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Dec 7th, 2009 by jeff
Using Google Insights to Improve Search Results
Dec 7th, 2009 by jeff
Google has developed a useful tool for keyword marketing campaigns called, Google Insights for Search. This tool is valuable for analyzing search trends related to high performance keywords and improving related to search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising (PPC) results. You can review the search volume patterns for different regions, categories, and time periods. Once you enter in a keyword phrase the tool displays a trend graph based on search volumes, a graph related to Regional Interest, a list of Top Searches and and corresponding list of Rising Searches.
Let me outline how our company is using this tool to help our clients. We have a few clients in the industry of global positioning systems (GPS). One is a manufacture of industrial hardware and applications, www.novatel.com and the other is a retail seller of mobile GPS units for consumers, www.gpscentral.ca. For both clients we are preparing a “gap analysis” to determine how their website is ranking for terms related to “gps”.
Note: The following data is aggregated industry related data, not data specific to GPSCentral.
Our analysis for companies like GPSCentral is a typically along the following lines:
- Enter the search term “gps”
- Adjust the filters to your specific interest: Web Search / Canada / All subregions / Last 12 months / All Categories to get the resulting page and graph
- Click on News headlines to see related news
- Click on Forecast get future trends (you must select 2004 – present for this function to be available)
If you login using your Gmail account you can get additional detail related to search volumes. When logged in, the y-axis becomes a percentage scale with 0 being zero and 100 being the highest volume during the selected time period.
For the gap analysis example, our next step is to review the Top Searches and Rising Searches and determine how the website is performing for these specific terms. For example, the top search term listed is “gps garmin”. When we look at Google.ca we can see that the website is performing well for this term – 2nd and 3rd positions. The website is also listed on the first page of Google.ca for the next 4 terms including “garmin”, “gps canada”, “magellan gps”, and “magellan”. But when we search for the 6th term on the list, “gps review”, www.GPSCentral.ca is not listed in the first 10 pages – room for improvement.
By using the “site” command in Google we can quickly determine that a pages has not been specifically optimized for “gps review”. A few pages on the website contain this term but none of the pages have “gps review” in the title of the web pages.
At this stage we have a few options:
- Select one of the existing pages and optimize the page for this term.
- Develop some new optimized content and add that page to the site.
- Start a linking campaign to improve the performance of the existing page or the new page
We haven’t started yet, but we will over the next few weeks.
Contact me if you have comments, questions or suggestions.
Jeff Nelson
Google Really is a Giant!
Nov 27th, 2009 by Stefanie
I was talking to a co-worker of mine yesterday about Google Trends and talked about some of the other Google tools out there. I thought to myself this morning that there are for sure some tools I am unaware of.
While I didn’t really find any that would be useful to me that I am not already using but I found some interesting ones that I didn’t know about. I wanted to share the Wikipedia list of Google Tools.
This is an INSANE list!!! I wanted to paste it here but this would then be the longest Blog post ever! Hopefully there are items in there that you haven’t used and can use to make life easier!
Enjoy.
New Google Tool Just in Time For the Holidays!
Nov 24th, 2009 by Stefanie
I just received a message from Google about a new tool called, “Google Product Search“. This changes Christmas shopping! Go to the page and type in any type of product you are looking for and you get a giant list of places to buy from, prices and ratings.
Try it out for yourself! You’ll be amazed.
-Stefanie-
Where Does The Time Go???!!!
Nov 18th, 2009 by Stefanie
The big topic out there is still social media. Whether it’s business or pleasure, everyone is talking about Twitter and Facebook and YouTube etc etc etc! The one question I hear over and over again is, “How on earth am I supposed to find the time to do all of this stuff?”
This is an excellent question because even though social media is “free”, the time needed for a successful social media campaign is the real hurdle. So where do you start?
It is really just about time management! There are different approaches to this obviously, one being just hiring someone to do it. Fair enough! But if you don’t have that kind of budget, there are a few things you can do to get it under control.
Once you have the strategy in place – I need to pause here for a moment and just stress the importance of the strategy step – you need to decide how to move forward. Are you going to be the one in charge, Tweeting, YouTubing and Facebooking your way to business success??
OK, so once you have that figured out and have decided that it is in fact you that will be in charge of all of this, take a deep breath and put together a plan and FOLLOW it! Here are a few little tips that I use:
1. Dedicate one hour every day to social media. Whether you spend that time updating your blog, tweeting, or brainstorming a new video for YouTube is up to you. But don’t let anything distract or interrupt you unless it is an emergency. Sit down and do it.
2. Part of the strategy step would involve figuring out your message. Of course you don’t want to just blast your community of followers or friends with spammy, pitchy sales stuff so come up with some clever ideas to give out information that is interesting and useful to the ‘user’. You would be amazed how many people will stop following you on Twitter if you just blast sales pitches out there. It is bad form!
3. If you have some down time, use this time for social media. Come up with ideas etc so that on days when you are REALLY busy, you can just grab an idea, post it up and be on your way!
4. Use the tools available online – TweetDeck, HootSuite – the list is endless of great helpful tools.
Those are a few of my suggestions. I found a great blog post with some of the same ideas and some new ideas. Have a read here! It’s a pretty helpful post!
-Stefanie-