Bill Hunt, SES Advisory Board; President, Back Azimuth Consulting
Seasoned Speaker Bill Hunt is always a pleasure to listen to. Loads of slides and a huge amount of useful information for how to think about Keywords, targetting value and making sure that your budgets are being used wisely.
Starting with the example of a keyword targeting fail whilst looking for a Wine Cooler that held 50 bottles, the SERPS brought a whole manner of listings that consumers then have to trawl through again to find the best match.
This is Bill’s blueprint of how to undertake your Keyword Analysis effectively.
Brainstorming Ideas
1) Brainstorm – where do you want ot be found?
2) Make a list of your products services and categories
3) What are the purchase cycle phases for your business? – find people in the right phase of the buying cycle
4) What do your current customers search for when trying to find your product – use liveperson – pass the word – ASK
5) What terms are currently driving visits to your site (Analytics)
6) What are people currently searching for on our site – these are people that assume you make or offer something – how many people come from paid search and go into site search because the landing pages were far too narrow
Generate an initial keyword list
- Keyword Strategy Worksheet exercise
- Keyword Categorisation> Description > Answer
- How would you categorise this word, brand name ?
- Why they did a query does not mateh our business objectives
- How important is this to our business – VERY
- Mine your pages for keywords (automated)
Google Keyword Suggestion
- Do not use every keyword that they suggest
- Use exact matches
- Prioritise budgets – maybe your spending on a big awareness word LCD TV – if you’re trying to sell parts and serial numbers
Advanced Keyword Modelling
- Trying to understand the mind of the customer – the are looking for something specific
- Understand the voice of the consumer
- Informational queries where searchers want something specific
- Complete a specific action ie buy a flight
- Opportunity sales or conversion + customer satisfaction
Understanding Searchers
There is usually a waste of opportunity
Puchase cycle with intent
- Researching product use and information
- Looking for features and functions – serve up a video or content that explains
- Comparing brands
- Looking for discounts 57 different variations looking for the discount code
- Have they already purchased?
Missed Opportunity buy Buy Cycle
- Brand, Branded Technology, Technology
- People searching for their product name or name of that model were putting together an IT purchase sheet
- Massive missed opportunity was up on generating awareness and not for the buying cycle
- Segment your words
Design Phase
- IT managers who are design systems
- Stencils were on a logn page of all stencils vs merchandising pages
- The type of stencil helps understand the audience and size of company
- Identify what people are looking for related to your business
Product Audience Segments & Personas
- Identify words to specifically target and hone in on
- Use Buy Cycle Modifiers
- 26 different ways to say buy or purchase in the English language
Coupon Codes
The case study used found 57 ways people were searching for the google coupon code – other sites tell you about the coupon codes
- Offer a code to track how many people want discounts
- Capture them for social media
- Sort by Margins – where do o make the most money
- Words that help us isolate a specific opportunity interest audience or need
- Segment by features, fuction, types, anything that allows you to understand the searcher’s mindset
- 75% of all queries had a formula of clothing type+ shapewear (eg shaping thongs) – this did not sell until they showed the thong part
- Re do the site that allows people to connect with what they are looking for
- Missed Opportunity Matrix
- Traffic and relevance
- Get the traffic from organic at x CPC
Mining for Opportunities
Bad Snippets for top ranked words
List of all the products you used to sell – searches per month for products they don’t sell – all support pages – so if ranking #1 then you want to do something with those cards – 10% 50,000 visits – 400k revenue in 60 days
Upsell to new products
Alignment to Social Media
The social media teams are taking our SEO budgets!
- Add tier 1 keywords to social media monitoring
- Understand the sentiment of keywords
- Understand the context of words
- Compare search volume – conversations and conversions
- Identify other forms of advertising
Combine search and social data
People were talking about deals 45 days before people put up any offers, modes of travel, destinations – safety, insurance
- What are Authority sites?
- How authoritative are you?
- Paid and organic ROI review
Takeaways
- Understand the intent of the user queries
- Understand the real performance of keywords
- Understand the context of keywords
- Classify keywords in logical segments to enable classification and mnodeling
- Do anything other than just collecting data in excel