Amazing because every year, football fans flock to search engines searching for the start time, and until now, organizations like the NFL, the playing teams, and the broadcasting station didn’t show up at all in search results because none of their sites answered the question. Seem crazy?

• 2009  Results: In 2009, start-time related searches were among the most popular the morning of the game, but neither the NFL nor NBC were anywhere to be found.
• 2010 Results: In 2010, both nfl.com and cbs.com had significant technical infrastructure issues that kept search engines from crawling and indexing the content. Again, the search results were sad and this time, full of spammers trying to capitalize on the search volume.
• 2011 Results: In 2011, problems continued. But news organizations jumped in, and the Huffington Post in particular ranked well for its article that simply listed all of the various ways people were searching for the Super Bowl start time. (That article was later “edited for clarity”).

This year, things are finally getting better. Even the Huffington Post, while still getting every variation of spelling and tagging in the article for maximum search coverage (“For starters, it’s two words, not one. “Superbowl” is an incorrect spelling.”), has filled out their article a bit with actual information.

The results could still be better. While [Super Bowl start time] has overall higher search volume than [Super Bowl kick off time], the latter is the top search this morning, and NFL.com only ranks for the former (HuffPo does quite well with the latter). Superbowl.com, which redirects to the NFL site, ranks, but as I mentioned in earlier years, this domain 302 redirects to nfl.com. A 301 instead would consolidate the domains (including value signals such as links), which might cause the target URL to do better overall in relevant searches. But still, compared to earlier years, I’d call these results a win for the NFL.

Sadly, NBC, the Giants, and the Patriots, and TV Guide all fail to appear in results once again. Even though both Google Insights for Search and my articles over the years should have prepared them for this year’s search interest.

Why should these sites care about showing up for these searches? They’ve invested substantially in site content and those seeking out the game start time are a perfect audience for that content. Searchers would click for the start time and stay for the fan jam videos and view the ads.

Of  course, Super Bowl viewers will see lots of ads anyway today. But that’s a topic for the next article.

Related:

• 2009 Super Bowl Start Time
• 2010 Super Bowl Start Time
• 2011 Super Bowl Start Time
• 2009 Super Bowl Commercials
• 2010 Super Bowl Commercials
• 2011 Super Bowl Commercials

The ad network analyzed search referrals on “hundreds of millions” of impressions across sites in its network between January 9th and 12th. And the longest search referrals — at an average of 4.81 words — came from Ask.com. AOL users are at the other end of the spectrum; their user queries average barely above four words, by far the shortest of the five sites that Chitika studied.

It makes sense that this would be the case, since Ask.com has been refocusing on questions and answers in recent years — and asking questions tends to involve more words than other types of queries.

It would be great to get real search query length data directly from the search engines, but they’ve never made a habit of sharing that kind of information. In May 2010, Google did release data showing that 54.5 percent of queries are more than three words — which falls in line with the Google (and Bing) data that Chitika shows above. But that’s the last time I’m aware of that either Google or Bing shared such information.

Keyword research is your time to understand the market you are competing in and how people search. It is your opportunity to comb through the competition and learn their keywords, content and link-building strategies. It is your opportunity to map out what you should track for your website, your market competitors and your keyword competitors.

If you plan a months- or years-long relationship with a client or website, you owe several hours or days to get this right.

Keyword Research Tips

Keywords are the foundation of search engine optimization. It is all about getting traffic from relevant search queries, the keywords people use to find our products or services or whatever we offer that our target market is looking for.

Placing a handful of words into the Google Keyword Tool, exporting the results, then calling it a keyword chart is skimming; it is not keyword research. Quality keyword research takes time and investment.

• Before you open one keyword tool, study the topic you are researching, at least to the point that you can explain it intelligently to someone else and answer basic questions.
• Study your marketplace competitors. These are basic sources for seed words and phrases to put into keyword tools.
• Seeds are the words and phrases you enter into the keyword tools. Track these and use the same ones in every keyword research tool.
• Use multiple keyword research tools. Every service has its strengths and weaknesses. Using different keyword tools is like seeking differing points of view. You want to be certain you have the best information possible.
• When you have some good keyword candidates, begin studying the search engine results for rankings competition and additional keywords. In SEO, the real competitors are the websites that rank for your keyword targets, not just your marketplace competitors.
• Revisit the keyword tools. Look up additional seed keywords you may have added along the way. Create a complete dataset for every keyword research tool you use.

Keyword Selection Tips

Once you have a list of keyword candidates, you must cull through it to find your keywords. This is where a lot of people throw up their hands and give up or try to over-simplify the process.

Going back and forth between dozens of export files from different keyword tools is not practical, so I use a database to compile a master table that I later export into Excel.

Even if you are not a database wizard, anyone can learn to combine data into a table using Microsoft Access. You can do this in Excel too, though I find that more taxing.

• Compile your research into a master table so you can sort it and filter it.
• I sort my keyword candidate by the number of words in each keyword or phrase first, then by the number of searches. Here is the Excel formula I use to create a word-count column:

• Set aside or check off relevant one-, two- and three-word phrases.
• Set aside or check off embedded keywords. Before Chris Anderson coined The Long Tail, I used embedded keywords to describe longer key phrases that contained shorter keywords. Search for each relevant one-, two- and three-word keyword, then mark the longer keywords that contain the shorter keywords.

At this point, what is left will be like looking for diamonds in a trash heap. There will be lots on non-relevant words and words with too little traffic. Comprehensive research is important, but now it is time to get practical.

• Set some limits. Depending on how much traffic the website I am optimizing receives already, I will set a lower traffic limit between 100 and 1,000. The more traffic my website is getting, the higher the limit I set. Anything below the limit gets culled.
• Review each keyword candidate you have left. If it is relevant, mark it or set it aside.
• At the end, copy all the keywords you marked or set aside into one table. These are your keyword candidates.

A keyword is not a target until you assign it to a page and begin optimizing for it.

Keyword Tracking Tips

You may be tempted to toss all your keyword candidates into a ranking tracker and monitor them. I advise against this.

Keyword candidates are not the same as keyword targets. Any keyword you have not matched to a specific web page will just be a distraction.

Reports filled with unassigned keywords tend to go unused. Also, if your boss or your client sees a bunch of keywords that are not on their website or for which the rankings and traffic are low, it will open you up to uncomfortable questions. Don’t put yourself in a position where you have to say, “Oh, just ignore those.”

What should you track? In my book the most important measurements are:

• The number of organic visitors that each assigned target keyword brings from each search engine.
  • Exact Match
  • Phrase Match
• The total number of organic search visits.
• Keyword diversity: the number of different keywords bringing traffic to the website from each search engine.

I still track rankings for high-tail keywords, grudgingly, once I assign them to a specific URL and start optimizing for that keyword. Actual search engine rankings are difficult to track. Too many different things influence the rankings.

Universal search result inserts (news, images, video, etc.), local search results, Query Deserves Freshness, Query Deserves Diversity and other factors all change the contents and display of the organic listings.

If I search for coffee house in Seattle and then in New York, I will get two completely different sets of results. Track traffic as your key performance indicator and use rankings as an imperfect estimate to determine things you cannot measure directly, like how much traffic your competitors may be receiving for the same keywords.

What About Long Tail Keywords?

If you are pursuing a long-tail content strategy, you may want to add rankings for recently used long-tails to your reports, but I would remove older long-tails from your reports as you add new keywords and content.

Unlike high-tail SEO, long-tail optimization tends to be “set it and forget it.” If you are not actively working on optimizing a keyword, it probably should not be on your reports.

A good alternative to traditional ranking reports are the search query reports in Google’s and Bing’s webmaster tools. These show average rank, clicks and impressions. This data is now in Google Analytics as well under Reports » Traffic Sources » Search Engine Optimization.

I like having clicks and impressions because, if a targeted keyword gets lots of impressions but few clicks, either the listing needs work or the keyword is a poor target. The downside is that these offer no competitor data.

Keyword Assignment Tips

It is important to be realistic when assigning keywords to URLs as search engine optimization targets.

• Understand keyword difficulty. Blindly optimizing for the most heavily searched keywords can lower non-paid search traffic.  When a website has nowhere near enough authority to earn a top ranking for a high-volume keyword, but optimizes its most linked-to pages for that same keyword, this may steal an opportunity to optimize for a more realistic keyword.

Be honest in your perspective.

• Use embedded keywords. Optimizing a page for a medium-tail keyword that also contains a high-tail that can get rankings and traffic now, while the page earns the authority to rank for the high-tail.

A medium-tail keyword is defined by whether you can successfully compete for a ranking as much as the number of search queries it receives.

• Use long-tails to support mid-tail and high-tail keywords. Not every page can be an SEO hub page — a page targeted for a specific, competitive keyword. The classic content strategy is to create lots of pages for long-tail content. As you do this, try to create content related to the higher-tail keyword hub pages and link from your articles — using optimized anchor text — to those pages.
• Do not try to optimize every page for a keyword. Every website has pages that will never receive search engine traffic. For example, a webpage showing a process chart may be great for people but thin content for web search. Think carefully before assigning a decent keyword on such a page.
• Consider searcher intent. People may search for information or entertainment or acquisition. Don’t optimize a sales page for an information keyword. Try to match page content and keyword assignments with intent. Start by looking at what types of pages already rank.

At the start, I wrote that we owe it to our websites and clients to get keyword research right. With all the research and reporting tools out these days it is easy to spend too little time preparing or researching then attempt to track more keywords and metrics than we can ever use.

Invest the time and thoughtfulness up front. Select which keywords you will optimize for. Choose pages for those keywords. Remove distractions. Do this and you will always focus on things that matter.

Google Correlate Added To Google Trends

Google Correlate has survived the chopping block. Previously available at correlate.googlelabs.com, it’s now been given a permanent home as part of Google Trends and can be found at www.google.com/trends/correlate.

Correlate has been described as “Google Trends in reverse.” With Trends, you provide a search term and get back data related to the term. With Correlate, you provide the data first. Here’s how Vanessa Fox described it just a couple months ago in our article, Google Correlate: A New Way To Research Keyword Popularity & Trends:

With Google Correlate, you can upload data charted over either time or space and Google will look for matching patterns in search volumes. If you don’t have data of your own to upload, you can simply specify search terms, and Google will calculate the trending pattern and show matching patterns.

Google Sets Shutting Down

Google Sets is another keyword-related tool, but it’s headed out to pasture. The latest update on Google Labs’ website says Sets will be shut down by September 5th. It was a simple tool that could identify and predict groups of related keywords from a small list (of up to five items). It was discussed in these previous articles here on Search Engine Land:

• Google Sets & Squared: Powerful Keyword Research Tools by Tony Soric
• 7 Incredibly Valuable But Underused Free Tools For PPC Marketers by Brad Geddes
• The Giant List Of Keyword Tools by Josh Dreller

More Google Labs Decisions

Those are just two of several announcements added to the Google Labs website over the past few days. Only one other experiment is specifically listed as being phased out: Places Directory, an app that launched in 2009 but has been essentially replicated by many of the features that are now standard in Google Maps for mobile.

Several other Labs projects carry a new notation that says, Although Google Labs is winding down, (NAME OF PROJECT) is available as usual on Android Market. That list includes:

• Google Shopper
• Open Spot
• Intersection Explorer
• WalkyTalky
• My Tracks for Android
• Google Goggles
• Sky Map for Android
• Gesture Search
• Finance for Android
• Google Listen

It’s not clear if Google is saying those projects will remain available in the Android Market after Labs shuts down, and when asked, a Google spokesperson would only say, “We don’t have any future plans to announce at this time.”

Three other updates: Google says that Web Application Exploits and Defenses can be found at google-gruyere.appspot.com. Scripting Layer for Android can be found at code.google.com/p/android-scripting. And Google Earth Engine is being moved to www.google.org/earthengine.

With this latest round of announcements, Google has now decided the fate of 28 of the 53 existing projects in Google Labs. See the “related articles” below if you missed the previous updates. The company isn’t saying what the timeframe is for determining the future of the remaining projects. But they’ve decided on just over half in about five weeks, so that may suggest it’ll be another month or so before Google Labs formally closes its doors.

Surprisingly, Facebook had a larger percentage of searchers over the age of 35, while Google+ trended  younger. 34.2% of searchers looking for Google+ were under 35 years old and only 24% of Facebook searchers were under 35. In addition to the younger demographic, Google+ searchers skewed towards higher incomes. Facebook saw 22.8% of searchers with an income of above $100,000 a year, while Google+ had a 32.1% makeup.

ComScore also elaborated on the information used in this report:

Each example analyzes the demographics of searchers that used the branded terms for the month of July, and are based on head of household. The index baselines are the searcher demographics for the entire US search population. Available measures are Age, Income, Location (home/work), Region of the US, Household Size, and Presence of Children in the Household.

For more information, see the full comScore demographic report.

In my last column, I started to make the case for how SEO changes when targeting mobile searchers, starting with the 14 differences between desktop and smartphone search results in Google that I was able to spot easily.

Today, I’m going to focus on keyword targeting, and how mobile searches could be affecting your bottom line today.

Searches Without Keywords

First, a scenario to consider: a business traveler is having a beer in the hotel bar after the first day of a conference.

She likes to try local beers when she’s in a new city, and this summer evening in Chicago calls for something light. She asks the bartender for a local summer beer and he gives her Goose Island Summertime.

She likes the beer, and wants to know more about it, but at this point the bartender is at the other end of the bar and she’s about ready to leave, so she takes out her Android phone and scans the label with Google Goggles.

There is no direct match for the type of beer, but Google does find a logo for the company that makes it, and gives general web results for the keyword [goose island]:

Our business traveler is able to click on the Goose Island website, and find out more about the beer, but with the current result set and the desktop website in the first position, it might take her two or three times longer than it should to find out more about the beer, and it’s impossible for her to recommend it to her friends on Facebook, or have a case of it shipped to her back home.

Given that she’s about ready to leave anyway, it’s unlikely that she’ll have the patience to complete her search session satisfactorily and even less likely that she’ll be able to remember the beer tomorrow morning.

I bring this up because this is not some futuristic scenario that will be possible in a couple of years. This is mobile search today. It’s also something that can be optimized for by the brand owner.

Furthermore — and this is the crucial difference for how marketers need to think about keyword research with respect to mobile— no keyword was ever considered or directly entered by the searcher.

Does this mean that we won’t need keyword research in a mobile visual search world?

Absolutely not. If you look at what the search engine is doing, you can see that it is scouring its image collection for related images and suggesting keywords that are related to the image, based entirely on what keywords the image is optimized for. Keyword research is still necessary, but there’s a different use case, and a different results set to optimize for.

Luckily for the Goose Island brewery, someone had optimized their logo for the phrase [Goose Island Logo], so Google was able to match the image to the keyword and provide somewhat relevant results.

However, if marketers from Goose Island had considered this use case when optimizing the website, they could have made sure that all of their logos for all of their beers were clearly displayed and optimized for logo queries in Google Image Search, and that each of these logos was attached to a mobile site that allowed the viewer to recommend their brand on Facebook and have a case shipped to their house in as few steps as possible.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, and this excellent craft brewery in Chicago missed a chance to grow a little more.

Are you considering mobile visual search when you’re doing keyword research and optimizing for logo queries? I would guess most people aren’t, since the use case is currently rare; but it’s only one mobile scenario of many that could affect brands that most aren’t even thinking about today.

Context Changes Meaning Of Queries

Google released a study in late April 2011 that details the shopping habits of smartphone users, and what they found should be changing how you perform keyword research.

I remember when I first learned to keyword research back in the early 2000s, I was asked what keywords I would type into Google if I were searching for a specific topic. The point was to demonstrate how some searchers use different queries than the ones you use, and you have to think about all variants in order to find the most qualified keywords that will bring searchers to relevant content on a brand’s website. In the early 2000′s, everyone was searching in a browser on a desktop computer, so there was no need to give context in order to understand user intent.

Today, you wouldn’t be able to answer that question of user intent without first understanding the user’s context. For example, according to Google’s research, 59% of smartphone users report using the mobile Internet while waiting in line, 48% report using it while eating, and 44% report using it while shopping.

If we were trying to research certain concepts prior to the surge of the mobile Internet, like how these users searched for coupons related to a brand, we would focus on optimizing a web page for variants of coupon and sale terms until we optimized a page intended for desktop browsers with printable coupons and coupon codes on it.

However, if we were to optimize that same page today, given that most mobile users don’t have the ability to print coupons, and some have the ability to scan them on their phone, understanding the mobile context both provides additional keywords, and negates keywords that we may have used for a desktop Internet-only page.

As a result, if a marketer really wants to optimize a page for coupon keywords in this age of mobile searches, they should either optimize a desktop landing page for all keywords and include both desktop and mobile keywords in a desktop user experience (good), or include mobile keywords and a mobile coupon in a mobile user experience and desktop keywords and printable coupons in a desktop user experience (better).

To ignore mobile searches entirely in a world in which 1 in 7 searches on Google are performed on a mobile device, and as many as 30% in the restaurant category, is a sure way to frustrate users and lose business.

Fortunately at this point, Google’s keyword tool provides mobile keywords and volume for feature phones, as well as smartphones and tablets, in addition to the desktop volume that they’ve always provided, so savvy marketers who want to understand how context changes keywords for their business finally can get data to help them do that. Hopefully this article, along with Google’s research on smartphone users, is enough to demonstrate that keyword research is changing, and those of us who do it regularly need to catch up before it’s too late.

Having explored the ways in which mobile searchers are changing the keyword research game and the ways in which mobile search results differ from desktop results, I’ll spend my next column detailing mobile’s effect on links and linkbuilding.

In the Just Behave column, we’ve discussed information architecture as it is used for search engine marketing and usability. One of the points mentioned concerns the gathering of terms and words that are used for taxonomies, link labels, category setup, navigation labels and content development.

If you’re only interested in keyword research for page rank purposes, you’re missing out on what people really care about. Since Google and Bing have learned how to determine what people like the most, it make sense to look for new ways to get that information for your web site.

Social Awareness Streams

A recent paper called “Hip and Trendy: Characterizing Emerging Trends on Twitter” calls social awareness streams “a class of communication and information platforms”. Those platforms are social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and even Youtube. Any place that we post 140 word comments with or without links, comments, pictures, videos and links are social online water coolers.

We’ve learned to Twitter while watching our favorite TV shows or mourn together the death of famous people. Facebook is used for both personal connections, as well as business use for marketing and gaining brand recognition through the involvement of “friends” and “fans”.

A slew of studies have shown the global impact on information, communication and the media due to popular social networking websites. For example, information and news are instant. In real-time using Twitter alone, hundreds of millions of users can log in and learn the latest interests, happenings, events, news and even public attitudes and opinions.

Sure, there’s always a debate about whether all this access to information is healthy or even necessary. But in general, the world has adapted and certain technologies thrive on this constant instant access to us. For web design, online marketing, user experience design and content writing, social awareness streams offer the opportunity to discover trending topics, opinions, and new resources. Your target market is talking to you and all you have to do is tap into their discussion streams.

How To Find New Topic Angles to Write About

If you’re accustomed to doing all your writing research using books or search engines, you may love trying Twitter. In the example below, I want to write new content for cooking websites that are looking for new recipe ideas. While I have favorite websites that can give me good information, I would rather look to see what’s popular with the world, just to get a new angle or perhaps learn something new.

Twitter has a search field at the top. Twitter users use what’s known as “hashtags” to help categorize and sort their “tweets”. It’s not a requirement to add them but if a tweet is expected to be found in searches for specific topics, it’s helpful. For this example, I chose the hashtag “#recipes” to see what came up.

As you can see, there are a lot of information choices with 71 more tweets waiting. In the upper right, are suggestions for me to “Follow”. These aren’t paid spots. Twitter displays what its algorithm determines may be the best choices. The tweets themselves are a running scrollable dialog. They’ve bold faced my hashtag and as you can see, some posts have additional qualifiers, such as “#breakfast.” Sorting options are offered such as tweets with links to resources (sites, articles, blog posts, pictures) and also local tweets.

Twitter is helpful for offering new ideas. Who knew there was a site with 17,000 cooking videos? And of course, with the Royal Wedding happening, any site related to recipes, weddings and food can take advantage for promotional purposes.

For keyword research, new combinations of words can be uncovered in Twitter, such as “royal wedding scones” and “yoga and tea” as a combination or long tail idea. When you spend enough time browsing specific hashtags, you’ll begin to see the reoccurrence of certain words or discover popular themes and topics. It’s a fantastic way to wipe away writers’ block or create new blog post titles.

Detecting Trends

A trend on Twitter is the easiest to find as opposed to Facebook or search engines. Facebook has what I call “mini-events” that are limited to certain groupings of people. For example, when I went to my high school class reunion, I posted pictures afterward in my Facebook account.

Not only did the people who attended who were on Facebook leave feedback, but friends from other years responded with comments too. The strange part is that this event was held publicly to all my “friends”, some of which are business colleagues and family members.

Facebook may not instantly expose global trends, but regular posting offers some surprising results. One of my high school classmates developed a new interest in website design just because she read some of the articles and blog posts I had linked to. Sometimes you can figure out what’s popular with people depending on their responses to posts, such as anything by the Dalai Lama, politicians and community sites.

Manually monitoring Facebook takes time but you can discover who the frequent posters are in your “Friends” circle and get an idea about who generates the most discussion. I have a few friends who love political debates. The discussions give me another perspective that news media sites don’t because there are no slant or propaganda leanings.

Twitter has grown popular for uncovering the latest trends based on how many discussions there are on a topic. It’s so popular that users know they can drive up the number of tweets to create a trend if they wanted to. Most of the time a quick look at Twitter trends just raises our curiosity.

For example, I found “Baskin Robbins” trending while randomly playing with a search for “Search Engine Land”. As you can see, the trends don’t need to be related to your search terms. And of course, Twitter is smart enough to know a search for Search Engine Land should also point to @DannySullivan!

Clicking on the trending “Baskin Robbins” led to results that provided the news (and feelings about) a 31-cent night promotion. Had it not trended, many people might not have known about this limited time special.

Tweets on a Trending Topic

Collecting data on trends is the focus of many studies, including ways to create new software that can deliver taxonomy information based on the trending data. Twitter computes trends on an hourly basis (how they do is not made public.)

The information can be used to understand geographical trends and even uncover areas of the world where certain information is more popular than others. (You can search by location in Twitter trends.) Tracking social awareness streams helps us understand a trends origin and context. There’s a difference found between informational/news trends and conversational. Who retweets more? Are local events tweeted less than national events?

An end goal of some of the SAS studies is improving ranking, prioritization and filtering of extracted data. Automated tools can be developed for individuals, organizations and communities wishing to collect and use social awareness streams. Many new ideas are being experimented with.

One experiment from my hometown newspaper is the creation of Tweeter feeds targeting the local community and also inviting the community to tweet, retweet and discuss the items. Even the newspaper publisher is available to tweet with. The result was to get more intimate insight into what the locals care about, which in turn gave them new ideas for stories, columns and new bloggers.

Google News: A Copy Editor’s Nightmare

Consider this page from Google News, the “Muammar al-Gaddafi” page that pulls in headlines from all over the world about the leader:

That page would give any newspaper copy editor fits, given that there are at least four different spellings showing up:

• al-Gaddafi
• Gaddafi
• al-Qaddafi
• Qaddafi

That’s just for the leader’s last name. His first name is spelled in at least two different ways, on that page.

A Name By Any Other Spelling Doesn’t Search As Sweet

Now consider people who keyword search for news. If they search for kadhafi, they get these headlines:

Now search for exactly the same person, only with a different spelling of gaddafi, and you get a different set of results, lead by different publications:

Notice that quote at the top of the page? That quote page again reflects the lack of unity on spelling Gaddafi’s news in the journalism world:

Survey Says: News Organizations Disagree

I checked several major news publications in the United States, as well as the UK, Canada and some for India and Japan. You can see the lack of agreement, even among the three major wire services, AP, AFP and Reuters, which I also checked:

Gaddafi: Reuters (Wire), Washington Post (US), Huffington Post (US),  The Guardian (UK), The Telegraph (UK), The Times (UK), The Mirror (UK), The Sun (UK), The Mail (UK), Bild (Germany), Times Of India (India), Daily Yomiuri (Japan). Asahi Shimbun (Japan)

Gadhafi: Associated Press (Wire), Wall Street Journal (US), USA Today (US), San Jose Mercury News (US), Chicago Tribune (US), Toronto Star (Canada), The Globe & Mail (Canada)

Kadafi: Los Angeles Times (US)

Khadafy: New York Daily News (US) & New York Post (US)

Kadhafi: AFP (Wire)

Qaddafi: New York Times (US)

At first glance, most publications seem to go with “Gaddafi,” but that’s largely due to the UK. Every major UK publication I checked used that spelling, unlike the disagreement among US papers and the wire services. Two major Canadian papers went with “Gadhafi.”

Even Gaddafi Doesn’t Say What’s Right

Who’s right? An interesting AP story suggests that the AP is writing the name in English as Gadhafi (the AP spelling) would prefer:

The Associated Press goes with Gadhafi. Why? It has to do with pronunciation – along with a series of letters the Libyan leader sent to American schoolchildren more than 25 years ago….

How does Gadhafi himself pronounce it? That’s easy since he refers to himself in third person quite often. He tends to say “Gath-thafi” with the middle letter pronounced like the soft “th” in “either.”….

Flash back to 1986, a year that started out with the AP (and many others) spelling the Libyan leader’s name Khadafy, based on the advice of Middle East experts. That changed when he sent letters to American schoolchildren, signed in Arabic script over his typed name: Colonel Moammar El-Gadhafi.

The story goes on to say that, however, the AP also chooses to drop the definitive marker of “El” from names, which is why it ends up with “Gadhafi” — which isn’t, in the end, how he seems to write it.

Then again, The Reid Report does a fantastic round-up on how on what’s apparently Gaddafi’s official site, he goes with “Al Gathafi” there. That round-up also covers a number of spellings used in 2002, where the Libyan Broadcasting Corporation disagrees with Gaddafi’s official site as well as the Libyan embassy — not to mention the US White House.

The Library Of Congress & SEO From 1986

It also points to a 1986 article from The Straight Dope which found at least 12 different spellings used by major media outlets. It lists what apparently the US Library of Congress had as guidelines on his name, which makes me think the library must have been employing an SEO way back before we had search engine optimization:

For the record, here’s the official Library of Congress rundown on how to spell ol’ whatsisname:

(1) Muammar Qaddafi, (2) Mo’ammar Gadhafi, (3) Muammar Kaddafi, (4) Muammar Qadhafi, (5) Moammar El Kadhafi, (6) Muammar Gadafi, (7) Mu’ammar al-Qadafi, (8) Moamer El Kazzafi, (9) Moamar al-Gaddafi, (10) Mu’ammar Al Qathafi, (11) Muammar Al Qathafi, (12) Mo’ammar el-Gadhafi, (13) Moamar El Kadhafi, (14) Muammar al-Qadhafi, (15) Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi, (16) Mu’ammar Qadafi, (17) Moamar Gaddafi, (18) Mu’ammar Qadhdhafi, (19) Muammar Khaddafi, (20) Muammar al-Khaddafi, (21) Mu’amar al-Kadafi, (22) Muammar Ghaddafy, (23) Muammar Ghadafi, (24) Muammar Ghaddafi, (25) Muamar Kaddafi, (26) Muammar Quathafi, (27) Muammar Gheddafi, (28) Muamar Al-Kaddafi, (29) Moammar Khadafy, (30) Moammar Qudhafi, (31) Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi, (32) Mulazim Awwal Mu’ammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi.

SNL From 1981 On News Confusion

But wait, there’s even more. Looking further back, Tim Ruder from Perfect Market got big laughs at our recent SMX West conference, when he showed a clip from Saturday Night Live in 1981 that was made fun of the issue:

The clip itself isn’t online that I can easily find right now for free (it’s from Season 7, Episode 8 for those with access via Netflix), but Perfect Market posted a transcript here (and the opening image for this story comes from that post). The transcript begins:

This man, Libyan leader, Col. Moammar Kadaffi, has been the study of intense news coverage this week by every major news organization in America. However, every time his name appears in print, it has a different spelling.

How Do People Search For Gaddafi?

If Gaddafi himself doesn’t make clear how people should spell his name in non-Arabic alphabets, and the news publications can’t agree, can we crowdsource a solution? How are people searching for the man?

Here, we have more agreement. The chart below is from Google Trends, which shows how people are searching from around the world. I checked on the six spellings used by the major publications above, to see which were the most searched for over the past 30 days:

You can only look at five terms at a time on Google Trends, but I quickly determined by running various combinations that “khadafy” is the least popular on the list. As for the others, “gaddafi” was the most popular spelling used by searchers, followed by “kadhafi” and the rest.

Search Popularity Says: “Gaddafi”

The chart above shows this via trend lines — “gaddafi” is well above the others, over the past 30 days. Above the trend lines, you can also see little bar charts that reflect popularity, which I’ve enlarged over to the right.

The numbers are an index value, based off the most popular term, “gaddafi.” They tell you in relation to that, “kadhafi” is only 44% as popular, “kadafi” is 34% as popular, “gadhafi” is 20% popular and “qaddafi” is way back at 8% as popular.

News Sites Ignore What Searchers Seek

What’s especially interesting is the lower line chart. This is “news reference” volume, and it shows how often each word is used in news stories, rather than how popular the term is based on searches.

You can see that the second most popular term is “gadhafi” as written in news stories that Google has collected, despite that being the fourth most popular term that people actually use. That’s a disconnect that some news publications may wish to reconsider.

News Search Also Says: “Gaddafi”

Indeed, using another tool, Google Insights For Search, you can see what terms are most popular specifically among those doing news searches.

Below is a chart showing the trend over the past seven days, and I’ve tucked the key with some index values on the side (note, the chart was set to seven days, but Google Insights only reported five days of data, for some reason):

This is similar to what we saw for the data from general searches — “gaddafi” is above the rest, though for a few days, “kadhafi” was more popular. If you go out further, sometimes “gaddafi” leads (as over the last 90 days or over the past three years), while sometimes “kadhafi” does (as over the past year).

Popularity Can Vary By Country

Location also matters. In the United States, it’s “gaddafi” far more than other spellings, according to Google Insights:

The same was true when I did spot checks for the UK and Canada. But in France, it’s “kadhafi” that leads:

Influence Of Google’s Own Suggestions

Finally, could Google itself be influencing how people search? Certainly, given that it will suggest terms. Those are based on how most people search, of course, but they can cause people to shift.

Consider someone who might think to search for “gadhafi,” and what they get, as they start typing that in:

See how Google suggests that they search for “gaddafi” — that’s going to cause some of them to select this option, regardless of what they originally started typing.

However, it doesn’t work this way for “kadhafi,” which is the second most popular search term. Start typing that in, and you get this:

In this case, there’s nothing that pushes people to instead complete a search for “kadhafi.”

Meanwhile, at Google News, typing in “kad…” causes the suggest box — which uses different data than at regular Google — to list “kadafi” as the top term along with “kadhafi” and “gaddafi” as suggestions:

Should Your Spelling Style Be Based On Search?

The takeaway from all this? I don’t think the decades of confusion will suddenly get resolved. However, if I were a news publication, I’d be using tools like these above to get a better idea about how my particular audience is searching for Gaddafi and using the spelling that makes the most sense based on that.

Sorry, New York Times — going with “Qaddafi” probably makes little sense. But at least you’re better than the New York Daily News and the New York Post going with the even less popular “khadafy.”

Postscript: Doug Edwards points me to a West Wing episode where White House chief of staff Leo McGarry takes issue with the New York Times and the spelling it uses, a least in relation to its crossword puzzle. Here’s the clip:

(featured home page image via Shutterstock.com)

The 2011 Customer Complaint Index measures search activity in the Google Keyword Research Tool involving complaints (i.e., broad match results for “(brand name) complaints”) and applies the data to Interbrand’s Best Global Brands report. Web Liquid recognizes some of the limitations in this approach: the study doesn’t reflect non-Google searches and the Keyword Tool also has some drawbacks. But the data is interesting nonetheless.

Raw Complaint Queries

When it comes to raw complaint searches, no one beats the auto industry. Toyota received the highest amount of complaint-related searches in 2010, and four of the top seven brands are car manufacturers. Beyond the top 10, Web Liquid says four others — Hyundai, BMW, Volkswagen and Lexus — were all in the top 30.

Three of the top 10 as shown above were restaurants: McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Burger King. More on that in a moment.

Complaints Compared to Overall Search Activity

When looking at complaint searches as a percentage of the overall searches for a brand, the financial industry dominates. Even though several car companies are on the first chart above, complaints represent a relatively small fraction of the overall search activity for Toyota, Ford, etc. But that’s not the case with financial services brands.

In addition to the finance brands, the same three restaurants make this chart, too. And that’s not all….

Mobile Complaint Search Activity

Web Liquid says four of the top five brands getting complaint queries from mobile devices were restaurants.

And the same trend exists when comparing mobile complaint searches as a percentage of overall mobile search activity; in that case, the top five brands are all in the food service industry (Burger King, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, McDonald’s and KFC).

The Web Liquid study also looks at complaint searches during the holidays (Amazon.com’s number of complaints doubles then) and who advertises against complaint queries (automotive companies do that more than others).

The study can be downloaded from Web Liquid’s website; your name and email address are required.

One of the best sources for keyword research is your customer’s own words. Here are a few simple ways to conduct research by just examining your customer’s information.

Gathering The Data

The first step is to gather the data in a single place so that you can analyze the information. There are generally a few places where you can find your customers’ actual words.

Email communications. Every day you receive communications from your customers. These come in the forms of contact emails, support requests, request for services, etc. These communications contain the customer’s actual words.

Most companies use either forms or direct email on their website. These form fills or emails are sent to a CRM system or directly to someone’s inbox. Pulling data out of an email inbox is not an easy task. Instead, use a form system that saves the data to a database, and then forwards the information to the appropriate CRM or inbox. By taking this simple step, you can start to collect all of your customer’s communications in a single place.

Blog comments. If you have a blog on your site, then you are logging comments to a database. It is a simple process to export the comments from your database. For most blogging platforms, just go to your host control panel and use the phpMyAdmin interface to export the comments.

Product reviews. Many ecommerce sites allow their customers to post reviews about individual products. In general, I find reviews useful to examine; however, the words your customer’s use to name the product is often heavily skewed towards the name you gave the product on the product page. Each system has a different method for exporting reviews, so you will want to examine how the reviews are being saved in your system.

Social mentions. Many social sites contain comments from your customers about your products. However, they do not always have an easy way to gather the data. If you are using a social monitoring tool, there may be a simple way to export the data.

If you are not using such a tool, then the low tech approach is to use Google alerts. Set up alerts for your brand names, products, etc. and then save all of those emails in a single place. You can even have those emails auto-forwarded to a database system so they are easily aggregated into a single place.

Of course, you can always just go to Twitter or another social search tool and conduct a search for your brand name and then copy and paste the results into a file.

Forums. If you have forums on your site, this is another great place to mine for keywords. Forum posts are generally more free-flowing than product reviews, and are often longer than blog comments, which make them a great place to mine for keywords.

If you are using a free forum system, then you should be able to export the forums from your hosting control panel. Otherwise, examine how the forums are stored to export the data.

Analyzing The Data

Now that you have a structured lists of your customer’s own words, it is time to analyze the data. There are a two easy ways you can use to extract keywords from this data.

Keyword density analyzer. The simplest way to analyze the data is to use a keyword density analyzer. Plug your customers’ words into a tool and it will show you the most common words and phrases they are using. Mine this list for new keywords.

Since this data may contain sensitive information that you do not want to use on a website, you might want to download a density analyzer that runs on your local machine to maintain the privacy of your users. In that case, Textanz is a good option.

AdWords keyword tool. Copy your list from your keyword density analyzer and paste it into the AdWords keyword tool. You can quickly find search volume, competition, and average CPC for all of your customers’ words so you can decide if you want to use the keyword for your paid search campaign.

The AdWords keyword tool can be used to spider your site. This is another easy way to find new keywords. If you have forums, reviews or blog posts that you were having a hard time exporting as structured data, you can instead have the AdWords tool spider those pages for keyword suggestions.

In addition, you can spider a social site for keyword suggestions. Twitter does not allow search results to be spidered, and Google’s keyword tool respects the robots.txt file, so you need to get around this limitation to spider Tweets. An easy way is to first search on Tweetscan for your keywords, and then have Google spider the Tweetscan search results page.

Another way to find keywords among your customer data is to temporarily publish the data to the web and then use the AdWords keyword tool to spider that data for new keyword suggestions. Be careful what you temporarily publish. I recommended you remove any personal customer data before uploading it to the web where a spider can find it.

Conclusion

When you use your customer’s actual words as keywords, you no longer have to guess at what words someone might use to find your products or describe your services. Your customers give you data every single day.

The first step to analyzing your customer’s words is to save it in a structured manner.

The second step is to analyze the data.

The third step is to add it to your paid search account and measure the results.

The steps are simple.

However, if your customers’ communications are not captured and stored in a manner that makes it easy to examine for keywords, then each day you are losing a valuable opportunity to find new keywords.