Archive for July, 2009
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
SEER works hard to improve three main items from the beginning of any SEO campaign: Site Architecture, Quality Keyword Rich Content, Drive Value with Links.
If a keyword is ranked #58 for a keyword, we know we have some work to do. When a site jumps ahead of one of our clients and pushes them out of the top 10, it gets personal.
Below is a guide about spam results, how to detect them, and finally where to report them. If you want all the links to submit a spammy site, they’re at the bottom (but if you skip all the interesting info you might not know what to look for!).
Discovering Companies Using Multiple Sites in Organic Search:
Companies we know are using multiple sites with the same content can be reported to the engines. Some of the tactics below allow you to identify the page in violation of Google Guidelines. The main one we’ll review today is “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”
1. Discovering within search results: Duplicate title tags & meta descriptions are often picked up by engines, so this isn’t a great way to find multiple listings. We first look at the URL format. A recent search for a keyword a client is targeting brought up four sites within the top 15 results with the URL formats listed below:
companya.com/product406.asp
companyb.com/product-id406.asp
companyc.com/product-406.asp
companyd.com/product406.asp
Is it possible two separate companies just by chance have the same product number? Sure, and I would still vet it to make sure it’s not spam. So, when four sites have the same product numbers, this raises a big flag. Looking further into the pages, each had the same exact product pricing and nearly identical content. This doesn’t create a good user experience for searchers. Who wants to see the same content & prices for a product and the only difference is the layout of the page?
2. Discovering through WhoIs: Once you find a duplicate listing like the example above, build a case so there is no uncertainty from Google, Yahoo, or Bing that the results is a duplicate page. Check any matching information through the WhoIs database. The business address, email & registrar name can easily be switched around and often times the nameservers give it away.
3. Discover through content duplication: As mentioned above, if you already see the page and know there is duplicate content, great. If you want to check for duplicate content, drop a couple of 7 word phrases from the site into a quote search in Google to see who else is coming up. Are the results bringing back any other sites that are ranked well?
4. Discover through backlinks: Many times duplicate sites will build links at the same rate. One tool that proves useful to find our linkbuilding rates is found through MajesticSEO. It’s a free tool and can show you a very insightful chart like the one below.
Reporting Companies in GoogleBase:
Organic search has been around a long time, but GoogleBase is a little newer. This just means there are new ways individuals can spam these results. Below are a few ways we’ve seen companies spam it recently:
1. Listing rebate pricing/quantity discount pricing instead of the price for each item is a violation of GoogleBase guidelines. Buying 1 tub of muscle milk sounds pretty nice for $15. To find out $15 is the quantity discount price when you buy 20 of them creates a poor user experience.
2. Searching for Nike Golf Balls and seeing a GoogleBase product result listed at $1 sounds like a great deal until you click through to find that you have to buy a package of 20 for $20 and 1 golf ball is not available.
3. Searching for TPX bat might bring back three results: TPX Left Handed Bat, TPX Right Handed Bat, Fall Ball TPX Bat. This example is made up, but something extremely similar was listed this past week with three results from the same exact company for an alternative (and fake) version of the product that is the same exact product. FYI, all bats are equal and while there are different sizes & weights, there are no left hand or right hand specified bats.
Where to Report
Google Spam Report Page – http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
This page allows you to report the search you did, the issue you’re seeing, and then provides a spot for an explanation why you believe the results are skewed/spammy. You can also send an email to report spam at spamreport@google.com. While testing how effective these reporting tools are, it seems to drop the sites reported a little over 50% of the time.
Google’s Quality Form – http://www.google.com/quality_form
You’ll find this at the bottom of any search page. Reporting through the quality form is similar to the spam form, but is just another arena to place a complaint IN ADDITION to the spam report page above.
Google Webmaster Forum Reporting – http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/
Google’s webmaster forum can be used as another alternative when there is no change in ranking or response through the reporting tools above. The forum is check by Google, but also has credible users that can help add or bring clarity to a spam situation. You’ll probably be outting a competitor to the webmaster world, so be prepared if you do this to be reviewed under a microscope by the community & competitors, especially if you’re using a name that can be associated with your product/company. You’ll want to post in the most relevant section, which is the Crawling, Indexing, & Ranking section.
Google Paid Link Reporting Site – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks
While many companies do this in some capacity, Google does not want purchased links impacting rankings. You can report a site that is blatantly using paid links. Most likely, the site will cease to pass value and the actual sites listed will not be penalized. Why? Because anyone can sign up a competitor to receive extremely bad paid text links on dumpy sites and then report them to Google. Not very far fetched when several paid text links can be purchased for under $5.
GoogleBase Reporting – http://base.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=policy
Report spam results mentioned above through this form. Be prepared to provide specific details into why it’s a spam listing.
Yahoo Spam Reporting – http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/spam_abuse.html
Bing Spam Reporting – https://support.discoverbing.com/eform.aspx?productKey=bingcontentremoval&ct=eformts
Reporting spam to Bing can also be done through the Feedback link on the bottom righthand side of the homepage.
If you have a “stop snitchin” mentality, your tune will change when a spam site bumps you and your revenues off the first page.
From our research, it’s well worth the few minutes to report a site implementing spammy/blackhat tactics to get your client or company back into the top 10. A broken down & simple explanation for the engines could help them see why it is spam faster, so take the time to research the proper ways described above to identify sites that violate engine guidelines.
Posted in SEO | 4 Comments »
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
SEER works hard to improve three main items from the beginning of any SEO campaign: Site Architecture, Quality Keyword Rich Content, Drive Value with Links.
If a keyword is ranked #58 for a keyword, we know we have some work to do. When a site jumps ahead of one of our clients and pushes them out of the top 10, it gets personal.
Below is a guide about spam results, how to detect them, and finally where to report them. If you want all the links to submit a spammy site, they’re at the bottom (but if you skip all the interesting info you might not know what to look for!).
Discovering Companies Using Multiple Sites in Organic Search:
Companies we know are using multiple sites with the same content can be reported to the engines. Some of the tactics below allow you to identify the page in violation of Google Guidelines. The main one we’ll review today is “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”
1. Discovering within search results: Duplicate title tags & meta descriptions are often picked up by engines, so this isn’t a great way to find multiple listings. We first look at the URL format. A recent search for a keyword a client is targeting brought up four sites within the top 15 results with the URL formats listed below:
companya.com/product406.asp
companyb.com/product-id406.asp
companyc.com/product-406.asp
companyd.com/product406.asp
Is it possible two separate companies just by chance have the same product number? Sure, and I would still vet it to make sure it’s not spam. So, when four sites have the same product numbers, this raises a big flag. Looking further into the pages, each had the same exact product pricing and nearly identical content. This doesn’t create a good user experience for searchers. Who wants to see the same content & prices for a product and the only difference is the layout of the page?
2. Discovering through WhoIs: Once you find a duplicate listing like the example above, build a case so there is no uncertainty from Google, Yahoo, or Bing that the results is a duplicate page. Check any matching information through the WhoIs database. The business address, email & registrar name can easily be switched around and often times the nameservers give it away.
3. Discover through content duplication: As mentioned above, if you already see the page and know there is duplicate content, great. If you want to check for duplicate content, drop a couple of 7 word phrases from the site into a quote search in Google to see who else is coming up. Are the results bringing back any other sites that are ranked well?
4. Discover through backlinks: Many times duplicate sites will build links at the same rate. One tool that proves useful to find our linkbuilding rates is found through MajesticSEO. It’s a free tool and can show you a very insightful chart like the one below.
Reporting Companies in GoogleBase:
Organic search has been around a long time, but GoogleBase is a little newer. This just means there are new ways individuals can spam these results. Below are a few ways we’ve seen companies spam it recently:
1. Listing rebate pricing/quantity discount pricing instead of the price for each item is a violation of GoogleBase guidelines. Buying 1 tub of muscle milk sounds pretty nice for $15. To find out $15 is the quantity discount price when you buy 20 of them creates a poor user experience.
2. Searching for Nike Golf Balls and seeing a GoogleBase product result listed at $1 sounds like a great deal until you click through to find that you have to buy a package of 20 for $20 and 1 golf ball is not available.
3. Searching for TPX bat might bring back three results: TPX Left Handed Bat, TPX Right Handed Bat, Fall Ball TPX Bat. This example is made up, but something extremely similar was listed this past week with three results from the same exact company for an alternative (and fake) version of the product that is the same exact product. FYI, all bats are equal and while there are different sizes & weights, there are no left hand or right hand specified bats.
Where to Report
Google Spam Report Page – http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
This page allows you to report the search you did, the issue you’re seeing, and then provides a spot for an explanation why you believe the results are skewed/spammy. You can also send an email to report spam at spamreport@google.com. While testing how effective these reporting tools are, it seems to drop the sites reported a little over 50% of the time.
Google’s Quality Form – http://www.google.com/quality_form
You’ll find this at the bottom of any search page. Reporting through the quality form is similar to the spam form, but is just another arena to place a complaint IN ADDITION to the spam report page above.
Google Webmaster Forum Reporting – http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/
Google’s webmaster forum can be used as another alternative when there is no change in ranking or response through the reporting tools above. The forum is check by Google, but also has credible users that can help add or bring clarity to a spam situation. You’ll probably be outting a competitor to the webmaster world, so be prepared if you do this to be reviewed under a microscope by the community & competitors, especially if you’re using a name that can be associated with your product/company. You’ll want to post in the most relevant section, which is the Crawling, Indexing, & Ranking section.
Google Paid Link Reporting Site – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks
While many companies do this in some capacity, Google does not want purchased links impacting rankings. You can report a site that is blatantly using paid links. Most likely, the site will cease to pass value and the actual sites listed will not be penalized. Why? Because anyone can sign up a competitor to receive extremely bad paid text links on dumpy sites and then report them to Google. Not very far fetched when several paid text links can be purchased for under $5.
GoogleBase Reporting – http://base.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=policy
Report spam results mentioned above through this form. Be prepared to provide specific details into why it’s a spam listing.
Yahoo Spam Reporting – http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/spam_abuse.html
Bing Spam Reporting – https://support.discoverbing.com/eform.aspx?productKey=bingcontentremoval&ct=eformts
Reporting spam to Bing can also be done through the Feedback link on the bottom righthand side of the homepage.
If you have a “stop snitchin” mentality, your tune will change when a spam site bumps you and your revenues off the first page.
From our research, it’s well worth the few minutes to report a site implementing spammy/blackhat tactics to get your client or company back into the top 10. A broken down & simple explanation for the engines could help them see why it is spam faster, so take the time to research the proper ways described above to identify sites that violate engine guidelines.
Posted in SEO | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
SEER is getting excited to work with our first PPC client using Magento’s ecommerce platform. Here are just a couple of features we can’t wait to get our hands on:
Inventory Management Reports
With Magento’s Low Stock Report, you can view the exact quantity of remaining supplies for every unique SKU in your inventory, listed from lowest to highest remaining quantity. This allows you to anticipate dips and spikes in PPC sales volume, given that one of your top performers goes out of stock or a new shipment comes in. Having this insight provides an opportunity to develop a strategy to counteract the anticipated dip in sales volume. With the AdWords API, retailers already have the ability to integrate their existing inventory management systems with their Google AdWords campaigns to make sure that clicks aren’t wasted on products that are out of stock, but being able to anticipate changes in inventory provides additional value.
Shopping Cart Reports
Creating goals and goal funnels in Google Analytics will allow you to monitor shopping cart abandonment rates. Magento’s Shopping Cart Report takes it one step further by providing more granular, product-specific data as well. With these reports, you can sort abandonment rates by product and include additional data like product price and the number of abandoned carts containing that particular product versus the amount of orders completed containing that product. This way, if there is a particular product with an abandonment rate significantly higher than the site average, you can develop a strategy to decrease abandonment rates (like offering a coupon code for that product) and monitor the results (by analyzing abandonment rates among coupon users and non-coupon users, also available in the Shopping Cart Report).
Sometimes ecommerce store owners are hesitant to grant outsiders full access to their store back-ends for a variety of reasons â sensitive customer information, ability to modify core site elements, etc. Luckily, Magento allows site owners to grant access to multiple users with limited access (reporting only, for example).
Magento also offers Google Analytics integration and automates installation of the Google Analytics code on each page of your site once you enable the integration feature.
Landing Page Creation & Testing
Creating landing pages for A/B or multivariate testing is made simple using Magento’s Content Management System, which works seamlessly with Google’s Website Optimizer. Magento put together a nice step-by-step video on their blog, which you can watch here
International Targeting
Magento makes it easy to create multi-lingual variations of an ecommerce site. Multiple currencies and tax rates are also supported. PPC advertisers are (surprisingly) still making the mistake of developing ad copy and keyword lists in a language different from the language on the ad’s destination URL. With Magento, if an opportunity is identified in another language or country, creating multilingual variations of your site is easy.
iPhone Optimized Themes
Magento also offers iPhone optimized themes, which is great for PPC advertisers who fit nicely into the m-commerce space, making it easy to launch mobile campaigns. The layout is optimized for the iPhone, though, meaning that opting into allow ads to be displayed on iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers means that your page will not look the same for everyone.
These are just a couple of features we’re excited about!
Have you worked with Magento in the past? If so, I’d love to hear your feedback!
Posted in SEO | 4 Comments »
Monday, July 20th, 2009
I would say that 65% of the social media consultants that I know talk too damn much. They are jet setting, twittering every couple minutes, going to tweet ups, talking to groups of 2nd graders about the power of social, launching twebinars and all that other useless CRAP.
Take a second marketing managers, if you are hiring a social media consultant, the more time they spend @’ing people all day, talking to their tweeps, going to tweetups, etc the LESS time they are spending growing your brand and monitoring your brand – a balance should be struck. I track my time like a banshee and personally monitor my non-SEO efforts so I know when I get out of balance
So I decided to give you some tools to do some investigative checking on your social media consultants with some tips on how to interpret what you find from these tools.
Problem #1 â Your Social Media Consultant is a groupie and not a strategist
How does your social media consultant becoming a groupie of people like Gary V, Chris Brogan, Geoff Livingston, Mari Smith, etc help YOU, yeah you, you know the person that pays for them to monitor your brand online? Following is fine, mutual professional respect is great too, but being a groupie to anyone who puts their pants on one leg at a time is crazy.
You think you’ve got a social media groupie? Here’s some things to do to find out.
Drop their name into Google Image Search & Flickr search. If most pictures of them are with other people, drinking at parties, cheesing for the camera with any web celebrity and showing other groupie behavior, you might want to think twice.
I took a big name person (who will remain nameless) who is doing social media for some big brands and 50% of his/her pictures were of this person acting very groupie like â If I need to trust my social media budget, I’d prefer the quiet strategic type vs the “look how popular I am type” anyday.
One person who breaks the heck out of this rule is Tamar Weinberg, lots of pics but she’s a superstar in her own right, so a lot of people want to take pictures WITH her, its the price of stardom but she’s not seeking it.
Problem #2 â Identifying a Chatty Cathy social media consultant?
Remember Chatty Cathy? Twitter has sprouted a whole new army of them!
Lets use Brian Chappell as an example of how to use twittercounter to uncover the traits of a social media consultant who gets strategy. A social media consultant who actually has a job can’t tweet all the time, sure we all get a little Chatty Cathy once in a while but real consultants do work at some point, and using twittercounter and selecting the “updates” option will show you that there are times when your potential social media consultant won’t update for a day or two, and that is a good thing, why? Because they are busy working on strategies to help their clients, again shocking!
Does it mean they need to have zero updates some days??
Not at all but if they usually post 10 times a day, there have to be some days that only get one or two.
Lets anonymously use a social media consultant with thousands of followers (who follows a couple hundred people). See this chart below. This person has over 50 tweets in a day about 10 times in 30 days. I think that is a bit excessive, especially since most of what they post is kinda useless for followers interested in social media.
Again its OK to be a little chatty once in awhile, but if you see this kind of activity, YOU should go investigate, some acceptable reasons to see a lot of tweets per day are:
Handling a customer service issue
Live tweeting from a conference
Having a baby / Getting Married :)
Posting hashtags to keep people abreast of a seminar
All those are perfectly good reasons for a social media consultant to have a big spike in twitter activity, but you should investigate the source of consistent tweet spikes before hiring them to make sure spikes in tweets are relevant.
Very often people’s spikes in twitter posts come from bickering and pissing contests. Take note, how often do they get involved with arguments that cause them to post 60 times in a day 10 times a month? Even if the tweets are small, it takes time to write that tweet and squeeze the thought into 140 characters, it could be a minute per tweet at least. Over the course of a day that’s an hour or more. An hour they could have spent helping you instead of arguing over who’s right and whose wrong.
Problem #3 They are “Talkin Loud and ain’t Sayin Nothin’”
Ahh James Brown Said it best!
Evaluating a social media consultant? Read their twitter stream, are they posting resources or opinions? A good social media consultant knows that there is a balance between personal, fun, opinion, type posts and ones that show that they “get it”. Use tools like Twitter grader and look at their cloud â take a look at Brian Chappell’s cloud is not the kind of guy to be running around drinking a ton taking photos with everyone, he analyzes and strategizes. That’s why I like him.
I see minimal @’s and nothing inappropriate or groupie like. I like what I see – a cloud filled with @’s and inappropriate words tells you what this person talks about most of the time.
Too many @’s tells me you like to make your conversations public, for the same reason why I don’t want to hear my neighbors argue, outside, I don’t need to see what should be a private conversation happening in public…your social media consultant should know when a conversation is public and when it should be taken private. If they keep their arguments public all the time, how are they going to ask you to respond to a customer complaint, call them stupid or an idiot on a public forum?
Problem #4 â They follow everyone who follows them.
This is a touchy one, but here goes. A strategic social media consultant (or anyone who values true networking) understands VALUABLE connections, and understands that not all followers are created equal and realizes that they probably shouldn’t follow everyone (this does not apply for social media consultants who sell software or authors who are trying to sell books). The groupie social media consultants follow almost everyone back, why? Because they have attached their self worth, ego, and popularity to how many followers they can get. The more people that follow me the more popular I am, right? Is their mantra. There are exceptions to this rule, but not too many.
Run Twitterholic.com
Run this tool I used Tamar Weinberg’s twitterholic report as an example.
Shocker, Tamar doesn’t follow everyone back, and she actually does have a book out there on social media, so you’d think she’d start following more people to maybe sell more books. Nope.
More importantly, you’ll see lately she’s been trimming back who she follows even as her follower count grows! I’d love to know why, but I can imagine that people that value connections realize that at times they need to trim some back when it just becomes too much.
Don Crowther another person I respect breaks this rule and is still a great consultant, so don’t use any of my ideas as absolutes, ok? There are quality people who do break some (but not all) of these rules.
Problem #5 – Their profile refers to themselves as a speaker, thought leader, expert, guru, or ninja.
Nothing says I drink the cool aid like I’m a social media ninja! If their goal is to get speaking gigs what does that do for YOU? I speak at a ton of events myself, but I’d never promote myself as a speaker if I only had 140 characters to talk about myself. Look at the twitter profile for someone I consider to be an expert, Beth Harte or at Chris Winfield and his profile on twitter. I tend to like people who are good at what they do and show some humility, so I can’t say that without mentioning Dave Snyder, Jordan Kasteler, and Loren Baker, just good guys too.
Why does this matter? The minute you start thinking of yourself as a “guru” you spend more time maintaining your status and not on hustling and being the best you can be at your craft. Getting selected as a speaker for some consultants plays into their ego in a way that says “look at all these people who come see me speak because I know so much more than they do” – thats whack!
Don again, breaks this rule, so it gives me an opportunity to again say – do NOT use any of these as absolutes? Don please don’t break any more of these rules or you are going to kill my post.
So those are my thoughts, this post has been bubbling up in me for a while, glad I finally got to write it. I know there are more folks who do social whom I didn’t get to mention here, its cause I am saving your samples for part II. Thanks to Gloria Bell, a Philadelphia Based Social Media Consultant who helped me spark this idea!
Posted in social media | 11 Comments »
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
There are many articles talking about how to structure your PPC accounts. Here are some good ones: Is Your Paid Search Account Structure Optimal? and Back to PPC Classroom Building Effective Campaign Structure. I think it is crucial to have a good account structure because it is one of the most important elements in PPC. This excellent PPC Hero blog highlights the disadvantages of not having a well structured account, A Poor PPC Account Structure Will Make Your Campaign Suffer.
The above mentioned articles give great strategic solutions in organizing your campaigns and ad groups based on site architecture and reporting needs. PPC best practices also tell us that our ad groups should be granular so that you can incorporate the keyword into the ad copy. This will then result in increasing your Click Through Rate and quality score, thus, lowering your CPC’s. Furthermore, this approach will increase your relevancy and thereby propensity to convert.
Keeping these best practices in mind, how granular should you get in creating ad groups?
Recently, the SEER Google Agency Team visited our office. Among the wonderful breakout sessions they provided, one of the most insightful sessions was on strategies to create well-structured ad groups (especially new ad groups). Google introduced the “1k impression rule.” It’s short, simple and providing a ton of values – If a keyword does not have more than 1K impressions determined by Google’s Keyword tool then the keyword does not need its own ad group.
Although the SEER Team has been utilizing similar approaches, the 1K impression cut off has systematically enhanced our ad group structuring. It also has helped us tremendously in re-organizing our current accounts as well as in creating new accounts.
Below is a step by step outline in how we have been using this rule for our practice:
1. Run your seed keywords on the Google keywords tool.
2. Sort your results by search volume and pay attention to keywords with impressions equal to or greater than 1,000. I sort the keyword by Local Search volume (in this instance is the US) which is relevant for this client (see the screen cap below). Further information on Google’s keyword tool can be obtained from the Adwords help. By now, you must be thinking why only keywords with 1,000 impressions or more? The reason behind this is that we want to invest our time creating targeted ad copy on keywords that have the greatest potential to drive the most traffic and thereby conversion.
3. Download all the keywords as CSV files. It’s just easier to manage the data in excel. You can filter data in a descending order and copy and paste your keywords as needed.
4. Start looking for potential ad groups theme. Based on the screen cap above, we have the following information:
a. The 1st keyword has 110,000 searches, let’s call this ad group X (if the term is relevant and not too broad for your intended audience)
b. The 3rd keyword has 27,100 searches. It’s actually a plural form of the 1st keyword. Thus, you can add the 3rd keyword into ad group X
5. Expand your keyword selections. After the ad group structure has been laid out, I recommend finding additional related terms, using Yahoo Suggest or any other Keyword tool you are comfortable using.
6. Remove duplicates. Once you have all your ad groups and Keywords in a long list make sure to remove duplicates. It can be easily done in excel 2007 by following this direction:
Highlight your Ad Groups and Keyword column, Select Data, Remove Duplicates, Select Your KW Column Only in the Pop up box and Hit Ok
It’s a simple process but after doing a lot of research, this task is easily overlooked.
And there you have it. Of course, this is not the only method for creating ad groups. I have found this method very systematic and helpful by taking out the guess work from deciding how many ad groups need to be created. In summary, if the impression volume is not greater than 1K, the keyword is probably not worthy for its own ad group with its own ad copy. Instead, the keyword should be placed in an existing, related ad group. Hopefully, this process could help you in developing your ad groups as a simpler and less daunting task as it has been for the SEER team.
Posted in SEO | 9 Comments »
Monday, July 6th, 2009
A few weeks ago I did a little test to compare Google cost and traffic estimates to actual keyword performance using historical data from one of my accounts and comparing it to data provided by Google’s Traffic Estimator for the same list of keywords. For the group of keywords I used, the actual average daily cost over a 30 day period was roughly half of Google’s low daily cost estimate and the high cost estimate was just over three times actual cost.
Of course, I was optimizing the keywords during this 30 day period to meet my ROI goals, which may explain the discrepancy between estimated and actual cost. It is likely that had I just tossed my keywords in an ad group and let them run wild for a month, the estimates provided by the Traffic Estimator would likely have been closer to actual keyword performance during that period.
I was surprised to find out a few days ago when I was pulling some estimates for a potential new client that customized location targeting is even less accurate than estimates pulled at the national level.
To illustrate, below are estimates for 4 different geographic areas for the same group of keywords:
Entire United States
Pennsylvania
Largest Metro Areas in PA (Erie, Harrisburg, Altoona, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Scranton)
15 mile radius around Danville, PA
For a larger list of keywords, search volume estimates are more valuable for getting a general idea of which keywords are likely to generate the highest click volume and may warrant having their own ad group to capitalize on Quality Score, assuming a good CTR can be achieved with highly targeted ad copy. In this case, there isn’t too much variation among keyword search volume estimates, which range from 0-3 across all 4 areas.
CPC estimates are roughly the same for all 4 areas pulled. I’m no expert on tutus, but $0.90 seems pretty reasonable to me.
Estimated Clicks/Day is where the data starts to get a little wacky. Obviously it isn’t possible for more clicks to be generated daily around tiny little Danville, PA than in the entire state of Pennsylvania.
Cost estimates are equally as unreliable.
To be fair, the Traffic Estimator does have a disclaimer on the results page, letting the user know that “All estimates are provided as a guideline, and are based on system-wide averages; your actual costs and ad positions may vary. To view estimates based on your keywords’ performance history, use the Traffic Estimator within the appropriate ad group.”
Does pulling estimates based on performance history generate more accurate data? Nope.
Here are the estimates I got in one of my ad groups when I ran the estimates from within that ad group (using the previous interface):
Just in case you can’t see that image clearly, the estimated search volume is 0 and there isn’t enough data available to estimate CPCs. Actual performance for this same group of keywords over a 30 day period was as follows:
Clicks: 269 (about 8 per day)
Average CPC ($2.10)
So it seems that pulling estimates at the national level (and considering the estimates to be high) is the best way to get useful data from the Traffic Estimator.
Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »
Monday, July 6th, 2009
A few weeks ago I did a little test to compare Google cost and traffic estimates to actual keyword performance using historical data from one of my accounts and comparing it to data provided by Google’s Traffic Estimator for the same list of keywords. For the group of keywords I used, the actual average daily cost over a 30 day period was roughly half of Google’s low daily cost estimate and the high cost estimate was just over three times actual cost.
Of course, I was optimizing the keywords during this 30 day period to meet my ROI goals, which may explain the discrepancy between estimated and actual cost. It is likely that had I just tossed my keywords in an ad group and let them run wild for a month, the estimates provided by the Traffic Estimator would likely have been closer to actual keyword performance during that period.
I was surprised to find out a few days ago when I was pulling some estimates for a potential new client that customized location targeting is even less accurate than estimates pulled at the national level.
To illustrate, below are estimates for 4 different geographic areas for the same group of keywords:
Entire United States
Pennsylvania
Largest Metro Areas in PA (Erie, Harrisburg, Altoona, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Scranton)
15 mile radius around Danville, PA
For a larger list of keywords, search volume estimates are more valuable for getting a general idea of which keywords are likely to generate the highest click volume and may warrant having their own ad group to capitalize on Quality Score, assuming a good CTR can be achieved with highly targeted ad copy. In this case, there isn’t too much variation among keyword search volume estimates, which range from 0-3 across all 4 areas.
CPC estimates are roughly the same for all 4 areas pulled. I’m no expert on tutus, but $0.90 seems pretty reasonable to me.
Estimated Clicks/Day is where the data starts to get a little wacky. Obviously it isn’t possible for more clicks to be generated daily around tiny little Danville, PA than in the entire state of Pennsylvania.
Cost estimates are equally as unreliable.
To be fair, the Traffic Estimator does have a disclaimer on the results page, letting the user know that “All estimates are provided as a guideline, and are based on system-wide averages; your actual costs and ad positions may vary. To view estimates based on your keywords’ performance history, use the Traffic Estimator within the appropriate ad group.”
Does pulling estimates based on performance history generate more accurate data? Nope.
Here are the estimates I got in one of my ad groups when I ran the estimates from within that ad group (using the previous interface):
Just in case you can’t see that image clearly, the estimated search volume is 0 and there isn’t enough data available to estimate CPCs. Actual performance for this same group of keywords over a 30 day period was as follows:
Clicks: 269 (about 8 per day)
Average CPC ($2.10)
So it seems that pulling estimates at the national level (and considering the estimates to be high) is the best way to get useful data from the Traffic Estimator.
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