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!

Additionally, they created a timeline showing the searches…which will soon be printed and hanging at my desk, along with the SEO Table of Elements and Does Your Website Suck? infographics. What can I say? I love visual representations of information related to SEO.

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?

Currently sessions end when more than 30 minutes between pageviews have elapsed for a visitor and at the end of the day. Those two items will still trigger the end of a session. However, Google Analytics has also ended a session if a visitor closed their browser. This will now change to end a session if any traffic source value for a visitor changes.

Let’s take a look at how this could change your data.

Scenario: A visitor comes to your site from the organic search results, bookmarks your site, then leaves to research the competition. Less than 30 minutes later, they search for a different keyword, see your pay per click ad and click on it.

In the old version, this would count as only 1 visit and 1 source. In the new version, it will count as 2 visits, with 2 different sources, and 2 keywords showing up in your keyword report. (And it eliminates those pesky keywords with 0 visits that show up in Google Analytics.)

The data from Google Analytics will be more accurate, especially if you have visitors who like to shop around a bit before buying. And, you’ll be able to more accurately see which keywords were used and how visitors behaved using those keywords.

Google says the change should be especially helpful if you use their  multi-channel funnels. Google said they expected this change to have less than a 1% change on traffic, but there was a little bug that may have inflated those numbers initially. They have since fixed that issue. (SEOmoz has a great post about that if you want to read more.)

For those who are new to SEO, it’s a great way to understand how Google has changed over time, as well as showcasing their advancements and improvements to search. In a mere 11 years, Google has come a long way, and they’ve changed the way we search.

Think about this:

• Google Local Business Center launched in 2005.  Remember when we didn’t just “Google” an address but had to (gasp!) call someone to get directions?
• Personalized search also launched in 2005. If you’re wondering what personalized search is, you’ve got some catching up to do, as it’s impacting your visibility in Google  for 6 years.
• Universal Search Results launched in 2007. Before then, it was just the top 10 ranking pages clean and uncluttered. I think most SEO’s can relate when I say I miss those days.
• Google Suggest launched in 2008. Before then, we had to type all the keywords ourselves AND come up with our own alternatives. I don’t know how anyone found anything.

What Google changes have had the most impact for how you search?

404 Page Not Found Errors happen any time a searcher clicks on a link for a page of your site that is no longer there. The page could have been removed, like when you discontinue a product.  Or, it may never have existed, like when you accidentally mistyped the URL in your email newsletter (oops) or is simply mistyped.

But why won’t they just go away?

• Google still has the page in its index. It can take search engines days or even months to update their index and remove that non-existent page. In the mean time, it’s still out there for people to click.
• Past marketing efforts, like emails, press releases or articles have a link to the non-existent page.
• People bookmarked the page because they wanted to come back to it later.
• Someone liked it so much they shared it through social media, and now their “friends” are clicking on the shared link.

So, how do you make lemonade out of these error lemons?

If there is a replacement or newer version of a discontinued product, or if you merely changed the URL, then you should 301-redirect the old URL to the new URL. Then, visitors will simply be taken to the new page.

If there isn’t a great replacement product, then allowing the 404, but maximizing the 404 page to be helpful to searchers is the best option.

Must Do’s:

• Customize your 404 page to include your website header, footer and navigation. That way, searchers won’t just get a plain old browser page that makes it look like your site doesn’t even exist.
• Make sure the message test is clear and offer to help in other ways. Whatever you do, don’t blame the visitor (or make them feel stupid) with text that says, “You’ve typed in a URL that doesn’t exist.”

Worth Trying (make sure to test):

• Consider adding a little humor and personality to your 404 pages. This is where knowing your audience comes in handy – it can be fun, but shouldn’t be off-putting. I know this can be challenging in the industrial sector, but why not do something that makes you stand out from the crowd?
• Add links to popular categories or products. Adding images with the links can help people visually decide what to click on.
• Add your phone number so it’s easy for people to call with questions. And, if you have a live chat feature, this is a great place for that too. Be as helpful as possible.
• Add another search box. Even if you have the search box in your header, try adding one in the content area so it’s even easier to find.

1.  Think of phrases that are more than 1 word (this will eliminate a lot of the “broad phrases” that may come to mind).

2.  Think of what your core or base business is about and how people may be searching for it (although a good SEO will find “out of the box” terms in their research that may surprise you).

3.  Think about what the pages of your site are going to be about (this is important:  if you want to rank for a phrase-you will need to have a page about it on the site).

4.  When you think your list is complete, check to be sure you didn’t leave out any major phrases that bring in lots of $ to your business.

Ok, now we have a list of phrases to get started with.  Next you will hand them over to me and I (or your SEO professional that you are working with) will conduct some rather extensive keyword research.  We will look at some of your competitors, your existing site (if you have one), your analytics reports (if you have them), pages of your new navigation to get started with variations of the initial list and to come up with similar or even (out of the box) terms.  Once we have arrived at what looks like a pretty comprehensive list of phrases that may work well for your site, we can plug them into one of many tools available to us.  These tools generally give us the metrics to decide if they are worth “going after”.  We use all kinds of numbers like; search volume, search engine competition and many others.  Now we can put together a comprehensive summary that will tell you which phrases will be the most beneficial to focus on.  Now, what I want you to remember is that there may be 100′s if not 1,000′s of different keyword phrases that will drive traffic to your site–we cannot focus on that many at the start.  I will tell you that we need to focus on 1-3 key phrases per page of your site at this stage of your SEO program.  When you have some good solid rankings and traffic for these phrases, then and only then can you start to think about adding new phrases into the mix.  Not to get off topic here, but when you decide to do that, keep in mind you will need more content to support them.

Back to my topic:  Keyword Research needs to have a highly focused approach to be successful.  The more focus you have in the beginning, the easier it will be to rank for the base terms that you need to be found for.  Which in turn will drive more traffic to your site and generally a side effect of that is focused traffic and they are the type of visitors you want.  Thus increasing your conversion rate and ROI.  Now that is what I believe you wanted the website to do for you.  Am I right?

This is pretty big news, as the ruling now allows for just about any word to end the domain name of a website. Large corporations will now be able to name their sites with .ford, .warnerbros, or .google, for example. Businesses using .com may soon be a thing of the past—custom net suffixes take product branding to a whole new level.

I’ve always thought that suffixes on websites were sort of arbitrary. Sure, .edu for educational institutions and .gov for government make sense, but .com, .net and others have become so widely used (and seemingly unnecessary) that they might as well be dot-nothing. After all, if you’re looking for Apple, for example, you can just type “apple” into your web browser’s address bar, and you’ll find Apple, no problem. But, can every Cheeseball Charlie on the block now get his own suffix to tell the world of his awesomeness?

Not exactly. To keep the riffraff out and make sure that the .what-have-yous are for legitimate businesses and the like, ICANN has set very high standards for who will be allowed to use customized dot-names. There’s a $185,000 fee just to apply, and a lengthy application process to ensure that the entity asking for the custom web suffix has not just the right to use the name (so Pepsi can’t buy .coke), but also the technology to support it.

You can read the full BBC article here for more info. What do you think of this new .development? Will it revolutionize the web like nothing has since good ol’ .com? Or will it be a new pain in the neck that just means you have to redo your “Favorites” folder?

4) There are More Statistics than You Can Shake a Louisville Slugger At: In baseball, there are so many statistics that their study has become its own type of science, sabermetrics. Baseball statistical experts, or sabermetricians, seem to keep track of every possible statistic, no matter how irrelevant it may actually be: “McGrew is batting .398 this season against left-handed relief pitchers in the top half of innings of games played west of the Mississippi on even numbered dates.”

SEO uses many statistics, as well—so many that there are a vast number of different software programs to keep track of them. Google Analytics is perhaps the most popular (since it’s free) and well-known (since it’s Google). It works quite well, but only covers a fraction of the possible statistics involved in SEO. SEO statistics go plenty deep, just like baseball’s do, but unlike baseball stats, even the deepest ones have some relevance.

SEO vs. Baseball: The World Series of Acronyms

For fun and fabulous prizes* try to guess which of the following are acronyms for SEO terms, and which are acronyms for baseball stats. Some are fairly easy, others not so much. Some are alternate names for more well-known terms. For an added challenge, what do the letters stand for? No cheating! Answers after the baseball. GO TWINS!

1. PFI
2. WHIP
3. BABIP
4. PPCSE
5. FIP
6. SERP

Answers:

1. SEO. Pay For Inclusion: a program offered by search engines to ensure frequent indexing of a site or page.
2. Baseball. Walks and Hits per Innings Pitched: a measure of how many baserunners a pitcher allows, on average, per inning.
3. Baseball. Batting Average on Balls In Play: measures the rate at which batted balls land in the field of play as hits. Usually measured by individual batters, sometimes by whole teams.
4. SEO. Pay Per Click Search Engine: Google Adwords and Yahoo Publisher Network are examples. PPCSE listings are displayed at the top or along the side (or both) of organic search engine results.
5. Baseball. Fielding Independent Pitching: sort of a variation of a pitcher’s ERA (Earned Run Average), but counting only plays where the outcome cannot be affected by the defense being played behind the pitcher (i.e. home runs, walks, and strikeouts).
6. SEO. Search Engine Results Page: the results generated after searching for a particular keyword in a search engine.

How’d you do? Score one point for each correct answer.

1-2 correct—bunt single
3-4 correct—RBI double
5 correct—standup triple
All 6 correct—walk-off home run

* No prizes are actually at stake. I totally tricked you!