keyword analysis, it is one place you don’t want to overlook.

Optimizing for social media traffic is a bit different than optimizing for search engines. But there are similarities. When you optimize your landing page for search engines, keywords are extremely important. After all, people will find your site by those keywords. But with social media, while keywords are important, they aren’t the most important thing. Social media users look for something different.

First and foremost, they want a unique experience. Keywords are good for ensuring those social media pages achieve better rankings in the search engines, but what happens if someone finds your content in Digg or StumbleUpon and arrives there from a search engine? You still want them to go to your website and that will take a different approach than merely sprinkling your content with keywords.

Your headline is very important. It should attract attention. More than that, it must get the click. Social media users have two things to go on in deciding whether or not to read your content: The headline and the description, or summary. The headline, more than anything, will determine whether or not they read your content.

What should a headline do? Three things:

1. Arouse curiosity
2. Tell the reader what to expect from the content
3. Use your primary keyword

Understand that Nos. 1 and 2 and more important than No. 3 when it comes to social media optimization. Yes, you want your keyword there for the search engines, but human readers care about the content. It must answer their most pressing questions or make them believe that your content will answer those questions. Get them to click. That’s the goal. And if you achieve that then you’ve done your job.

For most companies, a well-crafted and managed pay per click campaign can build real significant results into their online marketing plans. This is an area of online business that requires some critical thought. You don’t want to just jump in with both feet and a big budget and nonchalantly start tossing money away. There is a strategy to consider.

When you first start your pay-per-click campaign, do so lightly. Run a test. Initially, you want to test your keywords and landing pages. No sense in throwing thousands of dollars into a marketing campaign for a website that isn’t ready to close sales. So run a moderate test to see what kind of results you can get before you go all out with your marketing campaign.

When you run your initial test, you are looking for three things:

1. Is your landing page optimized well enough to receive traffic and close sales?
2. Are your keywords the right keywords for reaching your target market?
3. Is your ad content written well enough to attract click throughs?

If you can answer yes to those three questions then you are ready to start your pay per click campaign. If your answer to any of these questions after you run your test is “no” then you need to tweak and retest.

Many times, clients ask us if they have to pay for ranking for keywords that they weren’t targeting. The answer is no.

Most importantly, you never pay a cent for showing up for keywords that you aren’t targeting. In fact, long-tail searches that weren’t planned for can bring in a lot of converting traffic as well.

Every website will inevitably rank for certain keywords and phrases that weren’t being targeted. It’s a part of the natural order of the Web. Some of those keywords will actually prove to be beneficial for you.

It’s nearly impossible to predict what people will search for. Google has said that a 20%-25% of its search queries are brand new searches that have never been seen before. That effectively means that you’ll see a certain number of queries in your server log delivering traffic to your site in unexpected ways. That’s the power of the long tail.

If you can target long tail searches over a long course then you can penny and nickel your way into top search rankings one long tail search at a time. Eventually, if you win enough of the long tail phrases, you’ll start to rank for the general search phrases in your niche as well. And you’ll see loads of traffic coming to your site just because you were persistent enough to pursue the long-tail strategy.