Search engine marketing can be a very complicated business, folks. You can oversimplify it all you like… or you can make it a lot more complex than it needs to be. Either way, it all begins with search term strategy. When I think of search term strategy, I see a lot of factors in play, but let’s start with these:
Relevance: When I speak about the relevance of a search term, I’m really asking a simple question: what percentage of folks using that search term are actually interested in what your website has to offer? When I say interested, I mean someone who is ready, willing, and able to take action or buy. Relevance can vary seasonally – people may search for ski lodges in the summer, but they are less likely to actually make a reservation.
It is possible to improve the relevance of a website, and along with it the relevance of a search term. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, such as adding content, or changing the landing page where searchers arrive. Website owners often overestimate the relevance of extremely general search terms, but there are some simple methods you can use to get better estimates.
Business Relevance: Another way of looking at a search term is to consider how relevant it is to you. A site designer with a set of Flash tutorials on their site may be less concerned promoting those, because people seeking Flash tutorials are less likely to become clients.
To simplify matters, we’ll define business relevance in terms of money – how much would we pay to get an interested visitor to our website or landing page? This is different from what we’d be willing to pay for “any” visitor. We want to consider how much would you pay for someone who is ready, willing, and able to take action or buy.
It is possible to improve the business relevance of a search term. Increasing a site’s conversion rate is the easiest way to increase business relevance. Alternatively, our hypothetical designer might place Adsense ads onto the tutorial pages to generate revenue, or offer Flash training to other designers.
Some businesses see greater “lifetime value” in their customers, which also increases business relevance. In my business, most of our clients buy from us repeatedly, so I am willing to pay more to win the first sale.
Popularity: The popularity of a search term, for our purposes, is defined as the number of times it’s used in a search. This will vary across different search engines, from month to month, etc.
To simplify, we will define popularity as the number of searches in a given month across all search engines. Determining the true popularity of a search term is impossible, but there are tools that let us make a reasonable estimate.
There isn’t much you can do to improve the popularity of a search term, although people do try sometimes. The concept of “memeword marketing” is based on the idea of coining a term and promoting its use. Best of luck with that!
Competition: The competition for searchers’ attention can also be difficult to estimate. This has been a strong area of focus for my company, since keywords are our business, and we’ve developed a lot of different metrics that help us understand the competitive landscape.
Understanding the competition helps define the level of effort required to get in front of searchers. Level of effort translates, on some level, into the cost of competing. Competition metrics also help us understand the degree of risk involved, or the possibility that the effort will be unsuccessful.
Measuring competition is a very complex business, and I’ll begin addressing it next week.
What Can We Do With All That?
Now that we’ve defined a few metrics, let’s throw out some concepts and formulas to put some meaning into it:
Weighted Popularity: The “weighed popularity” of a search term is the relevance multiplied by the popularity. So if we believe that 10% of searchers are interested in what we have to offer (relevance), and that there are 10,000 searches per month (popularity), the weighted popularity formula says that there are 1000 (10,000 x 10%) targeted searches per month.
Potential Value: The “potential value” of a search term is the weighted popularity multiplied by the business relevance. So if we believe that there are 1000 targeted searches per month, and we’re willing to pay $1.00 to get an interested visitor to our website, the potential value is $1000 per month, if we could somehow get all of those searchers to our website.
The Really Really Big Question!
The big question that comes out of these two formulas is how much of that $1000 potential value we can bring into our business, and what it will cost to do so. I’d like to tell you that it’s a simple question, but it’s not. I’d like to tell you that it’s less complicated when you use pay-per-click advertising, but it’s not.
Next week, I’ll discuss how you can use the keyword metrics and methods we’ve developed to answer that big question, and how it all fits together into a solid keyword strategy. We’ll look at estimating competition and level of effort for organic (SEO) campaigns on Monday, sorting out pay-per-click on Wednesday, and then check out some helpful tools on Friday.
Related posts:
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Nice introductory article.
Im looking forward to read about your competition metrics.
February 19th, 2005 at 7:40 pm
More great advice Dan, I’m looking forward to reading next week’s entry!
February 20th, 2005 at 8:30 am
search engine optimisation at the moment is not really revelant to the work i do though interesting article all the same :)
learnt a few terms today and what they represent so lets have some more if you please :D
February 20th, 2005 at 4:31 pm
Your article was very informative. I’m finding writing copy for the web interesting and challenging. I look forward to reading more on this topic.
February 21st, 2005 at 12:18 am
Dan,
On Keyword Popularity…..
I’m glad you’ve written the last two posts.
Often in this industry I get frustrated with the focus on rankings for “popular” keywords as a measurement of success. Recently, I was putting together a case study for a new SEM brand for my company and felt compelled to include the rankings achieved for certain keywords. To some degree, I felt they should not necessarily be included (although they were great) because they did not express actual acquisitions but “potential” for acquisitions
I think the focus on rankings as a measure of success is going to be one of the things that lead to a client disillusionment with this business. As clients begin to say: “So what? Where are the conversions?” the reliance on ranking as a measure of success will begin to look more and more empty.
Why? Rankings are worthless if they don’t lead to conversions. Example, one client we’ve be talking with had been using 1P (uggh) and showed me a ranking report and that’s when it really clicked for me. I asked the client “what does this mean to you? What does it mean to your business?” No answer was given.
How does this tie into this post? Both of your metrics calculations are based to some degree on “Popularity”. As more people enter the search marketing business I believe that popularity measured as “the number of searches in a given month across all search engines” is becoming more and more skewed.
One reason, as you said “determining the true popularity of a search term is impossible, but there are tools that let us make a reasonable estimate.” Often some in this business will simply rely on keyword tools (of which there are only a few) to determine what exactly is a” popular keyword”.
While keyword tools, etc are great as a starting point, I think the reliance on these tools by people in this industry is creating a false sense of what keyword popularity actually is. I wouldn’t be surprised if more that a third of the searches performed on search engines for certain terms are performed by people checking their ranking for certain terms. They’re providing a false sense of what is actually a popular keyword.
I was just discussing my theory of keyword popularity with the owner of my company and he likened keyword popularity determination to the stock market. Imagine a stockbroker is convincing all his clients to buy a certain stock because he believes it will be “big” and go up in value in the future. As a result of his efforts, he creates a demand for the stock and it does goes up in value because of the purchases he has made. What results is that the stockbroker by creating the demand for this stock pushed up the market value of this stock.
I am still of the school that believes the most relevant keywords are mined from the log files of sites after they have been optimized for their target industry. Great web site search engine optimization will increase the keyword pool of industry relevant keywords for any site. Interestingly enough, I find that the terms that lead to the greatest acquisitions are not the ones deemed “popular”. (I’ve actually been testing keyword tool generated popular keyword acquisition, vs. log file generated popular keywords acquisitions.).
In the end it will be those in verticals with access to log files across their market that will know what true keyword “popularity” is and/or when this industry gets to the point where we can figure out what the true margin error is in “popularity”, who will be the most successful.
Thanks again for starting this, I look forward to future posts – and do hope that we’ll all discuss what really constitutes keyword popularity one day.
Have a great day!
Natasha Robinson
Official Desktop
Software that Supports your Focus
http://www.OfficialDesktop.com
Real Estate Logic
Putting the Logic in Real Estate
http://www.RealEstateLogic.net
February 21st, 2005 at 1:53 pm
Dan,
On Keyword Popularity…..
I’m glad you’ve written the last two posts.
Often in this industry I get frustrated with the focus on rankings for “popular” keywords as a measurement of success. Recently, I was putting together a case study for a new SEM brand for my company and felt compelled to include the rankings achieved for certain keywords. To some degree, I felt they should not necessarily be included (although they were great) because they did not express actual acquisitions but “potential” for acquisitions.
I think the focus on rankings as a measure of success is going to be one of the things that leads to client disillusionment with this business. As clients begin to say: “So what? Where are the conversions?” the reliance on ranking as a measure of success will begin to look more and more empty.
Why? Rankings are worthless if they don’t lead to conversions. Example, one client we’ve be talking with had been using 1P (uggh) and showed me a ranking report and that’s when it really clicked for me. I asked the client “what does this mean to you? What does it mean to your business?” No answer was given.
How does this tie into this post? Both of your metrics calculations are based to some degree on “Popularity”. As more people enter the search marketing business I believe that popularity measured as “the number of searches in a given month across all search engines” is becoming more and more skewed.
One reason, as you said “determining the true popularity of a search term is impossible, but there are tools that let us make a reasonable estimate.” Often some in this business will simply rely on keyword tools (of which there are only a few) to determine what exactly is a “popular keyword”.
While keyword tools, etc are great as a starting point, I think the reliance on these tools by people in this industry is creating a false sense of what keyword popularity actually is. I wouldn’t be surprised if more that a third of the searches performed on search engines for certain terms are performed by people checking their ranking for certain terms deemed “popular” by these tools. They’re providing a false sense of what is actually a popular keyword.
I was just discussing my theory of keyword popularity with the owner of my company and he likened keyword popularity determination to the stock market. Imagine a stockbroker is convincing all his clients to buy a certain stock because he believes it will be “big” and go up in value in the future. As a result of his efforts, he creates a demand for the stock and it does goes up in value because of the purchases he has made. What results is that the stockbroker by creating the demand for this stock pushed up the market value of this stock.
I am still of the school that believes the most relevant keywords are mined from the log files of sites after they have been optimized for their target industry. Great web site search engine optimization will increase the keyword pool of industry relevant keywords for any site. Interestingly enough, I find that the terms that lead to the greatest acquisitions are not the ones deemed “popular”. (I’ve actually been testing keyword tool generated popular keyword acquisition, vs. log file generated popular keywords acquisitions.).
In the end it will be those in verticals with access to log files across their market that will know what true keyword “popularity” is and/or those in this industry that can figure out what the true margin of error is in “popularity”, who will be the most successful.
Thanks again for reading my rant,
Natasha Robinson
Official Desktop
Software that Supports your Focus
Real Estate Logic
Putting the Logic in Real Estate
February 21st, 2005 at 2:29 pm
I note that you put some question into whether memeword marketing actually works. I coined that phrase in 2002 and began using it online in 2003. There are thousands of references to memeword marketing and my old site where it was used. I have sat in fifteen different lectures at conferences and have had the word memeword used there — and what is more that people still associate my name with it.
I am the owner of many hundreds of memewords pointing to a variety of different sites. One of those refers to, what I call SEEREZ — The Search Engine Real Estate that you can own.
My experience is that memeword marketing is not for the immediate crash and burn type Internet marketers — rather it can be used to good effect over two and three years and more. It is amazing how many people stumble across words online and find a whole new world of thought. I believe that if you do not have a memeword and a SEEREZ stragey of search engine marketing you are missing out on the long-term benefits that search engines can bring your site.
May 14th, 2005 at 9:42 pm
Andyman, I know someone else who claims to have coined that term, but as he seems to have disappeared again (apparently a lot of investors want their money back), we’ll consider your claim somewhat credible. Or maybe you are the Doc, just using a different handle. Either way…
There are indeed thousands of references to ‘memeword marketing,’ and in fact this blog post is ranked #3 at Google for the term (also #5 for ‘memeword’). Your website, wherever it is, doesn’t appear to be showing in the top 10 results… and that’s one problem with using memeword marketing as part of a keyword strategy. You may well succeed in creating ‘buzz’ around a term, but you are not assured of “owning” it.
This isn’t really a new idea. Marketers and advertisers have done it for years. It’s not just “snake oil” it’s “authentic python oil.” Don’t use toothpaste with flouride, get the one with “stannous flouride.” The heck with regular olive oil, get Extra Virgin olive oil. Kudos to anyone who uses it productively, with or without slapping a trademark on the term.
Well chosen words can indeed open up a whole new way of thinking. I’m always happy to coin a new term myself… such as Straw Man SEO, which translates to “selecting a combination of words that has little or no competition, for the purpose of demonstrating one’s SEO ’skill’ by attaining top rankings.” Sort of like coining a term and enjoying top rankings until people actually start using it and the competition shows up.
May 17th, 2005 at 9:50 am
Hi Dan,
Thanks alot for this useful article. I have little idea about search engine but this article really helps me alot.
Thanks again and looking forward for interesting article from your side.
Nick
Template Website India
December 23rd, 2005 at 2:44 pm