WordPress SEO Premium: (pre)-release

We’ve been working hard here at Yoast to offer you a Premium version of our WordPress SEO plugin with some really cool new features. But they’re not done yet. So we didn’t want to release WordPress SEO premium just yet either. However: more and more people are asking us for paid support on the plugin. So…

WordPress SEO Premium: (pre)-release is a post by on Yoast – The Art & Science of Website Optimization.

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Google Glass Gets Universal Search: News, Video, Sound Results & More

Google is giving Glass a taste of universal search results. The latest software update for Google Glass is out, and this one offers a significant expansion of the device’s search capabilities. Google sends out one major software update to Glass owners each month. The latest is known as XE9…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Forget Google’s Games – Make Social a Primary Traffic Source

Posted by simonpenson

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

For most business owners social is a toy. The marketing equivalent of that friend we all have outside our professional lives that you just don’t talk to your work colleagues about. Even though they are really the life and soul of the party.

But things are changing. A recent Forrester survey unlocked some startling stats about how we are all discovering things online.

Discovery is Google’s heartland. The very thing it has built its empire upon and yet it seems that a seismic shift is occurring. According to the research piece almost 50% of those in the 18 to 23 bracket used social as their primary discovery engine in the last year.

Those stats should make Google think very carefully indeed about its future strategy and how to keep its users, and advertisers, happy.

For a marketer such information should be impetus to think very seriously about strategy, and where to invest that budget in the next few years as we are finally given another way to access audiences at scale online.

Tipping Point

As powerful as that survey is, however, it is not enough alone to get you to invest hard fought marketing dollars on social, but for me there is an even more powerful argument brewing.

As we know, the ability to intelligently target consumers has always been the zenith for marketers. To do it well you need to be able to collect, and then slice and dice, information about the people using your platform.

Google’s been pretty good at this to date, as the propensity to buy has always been high from search queries. Social, however takes that data to a whole other level.

It is this, and the fact that in attempting to monetize the social space themselves the likes of Facebook and Twitter have opened the door for all of us to do the same thing with our own social audiences that really does suggest that a true tipping point has now been reached.

Is Google walking a dangerous line?

The problem for social until now has always been Google’s dominance, specifically its unrelenting focus on making search the only place you need to look to find your audience.

Until recently, few would have argued with that mantra. But things are changing.

The level of flux in organic SERPs and shrinking margins in paid are making many people look again, not just at their strategy generally but at the trust they have put in the brand for so long. I talk to business owners weekly who say they have ‘had enough’ of having their eggs in one basket and want a ‘safer’, more diverse, strategy.

Combine that with the fact that social now offers both audience size and access to the right people within it and the scales begin to tip significantly. Let’s look at that picture in more detail now.

Social’s key trump card

Until very recently social has been perceived as very much a ‘creative’ game. One for progressing conversations and engaging with people but not for making money directly. And while this is still very much a big part of the tactical piece there is now a layer of science sitting above it, which it critical to the success of any strategy.

That layer is all about the collection and interpretation of the right data to inform the entire marketing strategy.

As search marketers we have always known the power of data in informing strategies that convert into sales. Digital marketing is, after all, about not having to guess any more as the data is there to inform the strategy.

Social data takes that insight to a whole other level. Richer and more connected than whatever search can throw at us, it tells us such things as:

  1. The age breakdown of our audience.
  2. How often they interact with our content. (this post digs deeply into this)
  3. Precisely when they want that content and in what form.
  4. What other passions or interests they have.
  5. Deeper demographic data.
  6. Plus much more.

All of the info above can be obtained to a certain depth within Facebook’s Insights interface. A guide to how that works can be found here.

Google is concerned by this and the subsequent ability to target advertising into that space. It’s one of the key motivators behind the creation of Google+ alongside the obvious use the data has as a tool to power its personalisation and semantic plans.

Access is improving

Add better and more robust access to the platforms and we suddenly start to see why social is becoming so attractive. Facebook in particular has started to change mindsets around commercialization of social too and that opens the doors to all marketers to follow suit.

And with APIs opening up and becoming more robust, analytics improving and self-serve ad systems launching, we now have the keys to access the audience.

Where should you invest?

The question now is where should you invest and begin to execute a strategy that returns positive ROI.

The simple answer is to view social not as a ‘community management’ project, but as a science, designed to attract precisely the right people with the right content and to engage with them long enough that they convert. Consistently.

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook

Choosing the platform to center your strategy on is tough, but through testing and experience it has become clear, to me at least, that for 90% of businesses Facebook should be the commercial hub of your activity.

We have spent in excess of £500,000 on social advertising over the past 18 months and it’s that activity that has taught us the value of Facebook from an ROI perspective. It also lacks any real competitor in real terms as a central, all-encompassing social audience aggregator.

Google+ has no real part to play as a pure social play platform. There is no doubting the potential there for search benefits, but outside of tech industries it is very much a wasteland at present.

Twitter is useful as a distribution channel and, if you lean on its ad functionality, it has a place as a broadcast medium, but past that its strength really lies in being used as a customer service tool.

Pinterest is another worth considering, especially if you work in a creative industry, but again its one-dimensional content USP and lack of access makes it a limited option, for now.

Others like LinkedIn are working hard to improve the way they surface content and curate but they still have a long way to go. Sponsored content is certainly a step in the right direction.

And that leaves the king of them all. Facebook. A platform with the three key characteristics required for success:

  1. Access to a large audience (1 billion+ and counting).
  2. Access to data (to understand and measure marketing efforts).
  3. The ability to target and refine strategy based on user interest.

The question then is: “How do I go about making a platform, where I regularly see people sharing pictures of their favourite cat, work for my business?� That’s what we will dig into now.

Three phase strategy

Structure and process is key to making any marketing strategy work and social is no different.

There are three key stages to any social plan and they are:

  • Audience Growth
  • Engagement
  • Monetization

Without any one of the three you are doomed to failure and what is even more important is the fact that this is no linear process. You need to work consistently on all three, cycling through them all one by one to ensure growth and improvement is possible across all of them.

Growth

The first stage is the most important as without enough of the RIGHT people (and we’ll come to that) you simply won’t be able to monetize to a level where the project can be seen as a success.

That does NOT mean aggressively acquiring fans from anywhere. We have had clients come to us with 1 million ‘Likes’, complaining that they can’t monetize. The answer to why always sat very squarely with the type of people they had attracted and a content strategy that simply was not aligned to the right people.

You are looking for a relatively small audience in reality, but one that engages regularly with your content.

But how do you find those people? The answer is actually simpler than you think.

Digging into the data

Those that have access to the Facebook API are a lucky bunch. The data available out the back door is rich enough to make any Google engineer’s eyes water.

While search engines spit out fairly two dimensional, quantitative data around search behavior, social gives so much more. It tells us about the people. Their passions, relationships, loves and hates.

For any marketer that is rocket fuel.

And the great news is that you can not only look at what your audiences are interested in, but also what other brands’ audiences, and even general interest ‘sets’ are into (such as ‘digital marketing’ as a whole). That means you can spy on your competitors, which makes the data even more powerful. And if you have pumped your account full of cheap ‘fans’ and want a cleaner view you have the ability to simply look at similar brand audiences for the answers.

But you haven’t got API access right? Sure, but there is still hope and it comes in the form of Facebook’s Power Editor.

While rarely publicized, this little gem of a tool allows the user to dig into and segment data based on pages or groups of ‘Likes’, which means for the marketer that you can understand, in granular detail, more about your audience’s interests or those of your competitors. More ‘stuff’ about what they care about as people.

It’s accessible to all and to get it all you have to do is follow this simple step-by-step to install it on your account. It does require you to use the Chrome browser at this stage but that will change in time. It’s a free addition to your account and does not require you to spend money to use it either and ‘free tools’ are always a friend to all marketers!

We use Power Editor to segment by setting up a series of adverts with different targeting – similar to A/B testing. This allows us to choose different targeting for each segment, and in turn it gives us the estimated reach for each interest set. Capturing and correlating this data allows us to draw great insights in terms of audience interests.

By finding out how many fans of a Page ‘Like’ certain interest sets, such as football related pages you can quickly work out generalist interest sets and from that even correlate against the average Facebook audience to discover if the brand or Page has a high percentage of football fans, for example.

To help explain how such data can be used let’s examine the Moz and general digital marketing audience. For this purpose the digital marketing audience is defined as the people who ‘Like’ Digital marketing Pages on Facebook.

Below you can see clearly that the digital marketing audience correlates nicely with the overall Facebook audience (the dark blue line is the general audience and the light blue line is digital marketing). No great surprises so far.

But where it begins to get really interesting is when we start looking deeper; at what other interests the digital marketer has.

Again we can see here the general FB audience in dark blue and how interest sets vary against the digital marketing audience.

We can clearly see the digital segment over-indexes insanely around business, gaming, sci-fi, mobile devices and, interestingly, cycling, while it is clear that celebrities, pop music and fashion are really not that exciting for us (does that suggest we’re uncool?).

Diving deeper still we can extrapolate specific topics of most interest and we end up with something that looks a little like this:

As you can see we love Mashable and Steve Jobs (no surprise there) but the Wall Street Journal, Game of Thrones and Walking Dead may not be quite so obvious. Having this kind of info at hand gives you the ability to really target paid, owned and earned activity precisely where it will have most effect.

Using the insight

All the data in the world is irrelevant though if you have no way of using it in your day-to-day activity. So how does knowing this help?

In simple terms knowing who you are writing for or advertising to means that you can tailor your ‘content’ specifically at them, improving engagement and click through.

Paid media

In paid it means that you can be MUCH smarter with your spend and it opens up a whole other world to your targeting.

Forget looking to target people that just like ‘SEO’ or ‘digital marketing’ and look instead for what other interests they have. Run campaigns that capture them in ‘other’ places where they are likely to be; where their interests over-index against the average person.

If I were lucky enough to be a Moz marketer, for instance, I would absolutely look to target some social campaigns around the sci-fi audience. We know there is a high correlation between that market and digital and you’ll also pay less per click for the privilege – reaching the ‘same’ people for less and therefore improving the potential ROI of any campaign.

By targeting sci-fi fans you get the opportunity to reach those same ‘digital marketers’ in a less competitive space and those people that are not into the subject matter are immaterial anyway as they will simply ‘ignore’ the advertising, which is not a problem when you are paying Cost per Click, of course.

Content strategy

For content too this offers incredible levels of insight. Historically I had always been one of the very worst offenders when it came to believing that my creative content ideas were the best. That came from spending a decade in print, working ‘blind’ in terms of audience insight. My ideas were the best ideas going on in my own head.

The reality though, is that with data like this available you no longer have to guess, or rely on your own twisted understanding of what your reader may like.

I ensure that the data is integrated into the initial and ongoing brainstorming process each and every time to keep ideas tied to interests we know are likely to be engaged with and consumed. You can see that ideation process below and where data fits into it:

Engagement

Growth is one thing. Creating enough engaging content consistently is entirely another, however, and while you cannot engage without an audience, without engagement you have little to no chance of monetizing or organically growing your reach.

And to do that, on Facebook, at least, you must bow down to the majesty of Edgerank.

Edgerank

The majority of you will be more than aware of Facebook’s algorithm, but for those that don’t it is the ‘thing’ responsible for what you see and don’t see within your News Feed. And while internally Facebook says it no longer uses ‘Edgerank’ and that the algorithm governing feeds is now more complex the three key pillars still very much exist.

I’m not going to go in the complexities of that right here. This site does a great job of that should you require more background.

The basis of it is that the more you interact with a post, or a person, the more likely you are to see more posts from them in the future. And visibility means prizes, as we know only too well from search.

So, how can you better create content that resonates, aside from utilizing the data already discussed?

Use of the following content ‘tips’ can certainly help in my experience:

Top tips

  • Images – Almost all social networks are geared up to push visual content. It makes them more interesting and it is proven that images provoke more powerful, emotional responses than text.
  • Competitions – But we’re not just talking ‘free iPad’ here. They only work well when the prize is closely tied to the insight (so a more thoughtful prize based on their ‘Likes’) and these further tips also help.
  • Exclusive offers – Being able to make your Page feel ‘exclusive’ by creating bespoke offers is good because people share for two key reasons: 1. To show off. 2. To help a friend, and you benefit from both.
  • Curation – You do not need unlimited creation resource, as good curation is very powerful too. Play the newspaper editor role and filter the ‘trash’ so your audience doesn’t have to. They’ll thank you for it.
  • Listening – Not a content ‘type’, but being plugged into what is being talked about has long been a key social topic. Your reason for doing it though is NOT to sell, but to help. Get as close to your audience as possible.
  • Timing – The beauty of social data is real time feedback. You can see what works! To test on Google+ I like Timing+, but for Facebook, the focus of this piece and our strategy, Pageplanner is a great, low cost option.
  • HIPPO – I’m passionate about this one, and not because I like big grey animals, but because HIPPO stands for ‘Highest Paid Person’s Opinion’. Or more importantly their involvement in the Page. If they are visible you win trust from your customers and the hearts and minds of your business in taking social seriously. Get them to write a weekly post or host a webinar or chat.
  • Webinars – A great way to combine a winning content type, in video, with thought leadership. Webinars allow you to put across brand values personally through social.
  • Geo-location of content – Few think about segmenting content strategy by geography, but on a Page with a lot of followers it can be a killer strategy. Refine posts based on where the reader is will do wonders for engagement. Again, tools like Page Planner can make this really simple.

Validate effectiveness

All of the above work to greater or lesser degrees in different markets. The beauty of social though is that you can very quickly learn what works for your audience thanks to real time engagement insight. Facebook’s own reporting tool gives a view on this and we have created our own version, which also allows you to add in other Pages, so you can keep an eye on competitor strategies within the same view, as you can see below:

Monetization

For business it is the value of what ‘comes out the other end’. You can have all the fancy, soft metrics in the world, but without the ‘Ker-ching!’ moment the value is lost on most.

The great news is that the commercialization of Facebook has opened the door to all marketers and made it more acceptable to start looking at ways to monetize.

Editorial V Ads

And that brings us back to an age-old battle: one between editorial and advertising/commercial ‘content’ to a content driven audience.

It is a battle that has been fought for decades at newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations as media companies attempt to maximize revenues without sacrificing audience.

And we are now going to have to get used to it in digital, past simply juggling how many ad spots we have on our site. Commercialism within content goes much deeper than that.

So, how do you get it right in social? The great news is that the real time engagement data is available, as explained earlier, and getting it ‘right’ is simply a case of playing with the relationship between editorial posts and more commercial ones.

Below you can see a screenshot of a social client we work with and you can see more clearly the difference between the two post types.

On the right you have a ‘commercial’ post, linking back through to a pre-order on the website and this sits comfortably with the ‘editorial’ piece on the left.

Try adding a commercial post every fourth post to begin with and then work from there, monitoring engagement rates and fan counts for signs of drop off. As soon as that happens reduce it and stick to that ratio.

Vertical Pages

For those without an ‘off page’ monetization opportunity there is also a sneaky little model you can try for yourself.

I’ve been playing with a small handful of Pages myself, building content strategies and investing in some fan acquisition activity to build up relevant niche audiences around such things as parenting and finance.

Once those pages are established and you have an audience of around 5,000+ people you can follow that same ad/editorial model replacing the commercial link-to-site with a simple affiliate link. That way you can begin monetizing via the affiliate route.

Measurement

Of course, no monetization project is complete without the measurement piece and the good news again here is that our ability to measure social’s impact on the bottom line has improved drastically too in line with the genre’s own path towards commercialization.

Google Analytics and other analytic packages now help us understand clearly not just the last click, but much more of the funnel so we can truly measure social’s part in any conversion. As the channel is now being used increasingly as a discovery channel, knowing that it may have played a part at the initial interaction stage can make your social numbers more reflective of its true value.

Softer metrics

And then there are the ‘softer’ metrics that should have monetary values assigned to them. ‘Likes’, comments, shares and impressions should and can be tracked for GA easily now thanks to the _trackSocial method. This feeds more info on that engagement through to your analytics reports so you can better understand the value interaction brings.

Paid and organic

You can also separate out paid and organic social campaigns easily enough in the same way you would within search by making use of the Google URL builder. This allows you to create bespoke URLs for specific campaigns, allowing you to measure everything from fan acquisition campaigns through to individual content projects with ease.

Takeaways

It’s clear then that the combination of changes to audience behavior, in the way they discover new things, and social’s increasing maturity as a channel that ‘accepts’ commercial content means a tipping point is close.

Combine that with Google’s current obsession with change and the channel is becoming a serious option for those looking to vary traffic sources. And with all the tools now in place and a mass of data available to inform our decision making perhaps it is time to invest?

Top 5 Takeaways

  1. Find a way of digging into your audience’s social data and leverage that information to understand them based on their interests. The more you know about them the more effective your marketing will be.
  2. Ensure that a thoroughly thought our content strategy sits at the heart of those marketing efforts and powers your social channels. That strategy should include ideas created from the above insight.
  3. Test content types regularly based on engagement rates to refine your strategy. That way you are not guessing what your audience wants to see.
  4. Set up a thorough measurement strategy from the very start. That way you can truly understand the value that social is bringing to your business; at every point within the buying funnel.
  5. And above all: Take social seriously. It’s growing fast and with access improving it really can become a primary traffic and revenue source for your business!

And if you want to refer back to anything in this post we’ve created this eBook on the topic for you. You can download it for free by clicking on the link.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Technical SEO Skills for 2013 and 2014

We don’t agree on what “Technical Search Engine Optimization” is supposed to be so we won’t agree on what comprises “Technical SEO Skills”. Here are my definitions and why I think these skills are important. Technical Search Engine Optimzation These skills break down into four areas: HTML coding and analysis Server operating system administration and analysis Website architecture design and analysis PHP, Javascript, Perl, and similar language coding knowledge There is a difference between “having some coding knowledge” and being someone who writes software for a living. I’m not sure if a “coder” is supposed to be different from a “software engineer” but I get the impression that anyone who bills him/herself as a “coder” builds Websites, plugins, themes, and stuff like that. My apologies to any coders who actually develop full-blown software applications. In my day, when we walked uphill through the snow both ways (barefoot) we called ourselves “(computer) programmers” and the guys who taught us how to develop software were “programmer analysts” and “systems analysts” (who often called the “programmer analysts” wannabees — but I digress). Technical search engine optimization delves into code and operating systems. It’s got nothing to do with keyword research and link placement. […]

Using Google Keyword Planner (and Other Tools Instead) for Keyword Volume

Posted by Ruth_Burr

While far from a perfect tool (seriously skewed toward “commercial intent,” not always inclusive of trend data, difficult to drill down into local terms), the Google Keyword Tool was one of the best keyword research tools available. The keyword volume numbers were more trustworthy than other keyword tools, simply because they came right from the source—who better to know what kind of search volume keywords get than Google itself?

With Google’s recent announcement that their free Keyword Tool has gone away, replaced with their integrated PPC tool the Keyword Planner, a cry has gone up from SEOs: “What do we do now?”

Google Keyword Planner pros and cons

With the advent of the Keyword Planner, Google is making a strong statement that they’ll continue to focus on supporting PPC advertisers rather than organic search marketers. To that end, the Keyword Planner is heavily focused on PPC ads; you even have to sign up for an AdWords account to use it (although you don’t have to enter any payment information, and would only end up paying for the tool if you created and launched an ad). That said, the tool definitely retains some SEO utility.

Pros of Google Keyword Planner:

  • Users can now view keyword volume on a hyper-local basis; I was able to view search volume not only for the Oklahoma City area, but even drill down into Norman, the smaller OKC-area town where I live. This is great for businesses doing local and hyper-local SEO to get a better idea of the volume and competition in their geographic area.

  • The tool divides keywords up into suggested ad groups; this is designed to be a PPC-focused feature, but does provide some insight into which keywords Google deems to be semantically/topically related.
  • The “multiply keyword lists” feature allows you to search on combinations of words from two different lists. This allows you to combine your terms with modifiers such as location or color and compare search volume without having to concatenate in Excel.
  • Users can filter out keywords below a certain search volume, so you don’t even have to look at them.
  • Since you have to be logged in to use the tool, users aren’t limited to 100 words like we were with the logged-out version of the old tool.

Cons of Google Keyword Planner:

  • The ability to select Broad, Phrase or Exact match has been removed—only Exact match data is now available.
  • “Average monthly searches” is calculated over 12 months, meaning the Keyword Planner isn’t a good place to research trending topics. Use Google Trends for that.
  • The option to only search for words closely related to your term has been removed. However, Google has said they will probably add it back in.
  • Device targeting is gone—no more segmenting volume for desktop vs. mobile searches. This means volume numbers are, in general, higher for the Keyword Planner than they were for Keyword Tool since those two buckets have been combined.
  • “Local” vs “Global” search volume is no longer automatically displayed. Instead, Global (which Google is now calling “all locations”) is the default and users must drill down into specific locales for local search volume. To me, the added functionality around location targeting makes this a mixed blessing, but users will probably miss the easy comparison of seeing Local and Global side-by-side.

Alternative tools for keyword volume

Of course, for some of us, this latest example of data hoarding on Google’s part is the last straw. Here are some other places you can look for keyword volume. Since the Google Keyword Tool was free, I kept these options to tools that are free or have a free option (which is why I didn’t include the Moz Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis tool, even though I love it, since it’s only available to paid Moz subscribers).

Google Webmaster Tools impression data

Anyone with a Google Webmaster Tools verified site can view how often their site has shown up for certain keywords.

Pros:

  • This data still comes from Google itself.

Cons:

  • Because it only shows how many impressions your site got from a keyword, GWT Impression data can’t be used to research terms you’re not already ranking for.
  • There are disputes about the accuracy of the data—the consensus among SEO pros is that it’s less reliable than the Keyword Tool data was.

Bing Keyword Tool

The Bing-provided alternative to the Google Keyword tool goes a long way toward making up for the tool’s departure. It’s what we use in our Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis tool.

Pros:

  • Users can narrow searches by date range, to more accurately track recent search data.
  • Recent keyword volume trend data displays alongside other metrics.
  • A “strict” filter acts like the old “closely related” filter in Google’s Keyword Tool.
  • The tool is in Beta, so it’s likely we’ll continue to see more features and improvements as the Bing team keeps working on it.

Cons:

  • Because this data comes from Bing, which has fewer users, all search volume numbers will skew lower than they would in Google.
  • Geographic drilldown is only available at the country level.
  • Users must be signed in to a Bing Webmaster Tools account with a verified site in order to use the tool (but you should be checking Bing Webmaster Tools anyway, it’s free and there’s a lot of good stuff in there).

WordTracker

Good old WordTracker. This was the first tool I ever used for keyword research and it’s still plugging along.

Pros:

  • Their proprietary Keyword Effectiveness Index gives a gauge of how competitive each keyword is for the amount of search volume it generates.
  • WordTracker partners with SEMRush to provide paid users with paid search data as well.
  • Users can filter results by match type: “keywords in any order”, “exact keyword inside a search term” and “exact keyword only” as well as “related terms.”

Cons:

  • The full tool requires a paid subscription (starting at $69/month) to use—however, there’s also a free version that offers less functionality: Global searches only, no SEMRush data, and only 50 results per search.
  • Users must create an account with a valid email address to use the free tool.
  • Depending on which version of the tool you’re using, WordTracker data comes from one of two sources: a “major search engine advertising network,” or from metacrawlers such as DogPile, which search multiple search engines at one time. Since only a small portion of searchers are using metacrawlers, the sample of searches may be skewed based on the demographic of people who use them.

SEMRush

Full disclosure: I blog occasionally for SEMRush and am part of their customer feedback team, which means they have generously provided me with free access to their PRO tool.

Pros:

  • The free SEMRush keyword research tool provides PPC and SEO information in one view, which can be useful for marketers running hybrid PPC/SEO programs.
  • SEMRush surfaces up both the root domain and the specific URL that rank for your keyword term in the first 20 slots.
  • Related and phrase match terms, along with volume, are also served up in an individual keyword’s report.
  • Keyword volume data comes from the Google Keyword API, making it one of the more trustworthy sources of keyword volume data.

Cons:

  • Users must create a login with a valid email address to use the tool—but it’s free.
  • SERP information doesn’t take into account local, video, carousel or other non-text result types.
  • Geographic drilldown is only available at the country level.
  • Despite the related and phrase match keyword info, this tool is more effective at researching individual keywords, once you already have them, than it is at generating lots of new keyword ideas—so keep that in mind.

Don’t Hit Enter

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include one of my favorite keyword brainstorming tools, first introduced by Wil Reynolds at MozCon last year: Just start typing one of your core terms into Google, don’t hit enter, and see which keywords are suggested. Then “start the next word” by typing different letters to get further suggestions.

Pros:

  • Discover the results that Google is most likely to drive users to (since many users will use Google Suggestions that are close to their original query if they come up).

Cons:

  • No “related terms” data—everything that comes up will start with that first word.
  • No keyword volume data. You’ll have to use one of the other tools listed above for that!
  • Your suggestions may be skewed based on your location and search history.

The Future of Keyword Volume

I don’t really think any one tool is going to cut it in this day and age—I’d always recommend using more than one tool for something like keyword volume research, especially since the data can vary so much depending on where the data comes from. The best (safest) way to use keyword data from any tool, including Google, is at a directional level to make inferences about Google: If Keyword A has 10 times as many searches as Keyword B in Bing, and 5 times as many searches as Keyword B in WordTracker, Keyword A will most likely also be more popular in Google. This kind of directional approach is much more likely to be successful than treating the numbers from any one tool as gospel.

There are a few other things to consider in your keyword volume research. For one, increased personalization in search results means that even if you rank very well for a keyword most of the time, you may not show up every time that term is searched; there’s no way for keyword volume tools to predict how often you’ll be personalized in or out of people’s SERPs. Also, keep in mind that certain terms may be important to target even if they’re lower in volume, whether because they’re important to your brand or because they convert so highly that the lower traffic numbers don’t matter.

I’ll probably be using Google’s Keyword Planner in conjunction with one or two of these other tools, plus Moz tools, for my keyword research going forward. How about you? Any awesome free tools I’ve missed? Feel free to let me know in the comments!

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Google Adds Automatic Authorship With Google+ Sign In

Google announced an even easier way to get your picture into the Google search results by adding automatic author attribution through Google+ signin. Google has integrated Google+ Sign-In with Google’s authorship program. Now if you sign in to WordPress.com with Google, the the articles you publish…

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Google’s Matt Cutts: Nofollow Links Won’t Hurt You Unless You Are Spamming At A Huge Scale

In a video released today on the Google Webmaster Help YouTube channel, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts said typically links that are nofollowed can’t hurt your rankings in Google. That being said, while most cases are that links that have the nofollow attribute on them will…

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Is This The Future of Local Directory SEO?

new Google local search resultsNick Rink of Smart Local , a UK Local SEO firm, posted a screenshot of this new Google Local SERP this morning on Google+:   I can’t find another example of this, or a full SERP screenshot, but I think there is one of two things going on here: 1) Google is doing this to […]

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