Category Archives: Keyword Analysis

5 Tips for Managing Your Community on Google+

The day Google+ opened up brand pages, I anxiously refreshed my Gmail inbox all day long until I finally got the email inviting me to create a company page. I knew that by creating the page under my personal account that I’d be the only one able to manage it for the near future. But I really didn’t care; I was just so giddy to get the page set up.

Remember that feeling? I bet you ran out and did the same thing, right? But then what happened? Are you still as excited about it as you were back then, or do you now dread having to go in there? I mean not only do you have to keep up with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, HackerNews, and [insert social platform here], but you have to have a strategy for Google+ as well. Calgon, take me away!

Ok, so we know that having a Google Plus strategy is important and we know all the ways that we should optimize our brand page for SEO purposes, but are we managing our G+ community? Here at SEOmoz, we’ve been working hard on making sure that Google+ isn’t thought of as just a third sock, but as an important part of our social (and search) strategy.

Today I want to show you five ways you can use Google+ to engage more with you community, all the while helping your site and brand page show up more in searches. Sound good? Now, let’s walk through some of these tactics. One thing to remember is that with any kind of social strategy, what works great for us, may not be the best for you. So test things out and see if they work. Now, on with the tips!

1. Check your notifications respond

You probably want to slap

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Z3rw2AzBngY/5-tips-for-managing-community-on-google-plus

Be Careful Using AdWords for Keyword Research

For the past decade, most of us in the field of search have relied on Google’s AdWords data (either in the public tool, the API or the tools inside AdWords accounts). It’s the best source we’ve got, but many marketers may not realize that sadly, the numbers and queries may not always match up to what’s actually happening on Google’s search engine. I’ll illustrate with an example.

An SEOmoz blog post ranks in the top 2-3 results for many keywords around the phrase “blog traffic.” Here’s a screenshot of some of those rankings:

Google Search for Improve Blog Traffic

I went into our Google Analytics account and pulled the related keywords along with how much traffic they’ve sent in the past 30 days:

Moz Google Analytics Data

Then I went to Google’s AdWords Tool and searched for “blog traffic” to compare the suggestions:

AdWords Search for Blog Traffic

Here I got confused, because many of the terms that we receive traffic for are NOT shown above in the list… Is Google hiding them? Do they not know about them?

To be sure, I typed them into Google’s AdWords Tool manually, performing [exact match] searches only:

AdWords Tool Data

Holy cow… There they are. So, AdWords does have volume for these, and will display it, but only if you enter them exactly (or rather, “more exactly” – you can find them if you do sets of imprecise, but closer queries, too). I made the chart below to illustrate which terms were available from the broad research:

Comparison of Keywords Suggested vs. Those with Volume

As you can see, there’s ~50% of the terms not shown in the suggestion list, which is fairly substantive and could lead to some serious missed targeting opportunities.

THE IMPORTANT LESSON: Running discovery-focused searches in AdWords

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/YWfMvoLSA-o/be-careful-using-adwords-for-keyword-research

How to Build an Advanced Keyword Analysis Report in Excel

Analyzing keyword performance, discovering new keyword opportunities, and determining which keywords to focus efforts on can be painstaking when you have thousands of keywords to review. With keyword metrics coming from all over the place (Analytics, Adwords, Webmaster Tools, etc.), it’s challenging to analyze all the data in one place regularly without having to do a decent amount of manual data manipulation. In addition, dependent on your site’s business model, tying revenue metrics to keyword data is a whole other battle.

This post will walk you through a solution to these keyword analysis issues and provide some tips on how you can slice and dice your data in wonderful ways.

With Microsoft Excel, we can create a report with all the keyword data you will need, all in one place, and fairly easy to update on a weekly or monthly basis. Then with all this data we can easily categorize segments of it to more quickly determine the better performing sets of keywords.

What we will need to do is push Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Adwords, Ranking data, and Revenue data all into one excel spreadsheet. Then we will put it all together into one master report and one categorized pivot table report.

To start, you should be especially familiar with pivot tables, the Google Adwords API, the Google Analytics API, and keyword research of course. Utilizing these APIs and being consistent in the formatting of the data you put into your spreadsheet will make it easy to update. If you aren’t familiar with these tools, I have provided resources below and some steps to organizing this data.

Here are some resources for learning to use pivot tables in Excel:

Excel for SEO
Microsoft Pivot Table Overview

Now let’s go fetch that data.

I Got 99 Problems, But A Keyword Visit Ain’t

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/xdY75HrxZJo/how-to-build-an-advanced-keyword-analysis-report-in-excel