Some people live to organize and we see all sorts of advantages in organizing everything in our lives. If you’re in that category, you probably have already convinced yourself that organizing your keywords is important, but what about the rest of us? We need convincing.

Some search programs contain hundreds of thousands—even millions of keywords—and you can imagine that it isn’t easy keeping track of all of them. Even if your program has far fewer keywords—10,000, say—you can be forgiven for not looking forward to organizing all of those keywords. In fact, you can be forgiven for not even believing that organizing your keywords is an important activity. Everyone knows that paid search keywords need to be organized by accounts, campaigns, and ad groups, but keyword organization can go far beyond that—and includes organic keywords, too.

So, here’s the simple reason why everyone needs to organize their keywords far beyond the standard accounts and ad groups—money.

If you aren’t categorizing your keywords according to myriad criteria, you’re missing out. Here are just some of the benefits of organizing that can jump start your keyword optimization:

• Separate categories allow separate analysis. If you’ve ever performed market segmentation, you know the power of organization. Segmentation allows you to identify the keyword groups that convert the highest, produce the most loyal new customers, produce the best return on investment, and many other prized segments.
• Organization allows optimization. Understanding those prized segments allows you to optimize your approaches—better keywords bidding strategies, more time spent on optimizing organic pages, common messaging to persuade similar targets, and many more.
• Common categorization helps co-optimize paid and organic. If you’ve only organized your paid search keywords, you’re missing a big opportunity. Focusing on both organic and paid keywords with the same categorization approaches allows them to be optimized together rather than separately.

So, what kinds of categories can be helpful? Anything that allows you to consolidate your message across groups, rather than keyword-by-keyword:

• Target market. If you have already segmented your markets based on other criteria (B2B vs. B2C, demographics, industry, or others), you can use what you know about your segments to identify which keywords appeal to each segment.
• Purchase funnel. Search keywords reveal exactly where in the buying cycle searchers are. There’s no reason to offer a coupon to someone in the initial research stages, so organizing by purchase funnel stages allows message optimization.
• Benefits. Some keywords reveal which benefits the searchers desire—“cheap flights” or “five-star hotel” or “quiet restaurant”—and that lets you target the messages to match. Grouping keywords for value, luxury, or other benefits allows you to scale your learning as to which messages are most persuasive.

Don’t settle for one-dimensional keyword organization that does nothing to optimize your messaging. How you organize your keywords can make the difference between an average search program and a great one.

Some people live to organize and we see all sorts of advantages in organizing everything in our lives. If you’re in that category, you probably have already convinced yourself that organizing your keywords is important, but what about the rest of us? We need convincing.

Some search programs contain hundreds of thousands—even millions of keywords—and you can imagine that it isn’t easy keeping track of all of them. Even if your program has far fewer keywords—10,000, say—you can be forgiven for not looking forward to organizing all of those keywords. In fact, you can be forgiven for not even believing that organizing your keywords is an important activity. Everyone knows that paid search keywords need to be organized by accounts, campaigns, and ad groups, but keyword organization can go far beyond that—and includes organic keywords, too.

So, here’s the simple reason why everyone needs to organize their keywords far beyond the standard accounts and ad groups—money.

If you aren’t categorizing your keywords according to myriad criteria, you’re missing out. Here are just some of the benefits of organizing that can jump start your keyword optimization:

• Separate categories allow separate analysis. If you’ve ever performed market segmentation, you know the power of organization. Segmentation allows you to identify the keyword groups that convert the highest, produce the most loyal new customers, produce the best return on investment, and many other prized segments.
• Organization allows optimization. Understanding those prized segments allows you to optimize your approaches—better keywords bidding strategies, more time spent on optimizing organic pages, common messaging to persuade similar targets, and many more.
• Common categorization helps co-optimize paid and organic. If you’ve only organized your paid search keywords, you’re missing a big opportunity. Focusing on both organic and paid keywords with the same categorization approaches allows them to be optimized together rather than separately.

So, what kinds of categories can be helpful? Anything that allows you to consolidate your message across groups, rather than keyword-by-keyword:

• Target market. If you have already segmented your markets based on other criteria (B2B vs. B2C, demographics, industry, or others), you can use what you know about your segments to identify which keywords appeal to each segment.
• Purchase funnel. Search keywords reveal exactly where in the buying cycle searchers are. There’s no reason to offer a coupon to someone in the initial research stages, so organizing by purchase funnel stages allows message optimization.
• Benefits. Some keywords reveal which benefits the searchers desire—“cheap flights” or “five-star hotel” or “quiet restaurant”—and that lets you target the messages to match. Grouping keywords for value, luxury, or other benefits allows you to scale your learning as to which messages are most persuasive.

Don’t settle for one-dimensional keyword organization that does nothing to optimize your messaging. How you organize your keywords can make the difference between an average search program and a great one.

Keywords are the lifeblood of any search program.   The more we process data in our application the more I believe companies should spend far more time than they do analyzing them.   I have talked about the chaos of the data, the different numbers between paid and organic and the need for better segmentation and opportunity monitoring.  The big question is who should do this – agencies, interns, SEO teams, PPC teams – it varies by company but one thing is for certain, to maximize your opportunities in search marketing someone needs to do it.

Last Friday on a call with a large company we had 8 members of their search and digital marketing team on going through the demo the Digital Marketing Manager asked me who would do this work and monitor the opportunities and challenges with the keywords.   The team discussed a few opportunities and suggested it rest with the Global Search Manager who should have a lens into the overall picture.   I then suggested that they give access to the application to the Social Media and PR teams as well as the content development teams.  We mange preferred landing pages, keyword priorities and persona segmentation so these would be good to keep those uniform in the company.

They realized the Social Media team was not using the same words the Search Team has agonized over to prioritize and identify as critical.  The PR team was using the keywords and associated URL’s in releases to help build links to the most relevant pages.  To illustrate this, at OMS in San Diego I asked the 150+ audience in the Social Media session how many of them had talked to the search team about keywords and/or loaded the search team’s keywords into the conversation mining tool.  The answer was none!

Out of nowhere, a senior manager jumped in after having the epiphany that “keywords are critical to our digital marketing success” and suggested to the team they have some sort of a “Keyword Czar?

What would the Keyword Czar’s role be other than to rule over the keyword pot of gold?

Search Opportunity Analysis

This is the role that will aggregate all of the keywords and data and develop the opportunity models and other data needed by the teams for resource prioritization.  This person will also develop refine the monthly “Always On” performance reports and well as the paid and organic co-optimization models.  In my experience, this is typically not a new role but one that is shifted from analytics, data mining or taxonomy management.   There have been a few large companies, which have invested in this type of role, and they have yielded some very interesting results.

Content Needs and Opportunities

As companies migrate to more efficient content creation models this role will be come valuable since it can identify new opportunities for messages, keyword synergies and keywords to be added to paid search and organic programs that has never been considered.

Those of you who have read and follow the key principals in the great book Optimize by Lee Odden should be able to see the benefit of this role to the organization.  As Lee suggests in Chapter 8, you need to create content that “Attracts, Engages and Inspires” and this can only be done if you understand your audience needs, wants and problems.  We can learn what they are interested in using search query data and social media conversation monitoring.  These, when matched to your current content inventory (Preferred Landing Page Management) it highlights the gaps in your content.

As indicated, this will help increase traffic and conversion potential as well as creating the content matrix for preferred landing pages that can be used across all forms of digital marketing tactics.

 Keyword Arbitration

In many companies there are real problems with competition between business units.  In my recent post on Keyword Arbitration  we identified specific challenges when you don’t align across paid and organic, business units and agencies.   This role can manage the scorecards and process to do allow the process to be completed in a timely manner to ensure issues are resolved quickly and fairly.

Keyword Data Sharing

The most common cause of keyword overlap is the lack of sharing of keywords data.  his person would be the keyword data wrangler and keeper of the most current lists.  While we would love for you to use our Keyword Management Suite to manage them – Excel sheets on your Intranet or Google Docs can work as well.

I talked to a Search Manager recently that was stressed that their social media agency was using a list of words and URL’s from the previous year since no one thought to update them with the latest version.  Another company told me they lost a huge opportunity for links to a key part of the site via earned media since the PR team used the wrong URL and less than optimal keywords.

Keyword Expansion

You can read my rant on the necessity of keyword expansion and while I question the need for many companies that role does fall squarely on the Keyword Czar.  We do often find that companies are not matching key combinations of products and phrases.  While one company identified 25 different adjectives and descriptors for their buy cycle less than 20% of their products and categories used them.  This is the type of analysis that this role should be doing.  I the case just mentioned, by closing that gap that company increased search revenue by 12% mostly attributed to ferreting out these buy cycle terms that had a higher chance of conversion.

Keyword Czar’s Qualifications

Data Geek – First and foremost this person has to be a data geek.  They have to love data and be comfortable with data.

Excel Master – Yes, you can do a lot in our application but you will still need to do a lot of work in Excel or Open Office.  This person should be an advanced level with deep knowledge of analysis and pivot tables.

Understand Linguistics and/or Taxonomies – I worked with a company about 5 years ago that had a couple Masters and PhD candidates in linguistics, text processing and taxonomies that thrived in this area.  They spent the summer digging into all of their keywords and took the word base from 12,000 to over 450,000 that resulted in a total rebuild of the site around the taxonomy they developed based on the words.

There are also some personality traits that you may want to look for.

Trend or Nugget Curious – this person needs to be curious and ask questions why.  They need to be able to see patterns in data and want to dig into them.

Minimally Ambitious – why normally this is a bad thing – this is not that recent MBA grad willing to get in at the ground level that wants to the CEO of a multinational corporation in 10 years.  No, I am not talking about the career burger flipper but a person that is fine with a fairly defined role with latitude to be creative and without a lot of room for advancement.  These are often hard to find with the other skills but they are out there if you look around.

Business Justification

You will have to run the numbers.  Many companies don’t do anything with their keywords and data now so there is a lot of upside.   You could estimate a segment of words and their demand/opportunity and indicate that there is significantly more and that value might be enough to support it.  If your paying agencies to manage keyword and do that research this could be shifted as well to allow the agency to focus on more strategic and technical activities.  You could allocate a port of the time to your current team or agency and monitor the findings as in the case of the company that had the 12% increase in revenue that was 100% attributes to this activity.  Same with the company that found $400k worth of revenue by focusing on End of Life product keywords.

One interesting challenge we encounter once we load a company’s data into the Keyword Management Suite is the fights over keywords that begin as the different business units learn others are using their words or ranking for their terms.  In many cases they have been competing for the same keywords for a long time but often never knew about it.

Cross Business Unit Keyword Conflicts

Cross Business Unit keyword conflicts affects both Paid and Natural Search.   Here is a typical scenario.  Marketing Manager for Business Unit A searches on a term to see where they rank in natural search.   They get a surprise when they find in addition to their organic listing, Business Unit B is a paid search campaign for the same product and their listing is showing in the paid search result but they are targeting small and medium businesses rather than consumers.

A variation of this happens when both of the business units are running paid ads and depending on the time of the day and match types one or the other is the ad that is listed when the managers does their search.  I

Usually, this scenario arises when keywords are allocated based on budget rather than business objectives and searcher intent, resulting in multiple versions of the keyword being used in multiple campaigns simultaneously.  While it is frustrating to managers, it is very frustrating to searchers.   It can also lead to confusion for searchers when they visit your site based on the ad copy but encounter another set of content.

For example, this case from Adobe.  The query is “Adobe Software” and the PPC ad is for “Adobe Photoshop for Students” offering a massive 80% discount.  First the searcher wanted “Adobe Software” and not specifically Photoshop.  Second we don’t know which audience segment they are so in this case the if the Educational Business Unit would get a “No” for relevant ad copy and not be allowed to buy this phrase.

These “Searcher Intent” issues and be sorted out by simply managing your match types and keyword allocations to ensure that you don’t have misalignment.

Often most are unaware of organic ranking conflicts since those that still do rank reports often only care that there is a page ranking and not necessary the best page.  Since the late 90’s I have been advocating the use of “Preferred Landing Pages” to ensure the best page is the ranking page.   We had a case recently where a client found for one of their most important keywords a PDF was ranking and not the actual page.  Their SEO vendor showed everything was ok when in fact it was not – yes they were ranking #1 but no one was clicking and buying.  Once they redirected to the desired page they retained the #1 rank and saw a 40% click rate increase and 12% increase in conversions.

Worst of all there is the time suck of explaining duplicate keyword situation to various stakeholders after the fact rather than dealing with it before the campaign starts.  As a Search Marketing Manager it is your job of managing the conflicts and managing expectations and the cross business unit political minefield.

Implement a Keyword Arbitration Scorecard

Back in the old days when search engines allowed multiple accounts from the same company we often bid against ourselves.  As I wrote previously about Developing a Cost Justification for Integrating Paid and Organic Search that was a big problem in that organization.   Just having meetings and making suggestions are fine but you won’t make everyone happy.  What has worked well for me is to implement a Keyword Arbitration process.   This process is implemented in any case where we have a keyword conflict between business units that cannot be resolved by a hybrid page.

The scorecard can be as complicated as you think you need but here are is an example of the simplest one that I use which require a simple Yes/No answer:

The formula is simple – each “Yes” answer gets 1 point.  The BU with the highest score gets to use the keyword phrase.

If there is a conflict over the context or business objective of the Keyword, you can escalate it to a Senior Manager to make the final call.

It is very rare where there is a tie but if so, suggest that a neutral search landing page, similar to the Dell example below, to “share” the Keyword.  If they are unwilling to do so then escalate to a senior manger.

Hybrid pages can be the perfect solution when you have multiple audiences.  In this example below from Dell they send searchers to a top level page that allows them to select which audience segment they belong to.  This allows the business units to share budgets to get a larger share of the total audience and then allow the audience to self-select which category they are in and continue from there.

The bare minimum that I have found necessary for a scorecard are the following elements.  These all help demonstrate how serious a business unit is for this words and how organized they are to be successful.

Relevant Landing Page – Is there a specific and/or dedicated page for this phrase or offer?  This is important to help improve the quality score so that we can reduce the overall costs for the word as well as maximizing the conversions.

Relevant Ad Copy – Same concept as the relevant landing page.  Is this word lumped into a large ad group or caught up in a broad match cluster?   Also the context and interest of the searcher.  We often see ads that are very focused in their offer matched to specific queries.

Appropriate Budget – This is very subjective but in many cases a BU may not allocate enough budget to get a significant share of the demand for a keyword.  Depending on the word we might look at 50 to 80% share of voice on a keyword.

Tracking Metrics in Place – Are they using paid tracking to the conversion element?  Lots of times a BU will throw up a micro site or other landing page and not track the performance.  We want to make sure the person who uses the word can track the performance.

Current Offline Campaign – It is often unlikely that multiple business units are doing offline or other digital campaigns.   If they are they are generating awareness which will drive people to search so we want to make sure that we are connecting with them.

P&L Requirement – this is often the tie breaker – does each business unit has a mandate to generate revenue

Note:  We have added this function into our tool.  I am working on dummy data to show you what it looks like.   If we are managing multiple business units in our application we can see all the data in a single screen to allow you to make decisions on how to manage it.

If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve seen the research reports. And it’s become almost a part of the lore of search marketing. When searchers see the same site at the top of both the paid and organic results, they click a lot more than you’d expect. More than they click on those two results on that same page when they are two different sites. We’ve repeated this over and over again, so it must be true. But is it?

It does have a certain logic. When you think about the way searchers scan result pages, they are looking for their keywords and related words in the search results and deciding in a split-second what to click on. If they see the same company in two places, they might believe that the company is more credible than the other individual search results. That slight edge in credibility might lead to a lot more clicks.

It’s been important for search engines to persuade us that this is true. Why? Because there is equally powerful logic in the other direction. If you already have the #1 result in organic, why would you want to pay for the top paid search spot? You might be paying for traffic you’d get for free. So, it’s good for business if the search engines can prove that showing up in both places really pays off.

So, search engines have regularly studied the issue, along with search consultants who also would like this to be true. Yahoo! reported that it saw a 60% lift back in 2003 when it studied this issue. Google was even more optimistic, saying that there is an 89% lift in clicks on paid search when sites have top results in both areas.

Are these studies false? Unlikely. They probably revealed just what they purport to show. But that isn’t the important question for you. You don’t really care whether searchers in general click more. You want to know if your searchers do!  On top of that – do you even know if you have both in high-ranking positions?  Ironically, it’s very easy to test which your searchers are clicking and converting on.  You just need to pause your PPC campaign and take a look at whether the organic clicks go down.

But almost no one even tries this kind of experiment. A Back Azimuth study on keyword management best practices shows that fewer than one percent of all search marketers have even looked at paid and organic search together. Have you? And what would you find if you did?