Recently, I did keyword research for one of our clients. The client is an online retailer that sells snowboard and skateboard gear. When I was researching keywords, I came across a discrepancy within Google’s keyword research tools. First, I used Google’s Keyword Tool to research some general snowboarding terms. I looked at “snowboarding equipment” and “snowboarding gear” in exact match and examined their estimated monthly volumes. Below is a screen capture of the researched keywords on exact match:
(Image is not currently available)
I then used a second tool to analyze these two terms. I turned to Google Insights and found the following:
(Image is not currently available)
Now look how different Google reports on these two terms. As you can see when Google Keyword Tool was used, “snowboarding equipment” has almost 14 times the amount of average monthly search traffic when compared to the keyword term “snowboarding gear”. Then when Google Insights was used to evaluate these terms, “snowboarding gear” clearly has more traffic than “snowboarding equipment”.
Overall, it is very important to use multiple keyword research tools to identify the right keywords to target for a SEO or SEM campaign. Even Google conflicts with its own self. Make sure you exhaust every resource before you are officially done.
Recently, I did keyword research for one of our clients. The client is an online retailer that sells snowboard and skateboard gear. When I was researching keywords, I came across a discrepancy within Google’s keyword research tools. First, I used Google’s Keyword Tool to research some general snowboarding terms. I looked at snowboarding equipment and snowboarding gear in exact match and examined their estimated monthly volumes. Below is a screen capture of the researched keywords on exact match:
(Image is not currently available)
I then used a second tool to analyze these two terms. I turned to Google Insights and found the following:
(Image is not currently available)
Now look how different Google reports on these two terms. As you can see when Google Keyword Tool was used, snowboarding equipment has almost 14 times the amount of average monthly search traffic when compared to the keyword term snowboarding gear. Then when Google Insights was used to evaluate these terms, snowboarding gear clearly has more traffic than snowboarding equipment.
Overall, it is very important to use multiple keyword research tools to identify the right keywords to target for a SEO or SEM campaign. Even Google conflicts with its own self. Make sure you exhaust every resource before you are officially done.
Over the past few months I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Google Base. Some days it has brought in DOUBLE the amount of sales vs organic search and some days it has gone down without any notice. Below are some Dos & Don’ts to help understand what is beneficial, what will get your feed booted, and how this data appears in webmaster tools.
Dos:
1. Update the feed once a week. Even if nothing has changed, uploading a new feed will keep your feed from expiring. We have also noticed a slight drop after hasn’t been updated for 20 days. If it goes 30 days, the feed expires and all your products will be gone from shopping results.
2. Communicate any problems through googlebase-support@google.com. After an initial dislike for finding a feed booted, they have been extremely responsive for a general email address.
3. Check to make sure your products are Active and that the feed hasn’t been disapproved at least once a day. You will most likely NOT receive an email letting you know your products have been disapproved and just checking GA for traffic, sometimes delayed, is not enough. Finding your feed is down on Thursday night vs Friday morning means you can probably catch the support email team when they check Friday morning (responses have typically come back through email between 6-9am EST) and not have to wait over the weekend for a response (haven’t received response emails over weekends ever.)
4. Know what keywords drive traffic and use these in descriptive titles & descriptions. Solid keyword research is essential for any successful SEO campaign and it’s not different applying that to your Googlebase feed. If you were to target Apache Skis by K2 (no volume) instead of K2 Apache Skis (over 50,000 searches/year), you may not show up for the later phrase. If your company was in the top 3 shopping results showing up in universal search AND you get .5% of all search traffic AND convert 10% of that traffic, that’s $7500 extra annually for JUST ONE PRODUCT. Do solid keyword research and be rewarded.
Don’ts:
1. List rebate pricing or quantity discount pricing. Your feed will be booted without notice once discovered. At the same time, report companies using rebate/quantity discount pricing. With a simple email to GBase, we had the feed from the largest site in a specific health field booted and it was reloaded again with actual prices 1/3 higher than previously stated. Keep single item pricing in the price field and report on the other jokers doing anything differently.
2. Place open links in your feed unless you want to have a crazy spike in organic traffic/conversions. Make sure you place that tracking snippet on the end of the product page link. Also, know that if your product is listed in the three shopping results and the shopping results are ranking in position 3, webmaster tools will not report the fact that it is your shopping results ranking vs the actual product page. This may throw you for a quick loop when all of a sudden webmaster tools reports incredibly high rankings for keywords you know shouldn’t be there yet.
3. Give up if your feed is getting denied over and over again. This is a filter that need manual approval. Email support and attach your feed to have them manually approve it.
4. Include shipping & handling in your description. This is considered promotional jargon and it will boot your feed. This includes having the word “handling” anywhere in your description. This triggered a match in one of our product descriptions, “ease of handling”, and the whole feed was booted.
While the above lists are a short guideline, these are just a few large items that can help make your experience with Google Base involve more love than hate.
Have any Dos & Don’ts to add? Post’em and we can all learn.
Over the past few months I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Google Base. Some days it has brought in DOUBLE the amount of sales vs organic search and some days it has gone down without any notice. Below are some Dos & Don’ts to help understand what is beneficial, what will get your feed booted, and how this data appears in webmaster tools.
Dos:
1. Update the feed once a week. Even if nothing has changed, uploading a new feed will keep your feed from expiring. We have also noticed a slight drop after hasn’t been updated for 20 days. If it goes 30 days, the feed expires and all your products will be gone from shopping results.
2. Communicate any problems through googlebase-support@google.com. After an initial dislike for finding a feed booted, they have been extremely responsive for a general email address.
3. Check to make sure your products are Active and that the feed hasn’t been disapproved at least once a day. You will most likely NOT receive an email letting you know your products have been disapproved and just checking GA for traffic, sometimes delayed, is not enough. Finding your feed is down on Thursday night vs Friday morning means you can probably catch the support email team when they check Friday morning (responses have typically come back through email between 6-9am EST) and not have to wait over the weekend for a response (haven’t received response emails over weekends ever.)
4. Know what keywords drive traffic and use these in descriptive titles & descriptions. Solid keyword research is essential for any successful SEO campaign and it’s not different applying that to your Googlebase feed. If you were to target Apache Skis by K2 (no volume) instead of K2 Apache Skis (over 50,000 searches/year), you may not show up for the later phrase. If your company was in the top 3 shopping results showing up in universal search AND you get .5% of all search traffic AND convert 10% of that traffic, that’s $7500 extra annually for JUST ONE PRODUCT. Do solid keyword research and be rewarded.
Don’ts:
1. List rebate pricing or quantity discount pricing. Your feed will be booted without notice once discovered. At the same time, report companies using rebate/quantity discount pricing. With a simple email to GBase, we had the feed from the largest site in a specific health field booted and it was reloaded again with actual prices 1/3 higher than previously stated. Keep single item pricing in the price field and report on the other jokers doing anything differently.
2. Place open links in your feed unless you want to have a crazy spike in organic traffic/conversions. Make sure you place that tracking snippet on the end of the product page link. Also, know that if your product is listed in the three shopping results and the shopping results are ranking in position 3, webmaster tools will not report the fact that it is your shopping results ranking vs the actual product page. This may throw you for a quick loop when all of a sudden webmaster tools reports incredibly high rankings for keywords you know shouldn’t be there yet.
3. Give up if your feed is getting denied over and over again. This is a filter that need manual approval. Email support and attach your feed to have them manually approve it.
4. Include shipping & handling in your description. This is considered promotional jargon and it will boot your feed. This includes having the word “handling” anywhere in your description. This triggered a match in one of our product descriptions, “ease of handling”, and the whole feed was booted.
While the above lists are a short guideline, these are just a few large items that can help make your experience with Google Base involve more love than hate.
Have any Dos & Don’ts to add? Post’em and we can all learn.
Google came out with their nofollow statement two months ago. Looking back on this statement, I wanted to throw some ideas out there on why I am still looking into quality sites that have nofollow links and the results we have seen in removing nofollow tags.
Why go after quality sites with nofollow links?
For starters, this does not mean dropping comments in blog comments, high quality site or not. Engines certainly have the ability to identify comments through page segmentation and generally don’t believe this to be a good use of anyone’s time. Also, these are links that are completely out of control, to some extent, and out of context from the original intent of the writer.
Wikipedia is a good example. Many of us have edited articles that are dear to use (updating the Mets 2009 injury plagued season has been a highlight for me) and many of us have tried to add links. Some links I thought were relevant have been removed within 5 minutes. This is a good thing. Human editors that pay close attention to pages is valuable. Spammers need not post a junk link as it’ll get zapped. How does an engine not take this level of monitoring into consideration?
Human editing + a respected resource like wikipedia = something the engines will take into account. nofollow links are tracked by Google. These have appeared a number of times in webmaster tools. Google knows the links that are on Wiki even if it doesn’t follow through to those pages. I can’t believe that a link on wikipedia is not a value added link. Linkjuice may not pass, but having a lasting link on big W or any other credible source that is human edited & still nofollowed is something I will spend the few minutes to get. Google knows it’s there.
Should I remove the nofollow tag?
I’ve tested removing a few nofollow tags from a site, I’ve had a site remove them entirely from the dropdowns. This hasn’t made any reportable impact on rankings for those pages or the rest of the site. If you want to remove some, go ahead.
Why did Google come out with the nofollow statement?
Lets review:
1. Google is greedy (for indexing pages) 2. Pagescultping prevented engines from accessing pages 3. Google releases news that the nofollow, in short, absorbs value that could be passed to other pages 4. New sites no longer implement pagesculpting 5. In a perfect world, existing sites remove the nofollows & Google indexes millions of pages
The contact us, about us, privacy policy, shipping instructions pages, usually nofollowed, contain addresses, phone numbers & other data that will help engines identify geographical information about the website. These most likely have no inbound links and if there’s no sitemap.xml loading these into WMTools, Google doesn’t index this information. Opening up this data can only help Google to make a better decision on what to show.
There are plenty of do-follow linking opportunities available if you search the right places and ask clients the right questions. Don’t believe that SEER focuses a large amount of time chasing down nofollows, but there are some we believe carry some type of value, even if they’re not passing linkjuice. All in all, don’t shun a quality site where you can gain a relevant link just because it’s a nofollow.
Google came out with their nofollow statement two months ago. Looking back on this statement, I wanted to throw some ideas out there on why I am still looking into quality sites that have nofollow links and the results we have seen in removing nofollow tags.
Why go after quality sites with nofollow links?
For starters, this does not mean dropping comments in blog comments, high quality site or not. Engines certainly have the ability to identify comments through page segmentation and generally don’t believe this to be a good use of anyone’s time. Also, these are links that are completely out of control, to some extent, and out of context from the original intent of the writer.
Wikipedia is a good example. Many of us have edited articles that are dear to use (updating the Mets 2009 injury plagued season has been a highlight for me) and many of us have tried to add links. Some links I thought were relevant have been removed within 5 minutes. This is a good thing. Human editors that pay close attention to pages is valuable. Spammers need not post a junk link as it’ll get zapped. How does an engine not take this level of monitoring into consideration?
Human editing + a respected resource like wikipedia = something the engines will take into account. nofollow links are tracked by Google. These have appeared a number of times in webmaster tools. Google knows the links that are on Wiki even if it doesn’t follow through to those pages. I can’t believe that a link on wikipedia is not a value added link. Linkjuice may not pass, but having a lasting link on big W or any other credible source that is human edited & still nofollowed is something I will spend the few minutes to get. Google knows it’s there.
Should I remove the nofollow tag?
I’ve tested removing a few nofollow tags from a site, I’ve had a site remove them entirely from the dropdowns. This hasn’t made any reportable impact on rankings for those pages or the rest of the site. If you want to remove some, go ahead.
Why did Google come out with the nofollow statement?
Lets review:
1. Google is greedy (for indexing pages) 2. Pagescultping prevented engines from accessing pages 3. Google releases news that the nofollow, in short, absorbs value that could be passed to other pages 4. New sites no longer implement pagesculpting 5. In a perfect world, existing sites remove the nofollows & Google indexes millions of pages
The contact us, about us, privacy policy, shipping instructions pages, usually nofollowed, contain addresses, phone numbers & other data that will help engines identify geographical information about the website. These most likely have no inbound links and if there’s no sitemap.xml loading these into WMTools, Google doesn’t index this information. Opening up this data can only help Google to make a better decision on what to show.
There are plenty of do-follow linking opportunities available if you search the right places and ask clients the right questions. Don’t believe that SEER focuses a large amount of time chasing down nofollows, but there are some we believe carry some type of value, even if they’re not passing linkjuice. All in all, don’t shun a quality site where you can gain a relevant link just because it’s a nofollow.
Hey everyone, thanks for the kind comments about my session today. I have put the links below:
Google Insights – This is the tool you will use to find those rising searches I was speaking about. It also has seemed at times to be more accurate / up to date than Google Trends. Here are the daily trends, remember RSS and iGoogle folks sign up for these so you are being proactively alerted to trends, ok?
Remember that neat-o Excel Plugin I was showing you as I researched dog breeds by gender? Keep in mind to look for high degrees of disparity between male and female before you take this data to the bank.
We talked about detecting online intent with research vs. commercial based searches, MSN has a tool to help, here is the online commercial intention tool. They have a bunch of other sem / seo tools as well, go get busy kids! My favorite is the search funnels.
While we’re on Greasemonkey remember how my Google Analytics looked showing the rising keyword trends? Here is the tool I referenced. There’s also a firefox plugin as well.
Sorry this is subscriber only, but the SEOmoz Visualization tool is here, lets beg rand to make it free.
I know I ran through hubfinder, but please trust me, it is worth learning how it works. The paid version is part of Arron Wall’s SEO Book membership.
Wordtracker labs was the keyword research tool that is a firefox plugin to use to do keyword research while you are writing blogs, its a neat one too.
Remember everything I read that I like is on delicious, it gets updated daily.
Here’s a video on how to use delicious for linkbuilding from last ASE.
I know I ran through SEO Quake but here’s a tutorial on it.