Online Marketing Blog

Just as with Leverage Your Brand Lovers, the “Branding and Search” session gave the SMX West audience much to think about.

Bob Tripathi, Search Marketing Specialist at Discover Financial, reinforced the need to understand your brand as it relates to SEO/SEM.

Brand Recognition: Do searchers recognize your brand?
–ex. McDonalds’ arches are recognized worldwide

Brand Perception: Do searchers know what you do?
–ex. Discover Financial doesn’t just offer credit cards, but they offer a slew of other financial services

Brand Loyalty: Are searchers loyal to your brand?
–ex. Google and its VERY loyal followers

Monday night, Jessica and I represented TopRank at a Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Event in Minneapolis.

In the first of a series entitled ‘Conversations About the Future of Advertising’, Jan Leth from Ogilvy & Mather gave a presentation entitled ‘Dada, Data, Alpha and Beta’ in which he highlighted how marketers can take advantage of the digital age.

In particular I found interesting, the idea of momentgraphics versus demographics. Marketing of years past would have concluded that we need to know the age, race, income and interests of each of our prospects.

Social Media Keyword Research is Here
Whether it’s a phrase entered in a search box on a standard search engine, on a video sharing site or tags assigned to your friends’ shared social bookmarks and shared images, the meaning and intent inferred by keywords is paramount to any kind of “pull” online marketing effort.

For search marketers, that means using keyword research tools on an ongoing basis in order to adapt to trends, seasonality and changes in what’s important to the target market.

Early in my marketing career I sold classified advertising for a large and influential alternative weekly newspaper in the Twin Cities.

A true benefit of this job was experienced by friends of mine, met through occasional dabblings in the local comedy scene, who turned to me to get the word out about an upcoming show via a line ad on our back page.

Anyone familiar with an alternative news weekly’s back page is certainly no stranger to the type of ad typically represented there. Without providing too much in the way of detail, let’s just say that anyone – ANYONE – will say anything – ANYTHING – just to get found.

The success of an entire Search Marketing Campaign is rooted in the selection of keyword phrases and contrary to popular belief; the selection of these phrases is not contingent upon popularity and competitiveness alone.

Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance led part of the discussion on search term targeting at this year’s SES.

Perhaps the most important message of this session, one often overlooked by clients and SEOs alike is the idea not to choose solely what you would like to be found for, but also to select phrase for which you are being found by your target audience.

The poll is closed and the results are in with 154 votes for the most recent TopRank OMB Reader Poll: Best Keyword Research Tools. The two long standing tools of choice for many search marketers, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker, battled it out and in the end, tied.

What surprised me was how popular the old Overture tool continues to be despite not being updated since January 2007. Perhaps that should spell an opportunity for Yahoo to somehow use the url for a new and improved keyword tool with ads for Panama on it.

• Keyword Discovery (18%)

With any kind of online marketing you need a place to start. Find out what kinds of search queries people are typing into the search box and you’ll know what kind of content to optimize, create and get links to.

For the most part, keyword research software and tools fall into a handful of categories. Paid and free are two as well as those that are specific to SEO or for PPC. There are a few dominant players in each category but with some interesting innovations in the past year or so it’s worth re-visiting what’s out there and which tools our dear Online Marketing Blog readers prefer.

The popular keyword research tool, Keyword Discovery, has announced several new updates today. Here are the updates that stand out the most:

• Keyword Database Update: The KD global database now has 35 Billion searches and the premium database has 10 Billion searches from the last 12 months. This is in contrast to 300 million queries in the past 90 days with WordTracker.
• Plural Search Feature Release: KD should have had this feature a long time ago.
• Import to any KeywordDiscovery keyword database: Another long overdue feature recommended by KD users.

Upcoming enhancements to Keyword Discovery include:

A new keyword research tool called WordZe has launched this week and here is a quick review:

WordZe is a keyword research tool that shows detailed keyword searches, plus ways to track keywords well past their estimated daily search volume. The user data that powers WordZe comes from Internet portals and ISP logs from around the world.

“The tools that WordZe provides do more then just give users a general idea of how often a keyword is being search for, they also allow the user to track daily trends as keywords or industries fall and rise in popularity due to seasons or events in the news.”

As I was discussing the challenges and opportunities with a new client SEO project recently with one of our staff, I realized how much times have changed in regard to how we generate and apply keyword research.

In the late nineties and ‘01 it was pretty much a process of mapping keywords to web pages, citing popularity and competitiveness. We used the KEI information provided by the WordTracker keyword research tool to uncover opportunities with ideal keyword popularity to competitiveness ratios. Things like keyword density, prominence, position, etc were mulled over for each search engine in excessive detail.

There’s a new keyword tool called AOL Keyword Analyzer that has been posted based on the full dataset of the recently leaked AOL search data. The tool claims:

• “First tool on the web as far as I know that allows you to view what keywords a site receives in search engine traffic.”
• “First time you can see how much organic traffic every site gets from a search engine.”
• “First opportunity the public can see how many clicks individual SERPs get.”