Additionally, you can use Google Analytics to track data from your Site Search to help you improve your online marketing campaigns.  It’s not set up by default, but with just a little bit of work, you can get a bunch of great Site Search data from Google Analytics.

Find New Keyword Opportunities

By viewing the Search Terms report, you can get ideas of new terms to use in your SEO and PPC campaigns. If visitors are typing a particular keyword into your site search, they may be using that same keyword when they search in Google or Bing. If you see a lot of on-site searches for a keyword, you might want to try that word out in a pay per click campaign or add it to your list for SEO.

Get New Product Ideas

The Search Terms report in Google Analytics is a great place to research what your website visitors want, but you don’t offer. For example, a plastics supplier used this report to find out that a certain material was the single most searched keyword in their site search. It was a product they hadn’t previously offered for online sale. By adding it to their website, they can increase online sales and expand their product offering, making their site more valuable for users.

Improve Landing Pages

Whenever you see large numbers of searches, make sure you set the secondary dimension in Google Analytics to “Landing Page” to see which page visitors landed on when they typed in that keyword.

Now you can see which page visitors landed on for that keyword, and make adjustments to ensure visitors are getting to the best possible page of your website for that keyword.

Make Sure Visitors Can Find It

If users can’t see your Site Search, they probably won’t use it. Try testing the location of your site search to see if you can improve the user experience. For example, Freelin-Wade’s site search used to be below the fold, under the left navigation. In order to provide a better user experience, they moved it above the left navigation and saw a 77% increase in use of site search when it was above the fold!

Thanks to Search Engine Land for pointing out this video.

Next up is the actual research.  Get this, I now get to learn everything I can about this client and their terminology.  I start by looking over their current website or just their initial phrases, if they don’t yet have a website (boy am I glad they found us if that is the case).  Then, I get to look at some of their competitors where I learn even more about what it is that this industry is all about.  I am having fun now, learning about semiconductors, extruded tubing, metal castings, etc.  Ok, I have to qualify that I worked for an Iron Foundry and loved it–I really like to know how things are made.  They even have a cable show that was written just for me (or it seems that way anyhow) called “How Stuff Works” and if you haven’t seen it, it is awesome.  Back to the topic, now I start my actual search looking for terms that are highly searched and yet have a lower competition in the search engines.  This is often the “hard” part.

Once I have found a sizable number of keyword phrases, I sort through them giving them a category, with the best ending up in my “top recommended” category.  These are what I can take to the client through my 1-2 hour presentation on my findings.  This is the “fun” part, especially when the client sees all the different variations and terms that they may not have even thought of,  but are being searched online.  This is often a surprise as they may not be the same “lingo” that is used inside the company.  I like to make sure that they are thinking “outside the box” when choosing their final keyword phrases.  This is also where I get them to focus their keyword phrases.  You see,  at the the beginning of any website project, you need to really focus in on a few keyword phrases for each page.  I generally will look at 1-3 to start off a project.  This is an effective way to focus the content on phrases that have the most potential to drive initial traffic to your just launched site.  The goal should be to drive more traffic and higher quality traffic to your site so your conversions can also increase and hopefully lowering your bounce rate.

Next up is working on your content and using the keyword phases in the most useful manner on the site itself.  But, that is a whole new topic that I will have to talk about later.  Hope you enjoyed the quick keyword research read  and maybe you will get excited about keyword research next time like I do.

It isn’t really about which is better – it’s about using them in the most effective way to make the most of every marketing dollar. Here are 5 ways you can use PPC and SEO together to get the best results:

1. Identify new opportunities for organic campaigns. You can cast a wide net with PPC advertising and see which terms perform well for your business. For example, one of our clients sells HDPE Pipe and other underground utility supplies. Although it wasn’t one of our original focus keywords for our organic campaign, it was one of the best performing paid terms for traffic and conversions. Now it’s part of our focus keywords and once organic visibility increases, we may be able to scale back on paying for that term.
2. Fill in the gaps on highly competitive terms. We all have our lists of keywords we want organic rankings for, and that’s great. The problem comes when the competition level is so high that we can’t justify the amount of time and effort it will take to get that organic ranking. PPC gives us another way to get traffic for that competitive keyword without all the work that organic involves. It’s critical to measure ROI, however: we don’t want to pay more for clicks than we can generate in profit.
3. Introduce new products. Organic traffic is great, but it can take the search engines days or weeks to index and rank our newest products. When we have a new, hot item, we can use PPC to get that initial traffic until organic positioning catches up.
4. Address seasonality. The industrial marketplace doesn’t always follow the standard holiday trends that B2C retailers do. There are still seasonal trends for some industries. For example, another client sells commercial pressure washers. Spring and summer, when there is a lot more outside cleaning to be done, are much busier than fall and winter. By allocating their PPC budget for pressure washer terms during this peak season, we can catch more of those searchers who are ready to buy.
5. Test landing pages. When redesigning landing pages or adding new product copy, it’s important to test how effective those changes are. The problem is when we don’t have high enough traffic levels to get statistically significant results in a short time. We can use PPC to send a relatively large amount of traffic in a short time. Now we don’t have to wait as long to check bounce rates and conversion rates to see if our changes have positive impact.

How are you using PPC and SEO in your online marketing?

You’re in luck. Kiss Metrics has a great blog post that lists 50 Google Analytics Resources for 2011.

I haven’t had a chance to read through them all yet, but I’m seeing some great posts on this list. I can’t wait to dig into the posts about Integrating Google Analytics with Youtube, Using Regular Expressions, and Reports & Personality Types.

Here are a few must reads – basics that you won’t want to miss out on.

Beginners Guide to the New Google Analytics

Measuring Social Media with Google Analytics

Using Filters to Keep Your Data Honest

11 Actionable Metrics

14 Awesome Features of the New Google Analytics

Which of the posts are you most excited about?

Search engine optimization within the industrial market has it’s own very specific challenges. Web pages often have to be targeted toward engineers and specifiers, rather than the simpler end-consumer targeted pages of B2C sites. The information that users are seeking is more technical and detailed, yet still has to be understandable to buyers removed from the technical process, and of course for search engines.

But the industrial market also has some significant SEO advantages over other markets. Prime among those is the industrial market has far less competition than B2C markets, and this lower level of online competition creates some openings that a search engine marketing team can take great advantage of.

Online Competition

It’s important to clarify that when we’re talking about competition online, we’re not necessarily talking about the same companies that we would consider competition in the offline world. Any site that is ranking, or trying to rank, for the same relevant keyword phrases that you’re trying to rank for is competition. They’re all attracting click throughs from the search engine results page — click throughs that we want to attract.

But even when you open the competition up to the entire internet, the view is much rosier than it is for any kind of B2C site. For example:

• Aluminum Cases: a consumer-oriented product that isn’t even very broad, certainly not on the level of clothing or computer searches. Nevertheless when you search for aluminum cases you will come up with150 million results. Compare that to…
• Open Die Forging: forging is a solid industrial market industry, and open die forging is used to strengthen the raw material for countless other industrial processes, but unlike the cases above, open die forging shows a mere 390 thousand results in Google. While that’s still a large number, it’s indicative of how much lighter the competition is. Let’s take another example…
• Driver’s License Restoration: here we can take a look at a service that is consumer oriented, rather than a product. It’s very specific and yet there are still well over a million search results for driver’s license restoration in the searches. Compare that to…
• Flexible Shaft Couplings: a solidly industrial product, flexible shaft couplings are used in motors and servo motors across the motion control industry, in everything from robotics to windmills. But as an industrial market product, it seeks only 300 thousand search results — less than a third of even the very specific driver’s license restoration search above.

Again, every site that is competing for the same keyword phrase is online competition. So if you were an open die forging company, you’d have 390 thousand pages to compete against. But the vast majority of these aren’t real competition. The real competition is just the pages that are ranking on the first page of search results, and that’s where we come up against the strength of our competition.

Competition Strength

The strength of online competition can be measured in many ways. We can look at the size and age of the sites in the top ten search results, how well they’re optimizing the text on those pages, how many backlinks they have and the quality of those backlinks. This analysis gives us an idea of the amount of work that we’ll have to do to outrank them.

Happily within the industrial market not only is the competition smaller in numbers, but the competition is also typically less sophisticated in SEO techniques as well. The online strength of that competition is less. Just look through companies in the Industrial Marketplace Web and see how many of them are employing SEO tactics. Very few are.

This means that within many segments of the industrial market, search engine optimization efforts can carry your company a lot farther than they could in a B2C market. Where B2C companies often spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on pay per click, SEO, and linkbuilding campaigns, industrial market companies can see even bigger gains with far less investment. A quality, attractive site design with good SEO implementation combined with a modest SEO program can double, or quadruple online leads in a fraction of the time that B2C sites take to get a small portion of those results.

Of course the reason for this advantage is largely that so much of the industrial market either doesn’t pursue SEO practices, or handles it poorly. Thus the industrial market is ripe with opportunities to expand your customer base and trounce the competition — but only if you take it.

 1. There are Rules, Rules, and More Rules: A friend of mine moved to the United States from Iran twenty years ago, at age eight, and so didn’t really grow up with baseball like I did. A few years back, this friend decided that, since our hometown Minnesota Twins were doing so well, it would be the perfect time to get into baseball and learn how the game works.

“Well,” I said, “the first thing you need to know is that you’ll never know all the rules.” I added that, even if one were to watch every game of a team’s 162-game regular season, and learned a new rule with every game, that would still only cover a fraction of the rules. Even professional umpires probably don’t know every rule of baseball.

SEO is no different. There are so many different aspects of SEO that, even by studying it and learning something new every day, you’ll never be able to create a definitive list. All you can do is keep learning and improving your game.

2. There are Scads of “Unwritten Rules” As Well: Even if you did somehow learn all the official rules of baseball, there are still dozens, if not hundreds, of unwritten rules that ballplayers live by. The “Baseball Code,” you might say.

SEO is similar, but more contradictory. Most of the “real” rules of SEO are spelled out in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, but there are some SEO procedures that are directly opposed to these Guidelines.

•  The Baseball Code says you should never, ever swing at a 3-0 pitch (make the pitcher throw a strike).
• Google’s Guidelines say you can’t pay for links, but Yahoo Directory links—which you can only get by paying for them—are very helpful for rankings.
• In baseball, the batting team’s players should never walk over/on the pitcher’s mound, under any circumstances, during an inning in progress (always go around).
• Google says nofollow links give no boost to rankings, but there are documented cases of nofollow links that do pass authority and improve site rankings.

3. Bad Guys Sometimes Succeed…: The New York Yankees are perhaps the most hated team in all of professional sports, for a number of reasons that time and space don’t permit here. But, they have won the World Series 27 times. Bryce Harper may be an immature punk, but he’s probably going to be one of the best players in the baseball—if not the best—in a few years.

We’ve all heard of Black Hat SEO companies that engage in shady practices to boost their clients’ search engine rankings. Meta-tag stuffing, hidden or invisible text, gateway pages, and other tactics can work to improve rankings. They just won’t work for long.

The Yankees don’t win the World Series every year—often times they don’t even make the playoffs. Harper may knock the ball out of the park and trot around the bases like a show pony, but he’s plenty likely to get plunked for it in his next at-bat. And, inevitably, a Black Hatted website will get busted down to Class A ball by Google’s or other search engines’ webmasters for those less-than-honest SEO tricks.

As these three comparisons show, SEO and baseball are more alike than peanuts and Cracker Jack. GO TWINS!

Now, you ask:  “how do you know you can beat them?”.  To this I reply:  All of those negative comments about how they are running their SEO program or the lack of, we will make sure your site has all those elements to give your website the base to compete right out of the gate.  After that it is up to you to decide if you would like to take your site to the next level and hire a SEO expert to watch your site every month or hire in house to do the same.  But, I say: “you must have an ongoing SEO effort to get to the very top and stay there.”   I can give you the basics and a good foundation, but like any marketing, it needs to be an ongoing process that you invest time and money into to be successful.

Bottom line:  SEO is your best bet to beat out your competition, especially if you are a smaller company you have a great advantage as SEO requires agility–and most large firms do not have that ability.  So, do it your own or take my advice and hire a professional.

This does not have to be an overwhelming task though, if you are prepared from the start.  I know from an SEO perspective that if you plan ahead on who will be taking on each task (our project management team lays this list out very well) in the process your success and stress level will be greatly reduced.

Starting with deciding on an initial keyword phrase list that covers all that your website will be about.  Next deciding on which phrases you will focus on.  After that, it is on to writing content that matches those keyword phrases to a highly focused page within your navigation.  The writing is perhaps the hardest part for most businesses as they are just that, experts in their industry not copywriters.  This is where I would suggest using the services that most web development companies will offer and that is copy writing services.  They will interview you and your team and be sure to get your thoughts and facts expressed clearly on the page, and if they are really good they will incorporate SEO tactics while doing so.

I guess the bottom line here is that creating/updating your new website will not be easy, but with the proper guidance  and preparation it should go smoothly and have the outcome you were looking for.

How I like to start out any SEO project is to get a good base list of Keyword phrases that are matched to a particular page of the navigation.  Usually this entails 1-3 focus phrases per page, which gets me to my famous analogy of the shotgun or rifle approach.  Not if I were hunting I would want the shotgun, because I can just start spraying bullets everywhere and hit everything in site.  On the other hand I look at your website as more of a competitive shooting range that I need to be able to hit a specific target to win big.  So when you are starting your website project we want to really focus our “sites” like a rifle at the target, pick a few keywords and kick some search engine butt with those.  After we get great rankngs and traffic we can then start to work on the longtail versions and get all the peripheral traffic.  If we go with the shotgun approach and spray keywords everywhere, we won’t have enough focus to tell the search engines what we intended each page to be about (bad idea and bad for rankings).

You see at this point we want the search engines to know exactly what we were intending on each and every page of  our site.  So picking a few keyword phrases for each page and giving them steroids (another analogy that one of my co-workers likes to use) is the ideal plan of attack.    After we have decided on those focus phrases and matched them to their respective pages, we can then be focused on our writing of content on said pages.  Hopefully this is all making sense to you–it is in my head anyway.  Sometimes things don’t make it to the paper as I see them in my head, which is why I have some great project managers that accompany me in most of my presentations with clients.   They have a great knack for translating my thoughts into words that make sense.

I am hopeful that after reading this, you will go back to your site to see if you are indeed focused on what you were really intending to accomplish with your website in relation to being found on the search engines.  I think that you will find the more focused your pages, the higher your ranking, which in turn will show higher traffic and that should translate into higher sales.   If that is your goal to make money, then woohoo we will have done what we wanted the day you decided to build that website.