Ratios of Informational Content

In previous articles, I’ve written about the importance of theming content – developing a strategy that truly plays to your customers’ search intent. But usually, very little of that is informational content. The average website has a ratio of 80/20 navigational or transactional content to informational content — the opposite of how people are searching. If you have a blog, the ratio usually doesn’t get much higher than 60/40, and even then, most of that content is either not keyword rich or it’s what we call “time-limited” content.

Types of Informational Content

There are two primary types of informational content: “time-limited” and “evergreen.” The former describes the category that most blog posts fall into: a summary of some industry event, a commentary on recent news, or an opinion piece that will be outdated in a few months. Evergreen content, on the other hand, will continue to be relevant for many years.

The most popular of the latter type is “how to” content; but, that content has unfortunately earned a bad reputation due to sites like ehow and wikianswers, where you are as likely to find content on how to tie a shoe (not particularly useful) as you are on how to tune a guitar (useful). If a how-to is useful, then by all means, you should write it and include it on your website.

If you’re having trouble determining what people in your industry are looking for, try using the “Discussions” feature in Google. To do this, search for a keyword, like [computers]. Then, click on the “More” drop-down menu and select “Discussions.”

The resulting page shows you a variety of queries and discussions related to your keyword. “What percentage of computers are gaming computers?” “Where can I buy a used computer?” “How can I connect multiple computers to the same Internet connection?”

These questions all make great fodder for evergreen content. You could collect some data and write a post about what kinds of computers people buy and what they are used for or a post on what to look for and be wary of when buying a used computer or a post that explains how to connect multiple computers through a single router.

As you can see by the examples above, evergreen informational content doesn’t necessarily have to be “how-to” in nature; it can be explanatory (the difference between x and y) or best practices (why x, y and z will continue to work), as long as each is based on a topic or concept that is likely to remain relevant for years to come.

While time-limited content tends to be more effective at gaining links and attention, evergreen content is generally (not always) more effective at gaining rankings for specific keywords. The key is to make sure either type of content is truly helpful to searchers and not just written for SEO.

When is Informational Content Useful?

To answer this question, consider what the searcher is looking for. For example, if a searcher is looking for “droid cases” and you sell batteries, then content related to “droid cases” is probably not going to be all that useful to either party. A searcher of “droid cases” is not going to find your website relevant if you don’t sell droid cases, even if you do provide great information about how to choose one.

But, if the searcher wants to know why his “phone won’t charge” (10k monthly searches and very low competition), then you could provide some detailed, helpful content about when it’s best to buy a new charger or how to tell when your battery may be past its prime. This type of content is directly geared toward producing a sale, but it does not have to be.

Another example: let’s say you have a corporate website and you are trying to attract investors. This is a very competitive, low search volume market. Obviously, you want to optimize for the brand keywords [xyz company investing] and such, but you also may want to provide information on the different types of investments as well, even if you don’t offer them.

For instance, [high yield investment] is a strong search term. If your company is focused on long-term investment, then this would be the exact opposite of what you do; so normally, you would not optimize for it. But, with such a limited volume for [low risk investing] and similarly relevant keywords, you should take the opportunity to try and capture these additional keywords. Here’s how:

Steps to writing informational content

Integrating Your Informational Content

Informational content is important, and you shouldn’t just throw it everywhere. Long-form content has its place, and you should consult with your designers and user experience team to determine where it fits best. (We’ll explore that more next month.)

For now, just know that you need to have the content as well integrated with your site as possible. Keep in mind, too, that evergreen content can be in a blog if that’s where it makes sense to put it, but it’s more likely to get search engine attention if it’s part of your main navigation, such as within an “information center” or “resources” section.

If you fill a few pages of your site with informational content, you’ll find that you will get a lot more traffic. The catch? You must accept that the purpose of this exercise is to get more eyeballs on your site (oops, I mean to provide a valuable service) and that the traffic may not convert well. Still, 1% conversion on 10,000 visitors is a lot more conversions than 5% conversion on 1,000 visitors.

I joked earlier that this is just an SEO play, but the truth is that all websites should have some element of informational content. There are several stages in the buying cycle, and information gathering is one of the most important. Don’t leave your information seekers out in the cold — or worse, at one of your competitors’ websites.

But, on the subject of website redesign, we’re leading several of our clients through this right now. As they’re all at various stages and have various requirements for the finished project, I thought it might be beneficial to write up a content strategy process you can use when you do redesign your website.

Hire The Right People

You need:

1. A Website Developer: one who is open to a variety of platforms and can discuss the pros and cons of each one with you.
2. A Designer: one who can make your vision a reality. Make sure you hire someone who can use search-engine-friendly methods (i.e., no Flash, etc.).
3. A Technical SEO: one to make sure you don’t lose any of your existing rankings or traffic with the relaunch, and that SEO principles are “baked in.”

Determine Your Content Strategy

You need to conceive and implement a great content strategy. The best way to design a site is around the content your users truly need and want, but that’s not always feasible. If you have a lot of good content already, it may be better to look at the assets you already have and try to fill in the blanks.

Start From Zero

Keyword research should be your first step. Refer back to this article for some more information on that. Categorize your keywords into intent-based categories and think about the content you’d need to write to fulfill the needs of each topic.

For example, for a weight-loss program, there are likely to be a lot of searches around how the program works. This includes keywords like [how does x work], but it also includes keywords like [do I have to exercise on x]?

Now that you have your keywords, it’s time to check… ranking. Yes, I said it. Check to see how you are ranking on Google for your keyword categories. What pages are ranking? Has Google already identified pages on your site that are most relevant to a given topic? If so, you probably want to go ahead and assign the ranking keywords to those pages.

Map The Keywords

Look at what you have left. Are there content pages that need to be created? Is there existing content that would be a good match for the topic, maybe with a few slight changes in tone or focus? Map a single topic and keyword list to each page. No page should have more than 3-5 keywords, and they should all be tightly themed.

For example: [weight loss], [weight loss program], [losing weight], and [weight loss for women] could all be on one page, but you wouldn’t want [weight loss for women], [losing weight with exercise], [eating healthy], and [vitamin supplements] all on one page.

Similarly, all the keywords you choose for a page should be focused on the same stage of the buying cycle. The keywords above were all centered around information gathering. You wouldn’t want to suddenly throw a keyword like [buy food for weight loss] into the mix. It’s the wrong focus for an informational page.

Architect The Site

This is the point at which you involve the developer and the designer. Now that you know what the focus of the pages is going to be, you can begin to break them apart into sections and subsections.

Many developers won’t take on a project until you can tell them how many pages you’ll need, anyway (and this is the wrong way to price projects like this, in my opinion). The more insight you have into what your finished architecture needs to be, the more helpful the designer and developer can be.

Write The Content & The Tags

Now, you have tightly focused keywords around well-themed copy. While the designer is creating the user experience, and the developer is coding the pages, write the copy.

Use the keywords in the heading and the content without overdoing it, and then write tags that reflect the page, as well. Remember, although a description tag has no direct impact on ranking, it can certainly increase click-through rate if it’s written well.

Check Back With The Technical SEO

Before you even think about launching, be sure to check back in again with the technical SEO to make sure your site adheres to all the required best practices, that you have a redirect table properly set up, etc. Allow them to QA and do all the geeky things we do.

So now, you have a simplified approach to developing content for a new site. As you’ve probably already guessed, you can use this strategy for any content you’re developing. Just remember to focus on the keywords, and you’ll be golden.

Image credit to ShutterStock

You may see a drop in rankings or traffic and immediately panic. Have I been Panda-slapped? Even now, as we look at the two year anniversary of Google’s Panda Update, the likelihood is that you have not. Rankings and traffic fluctuate for many reasons, most of which are not related to penalties from search engines.

But, how can you tell? Instead of watching rankings overall, watch categories of keywords. If you separate your keyword categories by topic, you can more easily spot trends that have to do with a particular content area of your site. Typically, if there is a problem, it’s going to start there.

To evaluate symptoms of a bigger issue, I’ve created this handy protocol to get you started:

Help, My Rankings Dropped!

1. Have they really dropped?

• Do you see a corresponding decrease in traffic?
  • If yes, wait two days and check again, they may come right back up. Rankings and traffic bobble all the time.
  • If no, there’s probably not anything to worry about. Recheck in a week or so.

Keep in mind, there’s dozens of reasons a report may not be accurate. If analytics doesn’t show a corresponding decrease in organic traffic, there’s probably no problem.

2.  Ok, I’ve double checked and they really did drop. My analytics show a decrease, too.

• Don’t panic!
• Look at how the drops are correlated. Are they all from one group of keywords? Are they associated with certain pages of the website?

3.  If they’re all from a particular category of keywords, read on. If not, skip to Step 4.

• Check the sites that are ranking for these keywords. Are there new players? Has someone shot to the top that wasn’t there before? If so, investigate what they are doing differently. Is the content fresher, better optimized, more shared in social media? It may be that you just need to keep up with the Joneses.
• If no one has shot to the top lately, check to make sure no one has made any major changes to the site. It could be a technical issue.
• Still no luck? Sorry, you’ll have to hire an SEO to do a deeper analysis.

4.  If they aren’t from a particular category of keywords, but are from the same pages or section of the site, this could be a problem.

• Check the pages that used to rank/have traffic. Are they still live? Any major changes to them lately?
• Evaluate the content with an open mind. Is it really quality content? Or do you have duplication or poor quality? You can find a complete checklist here.
• Have any of these pages been duplicated elsewhere? Take a snippet of unique text from the page and search it in Google with quotes to see if someone’s been copying your content.
• Any technical issues, such as an accidental noindex or canonical tag?

5.  If you identify any of the above (except tech issues), you could be looking at the first stages of a Panda penalty.

You need to clean up this content asap, as the trend you are seeing could be an early warning sign that you could be impacted by Panda.

Truths & Myths About Panda

• Panda is an algorithm, not a manual penalty. It is only refreshed periodically. If you see early warning signs like the ones described above, you usually have plenty of time to clean up the content before the next Panda refresh.
• Panda, when applied, typically affects an entire domain or subdomain. You will likely see a significant drop in organic traffic as a result.
• It is still possible to maintain some rankings (especially in the 30s-40s and up) when hit by Panda. You probably won’t disappear completely, although it may feel like you did.
• There are usually early warning signs that you’re about to be hit, unless what you’re doing is blatantly spamming and it triggers a manual penalty.
• Most sites will never be affected by Panda.
• Panda is not only about duplication, although that is one of the most common forms of it. It’s also about poorly written or unsubstantial content.
• Duplication of a few pages, or a small percentage of poorly written content is unlikely to trigger Panda. The ratio usually needs to be pretty high.

So now you’re empowered to fight the Pandas in the room. The best advice I can give you is to remember that you are fighting a computer. Computers do make mistakes, but they are rare.

If you’ve been hit by an algorithmic update, you probably took short cuts that you shouldn’t have taken. Also keep in mind that no one but Google knows for sure how this all works. Although my opinions are based on experience, there are always aberrations and dissenters. Feel free to debate in the comments.

Since I was thinking about PPC and how incredibly mixed up and difficult it has become, it seemed like a good time to write about it.

My team and I are trying to figure out ways to look at PPC campaigns differently, finding a way to automate some of the grunt work while still delivering great campaigns. I know everyone and their brother has done this, but we’re convinced we can do it better. Just let me live in this dream world, ok?

In considering the best ways to evaluate campaigns, we’ve begun a very thorough and detailed investigation of Quality Score.

While you can do a search on Quality Score and find plenty of people who have quoted Google’s Quality Score Guidelines, I haven’t seen that many articles about how it really works, and no one is willing to share their “secrets” to playing the game.

Here is what we’ve found, and while I can’t share the details publicly, it’s all backed by solid data and testing.

Google’s Assault On Keyword Data

First, let’s begin with a quick review of (not set) keyword data. This is often linked with (not provided), but it’s actually very different. Not set results occur when something is lost between the AdWords click and the tracking on the analytics side.

It occurs most often with auto-tagging, or if there’s duplicate code on pages or duplicate analytics profiles connected to AdWords. Not provided is returned when a user performed a search with https://www.google.com and clicked on an organic result.

In a nutshell:

Differences in “Not Set” and “Not Provided” Keywords Reported by Google

The End Of Display URLs

No, display URLs aren’t going away. Google’s made a big change this year though that impacts what you can put on the end of your display URL. Forcing a subdomain (like www) onto each display URL cuts down your space by 4 characters. Here’s the catch: you can fudge this with three different techniques:

1. If your URL plus your keyword is exactly 35 characters, Google will display it as you wrote it. For example: domainislong.com/keywrd-is-alsolong (note how it doesn’t have the www on it?). If your requested display URL is shorter than 35 characters, they’ll shoehorn a www. in front of it. Anyone who’s done a lot of AdWords testing knows that presenting a URL without www increases clickthrough rate.
2. If your URL is longer than 35 characters by just a couple, they’ll adjust just enough to fit it. For example, the display URL in the screenshot below is 37 characters:
3. If you have a lot of really long keywords, consider using keyword insertion to get around the character limits for them. If a display URL is longer than 35 characters, Google will shorten it automatically. This can help you get some additional real estate in extreme cases; but you’ll want to watch it carefully, since Google will decide how to shorten it, and it might create a branding issue for you.

Since a major component of Quality Score is the clickthrough rate of your ads, you’ll want to maximize every available opportunity to increase clickthrough, including the techniques described above.

Random Quality Scores Of 10

Everyone’s thrilled beyond words when their campaigns suddenly start showing QS of 10. But, take a closer look. We’re seeing many keywords with 10s that have never had an impression or a click. Never. In the history of the account. As soon as they are shown, the QS drops.

My question is: is there benefit to having some “empty” 10s in an ad group even if you never plan for them to be clicked on? Will this raise your average QS for the ad group, and therefore, your perceived value in the auction? We’re testing it, but we’d love to hear your feedback as well.

Pre-loaded Quality Scores

Another thing we’ve seen consistently in our tests is that our keywords and ad groups are receiving quality scores before they’re launched, which is remarkably consistent with what they end up being post-launch. More on this as it develops, but it would seem that you can tweak your campaign architecture, bids, keywords and other facets to maximize your opportunity before you even launch.

I’ve heard from other PPC experts that this is simply based on competitor data for the same keywords. We have a client with a completely unique service that is new to the market who saw QS in her account before we launched. And they weren’t all 10s, suggesting that it was at least partly based on campaign architecture.

Keyword Match Type Targeting

The final thing that we’re noticing has a significant positive impact on campaigns is matching keyword types within ad groups. By creating multiple copies of each ad group for all of the match types we want to target, we can maximize opportunity for impressions.

Add that to the pre-testing that we’ve been able to do with the pre-loaded quality score data, and our campaigns are really humming.

Bid Management & Why We Don’t Use It – At Least At First

The final key that we found is that bid management doesn’t work for newly launched campaigns. Owners of bid management programs will tell you it’s best to launch in the program and let the program “learn” the campaign.

While it’s true that the programs learn incredibly well, they have to have a good foundation to start from, or they’re learning the wrong things. We’ve found a significantly higher return on the campaigns that we launched and optimized manually at first.

It’s a ton of time and expense, but the per-keyword return is much higher in the long run if the bid management program is introduced after the campaign has been live for a few days or weeks (depending on volume).

The Future Of Quality Score?

As Quality Score gets more obtuse and confusing, we’re seeing a lot of bouncing around. For example, we had one keyword that didn’t get any impressions yesterday at all, but bounced quality score from a 10 to a 3 and back again several times.

Couple that with the recent changes in impression reporting, match types, display URLs and more, and I have to wonder… could we be seeing the first steps of phasing out QS altogether?

The last time I saw this kind of volatility in a metric from Google, it was back in 2007 when Toolbar PageRank was getting discredited and phased out. If you think about it, Google doesn’t really need to show us QS. We’ve gotten spoiled. They could just as easily decide not to show it anymore, even though they use it internally. What do you think is the future of Quality Score?

Jenny Halasz (JH): What do you think are the most important issues facing how we think about keywords?

Andrew Goodman (AG): Evolution is what we feel most comfortable with, and we are hoping that we can just continue to react to different consumer search patterns. People are getting more savvy about how they search. They know to enter a geo-modifier… people are giving us more intent than we used to get.

But that’s beginning to change as Google puts more and more things into a black box, and tries to determine intent before the keyword is even used. People need to be on the lookout for this, and recognize that the tradeoff of convenience may be the loss of pieces of micro data they’re used to getting.

Matt Van Wagner (MV): Well, it’s interesting, and over the last 10 years, people have been trained on how to use search engines more effectively.

For me, the most interesting thing is that something that should be stable, which is the lexicon, what keywords really are, has been stable for a particular period of time… Google, within the last year, they changed the protocols – started to do some monkeying around inside the black box – in a way that’s incredibly disruptive to the nuances of search query distinction.

To Andrew’s point, Google does want to continue to make things easier, but profitability is at the edge of differentiation between companies… Google is not omniscient so that they know your company’s competitive advantages and what works and what doesn’t as it relates to the way that you communicate out to your potential customers. I find it really odd that after so many years they would have fundamentally changed so many things.

In my mind, clarity in search keywords should be better than it was 10 years ago… but, the recent changes to match types and reporting have caused so much disruption to our own accounts that we’ve basically had to retool almost every account that we have.

AG: At an even higher level of abstraction, Google’s found themselves in a place of fiduciary responsibility. To some extent, they have implied a level of stability [that many businesses have invested in]. I was reading about car dealers who are suing manufacturers for doing things like dumping rental fleet cheaply. So of course, we can’t sue Google for changing the rules, but people do have a moral economy, certain built-up expectations that react negatively to disruption.

MV: The problem is that there are millions and millions of us, with very little bargaining power, and Google basically controls a good part of the economic engine that drives the world. Everyone was hoping that Microsoft would give them some competition, but they’re just not there yet. I mean, a car dealer who is upset with a manufacturer can just say goodbye and go off and carry a different line of cars.

JH: We don’t have that luxury.

MV: Well, go do print, go do TV. [laughs]

AG: Yeah, go do above urinal advertising. [all laughing] But Google is going to have a deal with the urinal people soon…

[Conversation digresses into jokes about Google’s “did you mean” at the urinal.]

JH: What do you think about the expansion of the exact match type and the option to opt-out? Google’s history has always been that you can opt out of something for a little while, but eventually you won’t be able to opt out anymore.

AG: I would argue that Google’s history always was a lot of opt-outs compared to everyone else (Yahoo, Overture)…

MV: Well, speaking of opt-outs, there was the whole brouhaha with the ad rotation thing. Everybody whined loudly and long about that, and Google reluctantly put that back in… even though it’s [not that great].

AG: Do not optimize. Have worse ads run indefinitely.

JH: I won’t quote you on that.

AG: I probably wrote that already. It’s out there, it’s public.

MV: I think they changed that, right?

AG: ‘Rotate indefinitely and do not optimize.’

MV: But also, that’s a “not recommended” thing.

AG: Is that a Zagat recommendation? What does ‘recommending’ even mean?

[Conversation digresses into jokes about who recommends what.]

MV: The best ad is not the same thing as the best ad group. And the best click-through-rate isn’t the same thing as the most profitable ad or ad group. Although they’ve tried with analytics and everything, they haven’t gotten to the point of being able to optimize every company in America. And they can’t do that because that would be completely anticompetitive.

JH: Leaving Google for a minute, I assume you both run campaigns on MSN?

MV: What’s MSN?

AG: Oh, right, isn’t it called Bing Ads now?

JH: Old habits die hard.

MV: Oh, we do it all the time. I had just trained everyone in my office to call it adCenter.

[Conversation digresses into discussion of trademarks…]

JH: Ok, so what is your impression of ads on Bing, and do you think they will continue to compete in the space?

MV: Yes, absolutely, they will continue to compete. Bing is all in. There are some questions about Yahoo, with the introduction of Marissa Mayer, whether that will help solidify the relationship, help things like display advertising get directly into Bing.

The contextual and display and other groups are so disparate, it’s like when you advertise in different countries; and, you have to make a contract with each country. What’s really cool about what’s going on with Microsoft right now is that they’re going to full synchronization with Adwords. They’re definitely trying to keep up with Google, but Google keeps changing things.

AG: Synchronization… is really what everyone wants. Ninety percent market share for paid clicks for Google is really what we’re dealing with here, so people are really focused on optimizing everything very detailed in their Google account. So, to have a separate setup in Bing is… people give up.

So this would be a lot of money to Microsoft’s bottom line if they can bring everyone on board [with synchronization]. A lot of people are sort of frustrated with it.

MV: I think they’ve settled out some should we or shouldn’t we issues and… they have a lot of things they feel will give them the ability to compete and outcompete Google on a lot of things. But the very first thing is they’ve got to get enough revenue pushing through there to make it a profitable division.

AG: I think the big difference beyond that is that it’s mainly a US success story as far as market share [for Bing] goes.

JH: Both of you mentioned in your presentation that segmentation of platforms and channels are impacting the type of data we’re getting from our tools. Do you think that’s likely to continue? Do marketers need to be thinking about advertising in all those different channels?

AG: There’s all this granularity of how people are searching, and… I think the question is, can we effectively segment our data and respond to it vs. should we be segmenting our strategies?

There’s a real tradeoff between aggregating for useful convenient narratives and analysis that are easily actionable vs. this infinite splintering… chopping data up into pieces that won’t be statistically significant, and the novice will certainly see things that don’t perform in smaller and smaller buckets and call them non-performers even though they’re just random holes and noise in the data.

MV: One of the things people are running into is cross-device attribution, and of course, they want to solve it. I don’t think it’s a solvable problem. But you can model out the data and [make inferences]. Until… you have an embedded chip in you, we are going to have to be living with more data not provided, but just structurally because people like you [gestures to Jenny] are holding two devices at the same time.

AG: Someone like Google would want to get closer to solving [this problem]. The only thing that stops them is Apple. The fact that some of these companies hate each other is at least preserving some of our privacy.

MV: 2013 is going to be the year of complexity. I’m going to go buy a farm and plant some chia seeds.

I get emails like the one below all the time, this one being from the talented owner of Castleview 3D Architectural Renderings:

“I need your help.  I realy don’t get the whole keywords/SEO/web marketing thing — but I know enough to know that I shouldn’t and don’t want to tackle it myself. I’m a small business (small = just me) and maybe I can’t afford you.  But I’d like to find out. I get solicited by 2 or 3 SEO firms a week, but something about them and their approach really puts me off.”

Therein lies the problem. There’s an old joke that “99% of lawyers give the other 1% a bad name.” I think that’s just as true with SEOs. There’s 1% of SEOs out there that actually know what they are doing and do it well. Of those, about one third are black hat and about two-thirds are white hat (that’s not scientific, just an educated guess).

Now consider the average starting fee for SEO services. According to SEOMoz’s 2011 survey, the average retainer fee for an SEO agency is $2500-$5000 a month.

So what is a small business like the one above to do? The popular answer would be to hire a single SEO – maybe one of the many consultants out there charging between $100-$150 per hour.

But for many small businesses, even that is too much. How do they compete with the huge companies who are able to spend 5K and up a month on services? And here’s the kicker…

Google Is Making It Worse

Google has implemented so many elements to their algorithm that rely on webmasters knowing detailed SEO (not just basics) that they are making it harder and harder for SMBs to compete.

Here is just a small list:

• Favoritism in logged-in listings given to sites that have Google+ profiles
• Pay to play Google Shopping
• Enhanced listings with schema.org tags
• Duplicate content reduction and consolidation with canonical tags
• Authorship tagging
• Link disavow tool (which even Google says not to use unless you know advanced SEO)
• Data sharing and control with Google Webmaster Tools*

*No algorithmic impact, but the ability to influence things like sitelinks that the majority of SMBs don’t even know exists.

When & Where Does It Stop?

I’ve asked at plenty of conferences if this is the new normal. Are the days of being able to just put up a website with great content and getting it ranked over?

The answer I always hear is that Google just needs help from us while it catches up to the technology available. I say that’s a cop-out. I don’t see Google doing anything to catch up to the technology. I see them continuing to target people who don’t know any better – SMBs who have unwittingly hired one of those “2 or 3 SEO firms that solicit [them] each week.”

Sure, Panda and Penguin are targeting spam, and that’s good for all of us “white hats,” but in most cases, the people who fall victim to that spam are the SMBs. Generally, the big brands have plenty of layers between the SEO and the decision maker to rely on plausible deniability. I’d like to see Google focus more on improving their ability to understand all types of content rather than continuing on this witch hunt.

And in the meantime? The number-one result in my area for “architectural rendering company” is a site with keyword stuffed text in their description tag and at the bottom of their home page. And Bing isn’t much better.

The #1 result there is for a different firm (located in Toronto, and I’m in the US), with keyword stuffed description tag and spammy anchor text links at the bottom of the home page. So clearly, the improvements to reduce spam aren’t working.

Side note: someone should tell the “SEOs” these sites hired that the description tag doesn’t impact ranking.

So my question to you, dear reader, is: have keywords stopped being a proxy to a customer?

In other words, if you create great content, can you get it ranked? Or will we allow authorship, canonicals, schema, and manipulation of keywords to become the new normal?

One more thought before you share your comments, and I hope you will. The following statement appears in Google’s current quality guidelines, and has been there since the first time they were published:

“Make pages [primarily] for users, not for search engines.” Primarily was added in June of 2008, and Matt Cutts (head of Google’s webspam team) had this to say about it: “the spirit of that guideline is that users should be the primary consideration. But it is fine to do some things that don’t affect users but do help search engines.”

So, it’s ok to do these many things to help search engines understand your pages. But where do we (as users) draw the line? At what point are we designing pages more for search engines than for users?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Theming Content

The first question you need to ask yourself when optimizing a page is, What is the Page About?

If you can’t answer this or your answer is a keyword, then maybe you shouldn’t be building the page. Seriously. You need the page to be about something in order for it to have value on your website.

In the case of my client, the page was about a conference in Los Angeles where the company was going to exhibit. It’s starting to make sense now, isn’t it? Specifically, the page was about a single type of software it sells. Let’s call it Software A.

Putting Content Into Context

The second question you need to ask yourself is, What is the Purpose of This Page?

Is it news, a press release, a blog post, an educational piece, a sales piece? What are your goals with the page?

In my client’s case, the goal was to announce that it would be at the event and give a little bit of background about Software A. I’d call it a press release.

Consider Content Timing

The third consideration is: How long will this content remain relevant?

• Is it an educational piece that will always be useful?
• Is it a product explanation that will be relevant until the next version comes out?
• Is it a news item that will always be interesting?
• Is it an event that will recur?

In my client’s case, the page was about an event that would happen once (next week, in fact) and then be over.

Content Optimization

Finally, we get to optimization for search. Given the other questions you’ve asked, what makes sense for optimization?

• Are there relevant keywords to use?
• Should you include links to other content?
• What should the Title, Description and Heading say?

Making Decisions

The answer is, it depends. Don’t apply a one-size-fits-all method to your optimization. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to even put keywords on a page. Sometimes a few well-optimized links are all you need. Either way, the answer is common sense.

In my client’s case, they were putting out a news item about a conference for Software A in LA next week. I chose two key phrases in the text and linked them back to Software A’s pages. I chose a Title and Heading that read something like, “Company Presents Software A at Conference.” Anything beyond that would have been overkill.

So next time you’re wondering how to optimize a page, first use the handy chart below.

Consider Topic, Purpose, and Timing

Keep in mind, this isn’t a prix fixe meal where you can choose one salad, one entree and one dessert. Good optimization isn’t done that way.

Great optimization is more like a four course a’ la carte meal, where you carefully select each element based on what you know about your users. Just throw a few crumbs in every now and then for the search engines.

First, think about what your goals are with each medium. What are you trying to do, and what constitutes success in that area? Next, think about how the keywords will be used. Where, when, how often?

Finally, consider what your margin for error is. If you don’t get exactly the right keyword, what’s the penalty?

What… Is Your Quest?

In SEO, your goal should be to understand the keyword landscape of a topic. What keywords do people search for, and what does this tell us about their intent? What can we learn from looking at keywords in a broader context?

For PPC, your goal should be to find the keywords that you can bid on. Which keywords are going to make you the most potential money for your cost-per-click investment?

You should focus on keywords that suggest a purchase (or goal completion), that represent a category area that is profitable for you, and that you can’t easily get ranked for in organic (most of the time – there are exceptions to this).

What… Is The Air-Speed Velocity Of An Unladen Swallow?

Let’s start with PPC this time. And no, I don’t know the airspeed of a swallow, laden or unladen, so I’d be thrown into the abyss. But I do know PPC.

You’ll use the keywords in your campaigns and ad groups, in your ad copy, and on your landing page. You want to have a very tight correlation between each so that your Quality Score is high. This is pretty much it in terms of how you will use your PPC keywords.

For SEO, you’ll use these keywords as the foundation of everything that you do. Ideally, you’ll correlate your existing content on your website with them, find the gaps, and decide if you want to create additional content to fill those gaps.

You’ll identify a focus keyword or two for each page on the website, and correlate the meta tags, title, and content to match the focus keyword. You’ll also use those keywords to track and benchmark your ranking progress. I’ve created a handy image below that explains this.

Keyword uses for SEO and PPC, plus the margin for error

Understand The Margin Of Error For SEO & PPC Keywords 

In SEO, your margin for error is very large. If you use a keyword in a way that just doesn’t work, you’ll adjust it and try again. You may find yourself ranking for or getting traffic for keywords you didn’t think about. Those are a bonus, and you can just add them into your reports as needed.

You’ll also want to refresh your keyword research every now and then to make sure there aren’t new advances, technologies, products or ideas that weren’t popular when you first did your research.

Since SEO doesn’t cost a fee per keyword, you won’t (or you shouldn’t) shy away from high competition words that you may not get. It doesn’t hurt you at all to continue competing for those, and if anything, it makes it easier to qualify for many longer tail keywords.

Plus, on the user experience side, it makes your site much cleaner, because instead of having headings like “Wedding Accessories for Dog Ring Bearers”, you can stick with “Wedding Accessories” or the more specific but still high volume “Ring Bearer Pillows”. It’s important to adjust the depth of the keyword to the depth of the site, with top level pages using broader keywords and sub-categories being much more specific.

Conversely, the margin for error in PPC is small. Every mistake costs you money. Every keyword that you bid on puts you in direct monetary competition with other sites. You need to go over your keywords with a fine tooth comb, cutting out any that aren’t working, adding negatives, expanding to new opportunities, and always with one eye on the cost per click and the other on the Quality Score.

You need to make sure your keywords are tightly categorized by theme, that your ad copy is performing as well as it possibly can, and that your tight ad group/keyword strategy extends to your landing page and the way keywords are used on it. The efforts must be meticulous and calculated.

So the next time you are tempted to ask your consultant why they didn’t include competition metrics in an SEO keyword list, or why PPC categories are done by keyword rather than intent, think about the differences between the two mediums. And remember that just because data is available, it doesn’t mean it is necessarily useful in all contexts.

Thanks to Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s Bridge of Death scene for being the inspiration for my headings.

My White Hat Feels Dirty

Keywords at their most basic level are what we use to communicate, and if you think back to those COM 101 days, you’ll remember that the way it works is our thoughts are encoded in our brains into words, those words are spoken or written, and then decoded by the brains on the other end.

This is why when you say something, it may not come out (or be received) the way you meant it to be.

If we think of our websites as having conversations with search engines, this is how people get into trouble, and why search engines are failing at their job.

Search engines decode our websites’ content by parsing the language and applying a set of algorithms to it. In theory, they then rank content according to how well it matches the query. Oh, if only it were that simple.

What actually happens is that the search engines (Google especially) do a very poor job of decoding the intent behind the content. This is why spammers thrive.

For all Google’s lip service saying they know how keywords are actually used, and how they use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to decode intent, they miss a dozen spammers who are happily stuffing keywords and cloaking content. And getting rewarded for it.

So here’s my effort to level the playing field. Here are a few things spammers (ahem: SEOs) are doing to game the system that still work.

1.  Keywords In The Top Left Of The Page

You’ll see this on a lot of sites – a keyword (usually relevant, but with no valid purpose) in the top left corner of the page, just above the logo. It’s not hidden, but it provides no benefit to the user.

2.  Keywords In The “title” Attribute On Links

As soon as people figured out they could stuff ALT text, they realized they could stuff links too. You’ll see a lot of top ranking sites using this on their links – if you hover over the link, you’ll see a pop up with a keyword for the link just like you do ALT text. It’s often referred to as a “tool tip”.

Again, no benefit to the user whatsoever. Sure, it used to have valid purpose back when the Internet was invented, but now it’s nothing more than an instrument of spam.

3.  Keywords In The Domain

No matter what Google or anyone else says, there’s a clear preference for keywords in the domain name that goes beyond just the link anchor text you’re likely to get from your inbound links (see below). Spammers know that keywords in the domain name can help you rank better in Google. Test after test has shown this is true, despite what Google says.

4.  Keywords In Site Navigation Links

“Home” is a perfectly acceptable link! It’s universally recognized, it’s clear, and it’s short and to the point. It doesn’t need to be “Keyword Research Home” or “Lemon Law Home”. But Google continues to reward it. I’m sure Web designers everywhere would throw a party for Google if they would finally change their algo so that this stupid stuffing trick stopped working.

5.  Keywords In Link Anchor Text

This is exactly what Google claims to ferret out with Penguin. If it actually worked that way, I’d throw a ticker tape parade. Because the way SEOs get links is anything but natural. In the early days of the Web, you got a link on someone else’s site by asking, “Hey buddy, we have similar but not competitive websites. I think my users would benefit from your site and vice versa. Want to trade links?”

There’s nothing wrong with this type of exchange, but Google de-values it because it’s an exchange rather than a one way link (which in the early days of the Web would only happen if you paid the webmaster for it, but I digress…).

Instead, the link behavior they reward is “check out this article for more info on keyword research techniques“, when in a natural world, these are the keywords a person would actually use for the link anchor text: “check out this article for more info on keyword research techniques”.

Before you start screaming obscenities at me (I’m an SEO, not a Spammer! Those are valid SEO techniques!), let me say that I use (almost) all of these techniques from time to time on the websites I optimize. Because here’s the thing. They work. And as long as Google’s going to show preferences to sites that do this, I’ll have to do things that make me a little sick to my stomach every time I recommend them.

So here’s my plea, Google. Start putting as much emphasis on intent as you do on content. And help those of us out there who identify as “white hat” SEOs feel a little less dirty from our success.

Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images

These tools are not a substitute for detailed keyword research like I talked about in my first series of articles. Rather, they may help to either identify those keywords that are most important to your competitors, or help find obscure opportunities where there may be little search volume, but there is also little competition.

All of the tools I reviewed for this article are free to the public. Some have paid options, but I’ve only covered the free features.

KeywordEye

keywordeye.co.uk

This tool defaults to Google UK since it’s developed by a UK team, so if you’re using it in the US, you’ll have to change it to Google US. The nice thing is that it also has options for several other countries and returns results in language.

The free version of this tool does limit you to 100 keywords, so while it’s useful for high level ideas, it’s not a keyword research substitute.

Another nice feature is the ability to order the cloud visualization it returns – by Adwords competition or by search volume. Since the cloud already “orders” the data by showing high volume words in larger font, I generally choose to order by Adwords competition.

Here’s a screen shot of “backpacks” in Google DE ordered by ascending Adwords competition:

Cloud results for "backpacks" in Google DE

As you can see, this is an easy way to surface a lot of related keywords that don’t necessarily contain the word “backpack”. It’s also a better strategy for translation/localization on the cheap, since “deuter rucksack” is likely to be the most searched phrase.

It will save you from making a big mistake like using the literal translation of “to backpack”, which is “trampen”, or being too specific like “hiking backpack”, which is “wanderrucksack”.

KeywordSpy

www.keywordspy.com

Keyword Spy allows you to quite literally “spy” on keywords. It’s a great name.

There are several features of the free version of this tool, but the one I like the best is the Domain spy tool.

Just type any domain into the search box, make sure the radio button for “domains” is selected, and you can get reasonably accurate data on how much that site is spending in paid search, who their competitors are, what keywords they spend the most money on, and more:

Result for Geico.com in KeywordSpy

Those tabs across the top work too, and while with a free trial, you can only get 10-20 results in each tab, the information is still really useful.

The “Ads” page for example shows you Geico’s top ad copies with some key information about them. You can even click on this little “KW” button to get more keywords that are in that ad group:

Plus, you can export any of the lists into Excel, CSV, or Google Spreadsheets. Bonus! Export capability is usually not offered in free products.

The competitors tab is also pretty neat; you can see both organic and paid competitors side by side:

Paid/Organic Competition in KeywordSpy for Geico.com

The Top Lists page is mostly just fun info to know with no direct application, but one of these lists is the keywords with the largest cost per click change. This information, which is not readily available in other tools, can be quite useful in detecting trends as they are happening.

Notice that every one of these keywords is for a different industry/vertical, so you get a good cross-section. It’s worth checking back on occasionally.

But in terms of real world application, the Keyword Spy add on has got to be the best feature. Their website link doesn’t seem to work all that well, but I downloaded the add-on for Chrome, and basically what it does is allow you to open the domain report on any website where it’s applicable.

You can find out some interesting and useful information this way. For example, did you know that the most profitable keyword Facebook bids on (according to Keyword Spy’s calculation) is “advertise myspace”? Think of what you could learn about your competitors.

SEMRush

www.semrush.com

This tool is also a paid tool with a free option, but unlike other free options, I think this tool provides just enough data in its free application to be useful. One element that I like in SEMRush that I haven’t seen elsewhere is the metric for the number of results in Google. That’s this number for any given search:

Number of pages for "backpack" on Google.com

The number of results is useful because it essentially shows you how big the competitive field is for a keyword. Instead of showing you just the number of competitors, or who wants to pay for it and how much, it shows you that there are (in this case) 145 million other pages that use this term in a way that Google feels may be relevant.

Here’s where you see this metric on SEMRush:

Another area that SEMRush provides something you just don’t see everywhere else is “related keywords”.

Staying with the example of “backpack”, you can see below that SEMRush points out a couple of important keywords that are not relevant to a site selling bags that you carry stuff in and sling over your shoulders:

Keywords related to "backpack", source: SEMRush

These keywords all refer to an application named “backpack”, which was created by 37Signals and is a companion to BaseCamp, which is a project management system.

This is an important piece of information, and something I need to make sure I put in the negatives of my PPC campaign. Sure, I would find it eventually anyway if I’m optimizing my account well, but this way, I don’t have to pay for keywords like this up front.

So there are just a few free opportunities to get more keyword data. There are so many more I could cover, but after reviewing more than two dozen free keyword tools, these are my favorites. One other toolset that merits mention is the one from SEOBook, which is only partially keyword research, but between the tools and the browser extensions, will make your life so much easier.

It’s important to note, there’s definitely something to be said for paying for great data. I’ve previously had the benefit of subscriptions to SpyFu, Wordtracker, Adgooroo, Compete.com, and KeywordDiscovery, and I wouldn’t hesitate a minute to buy those again if my budget allowed.

What’s your favorite tool? Are there other features of the ones I covered that you couldn’t live without? Tell me in the comments!