A brief description of what I’ve come to learn as one of the most important building blocks of the Search Engine Optimization process for a website, the Keyword Analysis. This is an insight into how go about selecting the best keywords for your website. To optimize a keyword for a web-page of a website, it is very important to analyze that keyword to understand one, the importance of the keyword based on the search volumes and the competitiveness, two, whether it is of absolute relevance to the theme and content of the website and three the search patterns to check for the latest trends.

1. Google Keywords Tool

The first is made very simple by the brilliant Google Keyword Tool. It gives exhaustive data about the keyword with accurate values like local search volumes, based on the Geographic location, the Global search volumes, and the trends in searches for that word. It also generates similar results if you want it to give you an idea of relevant keywords to the ones you’ve entered.

Google Keywords Tool

2. Google Trends

Another tool giving you the change in the trends of searches made with respect to that keyword, that is, the change in traffic over time with respect to the specific keyword, is the Google Trends Labs. It gives you an approximate change in search patterns, that is the change in demand for a specific keyword and at the same time, you can compare the search trends of up to five keywords. It helps you device a strategy to help target some important keywords and ramp up the SEO elements for that keyword based on increasing or decreasing demand.

Google Trends

3. Emerging Trends

It is very important to keep updating yourself on the emerging trends keeping in mind the theme and product/service/information provided by your website. The most common lookouts could be the social media, news and blogs. The keywords relevant to your website and manner in which they are used need to be kept in mind because even though these keywords may not have the best search volumes, the content might keep multiplying over time because of the popularity.

Facebook Lexicon

The Facebook Lexicon Tool shows a correlation between raining and windy with respect to time throwing light on the latest trends.

4. Google Analytics

Search patterns can be drilled into with the help of Website Analytics tools like for example, Google Analytics. It helps in giving you an idea as to which keywords are important, the ones driving traffic to your website. Hence you can concentrate on these keywords and optimize your pages further for these keywords. Data like browse rate, time spent on the website, conversions and bounce rate should also play a key role in your follow up action. For example, keyword A has tremendous traffic and is generating a lot of interest causing traffic to land on your website, but if the bounce rate is too high, it is then easy to understand that there is something wrong with the webpage and changes need to be made after finding the apparent reason for the high bounce rate.

Google Analytics

5. PPC Advertising Data

PPC data can be very helpful in a getting an entry into the mind of the traffic. After a website optimization is performed on a website from the seo perspective, it takes time for results to show on search engines. The PPC data can give you a fair idea as to what keywords interest a potential customer that would convince him on clicking on an advertisement. This keyword data if strong enough (clicks, conversion) can be incorporated into your keywords list and you could optimize your pages for them.

Google’s Traffic Estimator Tool

6. Top Ranking Domains

It is very important to know which competitors are ranking for the keywords that are part of your keyword basket. These search engine rankings give a fair idea of the competition for the keywords you are targeting. You could try and understand why your competitor is ranking. For example: On page optimization of the competitor website.

Competitor Website - On page Optimization

7. Search Relevance

It is very important to understand what the user is searching for the keywords targeted by you. Sometimes, generic keywords might give excellent search volumes but might not bring the best traffic to your website. From an ROI point of view (which at the end of the day, is the ultimate goal for any website placing its website in the hands of an SEO firm), it is the most important aspect.

MSN Ad Center

The Msn adCenter labs tool detects whether a keyword entered has commercial or information related intent.

8. Legal Issues

It’s very important to do some research in the legalities of a keyword that you are targeting. Legal issues can crop up if the keyword is a trademark of another company.

SEO is my Religion, Google is my God.

 

Since Its inception, Adwords has grown leaps and bounds. With each passing year, its popularity among Advertising Professionals has grown exponentially and so has the way its being used by them. Keeping up with the Google way of innovating and continually developing itself, the Google team has, after consultation with the very professionals who use it, released the new Adwords Interface.

Currently its available as an option on currently active Campaigns for a period of 30 days, i.e. users can switch between the old and new interfaces at will as they get accustomed to the update. Any new Accounts created have just the new interface.

Let us now take a look at what has really changed from the old to the new.

As soon as you look at the screen, you notice the left navigation that has been added. It has an Adwords Editor like feel to it, i.e., it follows a tree structure which mirrors the one in the Adwords Editor. This makes navigation far easier as you can browse the entire account at one click. If you wish, you can still use the links at the top to navigate through the account.

Navigation in the New Interface

Also, you can just click on the Keywords/Ads tab at any level of hierarchy to see all the contents at that level, something which was not available in the previous interface. This makes analyzing performance across adgroups/campaigns far easier. Gone are the times when one had to generate a report just to look at figures from across adgroups at a time, now it’s possible at the click of a tab. Makes life a whole lot simpler!

Keywords in the Old Interface

Keywords Tab in New Interface

Another Striking Feature, which can be noticed in the image above, is the inclusion of graphs, similar to those seen in Google Analytics. Now, performance trends can be spotted fairly easily by selecting metrics and a date range over which the comparison is required.

Performance Graphs in the New Interface

Filters let you define specific rules for which you can see keywords, ads, placements. This allows the segregation of keywords which aren’t performing well, or ads which have CTR above 1.5%.

Customised Filters

The Campaign creation process has been immensely simplified with the new interface. Ads, Keywords, Bids can be created/set in any order using the tabs used for managing a campaign once the adgroups are created.

The New Campaign Creation Screen

One reason why everyone preferred the Adwords Editor to edit their PPC Campaigns was the ease with which basic keyword editing was done. This has been incorporated within the new interface, making it possible for one to edit keywords, etc inline itself.

Inline Editing

These were just some of the brilliant features that Google is providing us with its new interface. In a nutshell, its combined features from the Adwords Editor and Analytics to make the Adwords Experience a whole lot better!

I was just exploring Google’s wonder wheel some days back & one question came to my mind instantly – why would someone use the Google wonder wheel? Although, the wonder wheel is launched to enhance user experience, how many users actually use it? But then I thought, just forget the user for time being and see what the wonder wheel can do for us – the SEO guys!

I did some research which can be summarized as follows –

1. Keyword research tool – Most important part for any successful SEO campaign is keyword research. This is where the wonder wheel can come in handy. Just put in your search query and see the related search terms in a comprehensive manner.

The Wonder Wheel

2. New website – suppose, someone is launching a website for his business. He can find out what Google wants in his site by just exploring the generic keywords related to the website using the wonder wheel. Google is just telling us what it wants on our site by means of the wonder wheel.

3. Niche searches – The wonder wheel can show a lot of related keywords when you query for niche terms. I “Googled” some random things and found some related terms to the query! Why don’t you guys try it out?

4. Content writing – Before writing content on a specific topic, we can just explore wonder wheel and know what Google relates to that sort of content and then write content around those related terms, thereby generating a theme around those keywords.

I noticed one more thing, the keywords in “Related Searches” tab and those in the branches of the wonder wheel are SAME. I wonder, what if the keywords in the related searches tab and the branches of the wonder wheel are different? What would be the scenario then? And, what algorithm will Google use for both, the related search tabs and the wonder wheel?