I know what you are thinking, the same old ways to do proper (white hat) SEO regurgitated, but there are some interesting things to point out as SEO has evolved with the advent of social media.
I was with a client recently working on SEO, and or course I asked him to give me some key phrase ideas on how they thought people would search to find them. I then added my two cents. Of course after I did keyword analysis, I found that maybe 15-20% of the keyword phrases we had actually returned results. It’s amazing how we, and business owners and marketers think people behave when it comes to online searches, then find out people aren’t searching that way at all. So the point here is to build large keyword lists and then refine to smaller keyword lists.
I have found that doing A/B and A/B/C testing on ads groups is extremely effective. first you have to set up a small ad group. What an ad group is, is a set of keywords that you have associated with an ad/ad variation. Simply putting a smaller number of keywords in the ad group can significantly improve click-through rates. The nice thing about doing A/B testing is all the major search engines have tools to help do testing. The trick here is once you see one ad group our performing the other, you not only should use that ad group, but dig deeper ask why it is actually outperforming the other group.
This one might be obvious but I see many people not doing it, and that is geo-centric keywords. For example, if you want to be found for the keyword, ‘marketing company’, you will see there that Google returns 165,000,000 results for the key phrase. Good luck getting high ranking there.
The next thing to do, because Google is showing you pages with those two terms, but not necessarily together, is to find an exact match. the way this is done is to type the key phrase is parenthesis in the Google search bar and see the results. The results returned dwindles down to 4,290,000. This will give you a better idea of competitiveness of a keyword or key phrase.
This still doesn’t mean though that all of these pages were optimized using that keyword. The best way to look it to do what is called an ALLINTITLE search. This is an advanced command operator. Here is a link to a list of Google Command Operators: http://tinyurl.com/apzkr What this command does is actually show the number of pages with this key phrase in the pages title. The way you would type it is: allintitle:”marketing company”. As you can see the results returned are now down to 90,700.
Be aware though that when you are doing this, overuse of this tool, will cause Google from temporarily block you from suing that operator (Google thinks its spam). I have found that you are cut off after about 15 keyword searches using this technique, so you have to do it in little bunches.
So why worry about keywords in the title? Google give the page title a lot of weight, and if the key phrase is being used there, then it is likely being used by your competition. Once you do an allintitle search, you want to look for key phrases that have high search results, but comparatively low allintitle results.
So now you have a keyword with 90,700 results. This is not a bad number to compete against, but suppose this number was much higher? try using a geo-centric keyword. for example, trying using the key phrase marketing company Maryland or even better marketing company Baltimore, this will dramatically improve your chances of high search rankings for that keyword as shown below. See how the search results went from 259,000 to only 18 using a geo-centric technique?
One last thing to point out, make sure the keyword is in fact a competitive keyword. Meaning again, high search results but low allintitle results. for example, I would consider an allintitle (AIT) result of under 1,000 to be non-competitive and you’ll want to use it. 1,000-3,000 results is fairly competitive, 3,000-5,000 competitive, and 5,000 and over is highly competitive. depending on how established your company is how one would decide how competitive to go. for a start-up I would not use results over 1,000.
Integrating social media also will greatly improve your rankings as search engines are now using real-time search results as part of their algorithm. If these techniques (plus many other common practices ) do not work in might be time to look at PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising.
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