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Why Should You Organize Your Keywords?

October 7, 2012 by

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.

Filed Under: Keyword Management

Why you should Organize your Keywords

August 27, 2012 by

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.

Filed Under: Keyword Management

81% of Paid Ads do not have a Corresponding Organic Listing

August 2, 2012 by

Hopefully that headline got your attention!   Yes, you did read it correctly – Google’s research shows that 81% of the time the paid search advertiser does not have a corresponding organic ranking.  So the opportunity of 1 + 1 = 3 actually rarely happens.   I believe this is primarily due to many companies not being aware of what is happening between their paid and organic activities but that is another post.

I had commented on their original research that incorrectly stated that if you have paid and organic there is an 8% increase in traffic.   In March Google put out their “revised” research on the impact of organic rank on paid clicks. I wrote a pretty scathing review of the research which I would like to think helped encourage them to go back to the drawing board.    The part I objected to what that they did not account for those words where the advertiser was not ranking.  Of course if you don’t rank for a term you will see an increase in paid search clicks

In the updated research titled “Impact of Organic Ranking on Ad Click Incrementality” they looked specifically at what happens when they have organic rankings and take away the paid.  This helps show the collaboration or cannibalization of the two.   They even did a neat info graphic that I will dissect to help explain what they found and the implications to search marketers.

Source: Google http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/impact-of-organic-ranking-on-ad-click.html

81% of the Advertisers DON’T HAVE an Organic Listing

Yes, that is what they found.  Of the words in the test, the advertisers that had a paid search ad running “did NOT HAVE an associated organic result 81% of the time.”   At first I was shocked by this but then we see this on nearly every data load we do into our Keyword Management Suite.  We often find the typical company only actively manages a fraction of the words in their paid campaigns in their SEO campaign.

Clearly, if you don’t have an organic listing then you won’t get additional consideration and the ONLY opportunity for interaction is “renting the traffic” via the paid listing.  They continued with the analysis and found that only 9% of the time the advertiser also had the #1 search results position, 5% of the time the advertiser was ranking in the 2 to 4th position and 4% of the time they were in a position #5 or greater.  So clearly, there can be a case made for rank checking to make sure that you do have organic results especially for high value terms.

I have talked about this recently in How do your Expensive PPC Kewyords Perform in SEO? after finding so many companies do not even know how many of their highest Cost Per Click keywords are performing in SEO.  We are updating our application to look for this anomaly specifically.  In preliminary tests we are finding that in some cases it is much worse.  We have found a few cases where it is as much as 98% of the time there is no corresponding organic listing in the top 5.

66% of the clicks happen when there is NO Organic Search Listing

So if we don’t even have an organic listing 81% of the time when there is a paid listing how does this impact the click rate.   Google found that 66 percent of the clicks occur when there is no organic listing for the advertiser.   Duh, that is the only thing they can click.

So what we all want to know is what happens in the 9 percent of the time when we do have both paid and organic listings.

  • 99% of ad clicks with no organic results are incremental.  – Duh!  You can’t get a click from Organic if you don’t have organic so any clicks from paid are incremental.
  • 50% of ad clicks with #1 organic result are incremental – this is what Google wanted to hear to counter advertisers that if they have a #1 listing then they don’t need to use paid search.
  • 82% of ad clicks for advertisers ranking in organic positions 2 to 4 are incremental
  • 96% of the ad clicks for advertisers ranking in organic position 5 or greater are incremental

Google does call it out specifically but do concede that while statistically there are 50% incremental clicks – the rate of incremental clicks varies by advertiser and I will also add that it is the context (query type or buy cycle) and type (branded or non branded) of keyword plays an important part in which is clicked.

My goal is make advertisers aware of the 50% incremental lift in clicks but more importantly ensure advertisers work with the SEO team to ensure that they do have a corresponding organic ranking.  Our research shows that few advertisers even know where they rank in relation to their paid terms.  What we want to clearly understand is how and when can an organic listing be a substitute for the paid ad?  That is the work we are doing now to test different situations like branded and non branded as well as phases of the buy cycle.

You can read my previous article on that attempts to answer the question “Should you buy your Brand Terms when you Rank #1?” where we look at a very specific case where a company was over paying by $24,000 a month for their brand name.

 

The Cost of Not Ranking

We already had a “Cost of Not Ranking Model” in our tool based on the Excel file that I write about in this post from 2010 on “The Cost of Not Ranking Organically” on my personal blog.  Based on this research I will update the logic in our tool to show the incremental cost.  Again, it should never be a PPC vs. Organic but a Paid + Organic and once we have the alignment then we can work on the messages to make sure they are collaborative.

 

What is your situation?

How many keywords do you have in your paid campaign that do or don’t have an organic performance.  As Google noted, without organic listings your paying for 100% of the clicks for people interested in your products and services.   If you don’t know what your situation is you are a perfect candidate for our Keyword Management Suite or new Search Performance Analysis Solution.

Filed Under: Co-Optimization

Should you Buy Brand Terms When your Rank #1?

August 1, 2012 by

So you have a #1 ranking brand term should you also buy it in paid search?  I recently wrote the article about the 81% of all paid ads that don’t have an accompanying orgnaic listing.  That was a byproduct stat from teh main purpose of the research which was to reassure advertisers that running paid ads for high ranking organic terms is still an excellent strategy – which I agree with 100%.

Why does Google care if you do or don’t?  Well, it is all part of Google’s Profict Maximization – this, in m,y opinion is the siggle largest budget waster only second to braod matching terms.   For many adverisers, their top ranked terms are their branded terms and where a significant share of the click volume goes.  For one of our clients it was as much as 83% of all of their paid search clicks.   This means there is significant click volume (Google Revenue) that would be lost if they just turned them off.

There are some key strategies where you need them.  Back in the day were you could really protect your trademark this was not a big issue but now that you can’t there is often a stragic way to do it but there is also a right ans wrong way.  The following is a case it shows you need to do the research and it also shows the financial impact to Google if you just turn it off.

This is a major national brand in the travel space who was buying their company name “Acme” in paid search both in broad and exact match. Their average paid position fluctuated between #1 #2 and #3 but typically wanted it in the #3 position.    They obviously rank #1 for their brand name and have 6 highly relevant site links.

Company Name – Broad Match vs. Organic Performance
Source: Back Azimuth Search ROI Analysis

Scenario 1 – Broad Match Brand Name

Organic Performance:

They received 409,872 visits from Google via the organic results (94.35% click rate based on paid search impressions and ranking #1) that resulted in a 4.06% conversion rate generating $7.3 million in revenue.

Paid Performance: 

They had 434,531 impressions for which received 19,191 clicks (Average CPC was $1.28) for a media spend of $24,541.   They had a 4.42% click rate and a 1.19% conversion rate generating just over $9,000 in revenue.  This resulted in a negative Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) of -$15,535.

Analysis:

The problem in this case was they were running a “price match offer” along with copy that indicated “they offered he cheapest airfare” which did not sync that well in with the searchers intent for a broad-based branded navigational phrase.  At first the agency wanted to just change the ad copy to make it more in line with the navigational query but ultimately after looking at scenario 2 below, they opted to kill the broad match and go with exact match terms since we had identified 2,387 exact match variations including nearly 2,000 misspellings.   The result was putting just over $24,000 worth of click costs back into the pool for other words.

This is the prime reason that some advertisers want to turn off these ads.  The paid team argues that they have to be there for branding purposes but in this case the paid actually pushed people into the organic.  The learning here is as quickly as possible you want to get words into exact match situations and then make sure the context matches.  In the scenario below the advertiser swapped their broad match of the brand to over 2,387 exact match variations taking the average CPC from $1.28 in the broad match to between $0.04 to $0.32 for the exact match terms saving nearly $30,000 a week thereby allowing significantly more clicks for other words where they had budget restrictions.

Cost to Google: 

About $24,000/month or $288,000 a year.  Note: Google will ultimately make this up n other keyword clicks but this helped increase the media efficiency of this advertiser exponentially.

 

Scenario 2 – Exact Match Brand Name

So while in scenario 1, buying a #1 ranked branded term using broad match did not make sense what happens with an exact match for the same term? The paid search ad in this case was a reference to them being a leading travel site and having the lowest prices.

 

Company Name – Exact Match vs. Organic Performance
Source: Back Azimuth Search ROI Analysis

Organic Performance:

Using the same 409,872 organic visits this means that our organic click rate was 55.27% with a Conversion rate of 4.06% generating the same $7.3 million in revenue.

Paid Performance

In this exact match case the paid click rate was 42.36 percent (nearly 10 times that of Broad Match).  The Average Cost per click was a negligible $0.04 per click.  We drove 314,229 visitors from paid search The conversion rate was 3.43% which is great resulting in sales of nearly $300,000 generating a positive ROAS of $285k.   So with paid in exact match and the #1 organic listing Acme had nearly a 97.63 percent share of clicks.  This my friends is the definition of 1 + 1 = 3.

Analysis:

For half the paid search media budget they achieved a significant increase in visits from paid search.  This gave them the brand protection they wanted along with an increase.  The following months have shown that in this case of exact match the paid and organic seem to be working together.  Due multiple competitors also showing up for the brand name and to the collaborative success of paid and organic the client will not turn off or day part the paid to see what share of traffic would go to organic without the paid.

 

What is your situation?

If you don’t know what your situation is you are a perfect candidate for our Keyword Management Suite or new Search Performance Analysis Solution.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Search Performance

Should you have a Keyword Czar?

July 24, 2012 by

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.

 

Filed Under: Keyword Management
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