Search Advertising: Trade Secrets (Part I)
Recently, I accompanied two of my colleagues to a Yahoo Search Marketing conference. Along with the delicious breakfast spread, they provided a lot of helpful information on how to create a successful search marketing campaign in Yahoo and beyond. We spent an entire day in that overly-air-conditioned conference room with the other wanna-be online advertising gurus; and thus received a lot of tips, tactics and advice. So I’ll impart the knowledge to you in a three-part blog series: Search Advertising: Trade Secrets.
Keywords are clutch. There were people at the conference who sheepishly admitted to having only 100 or so keywords in their whole campaign. If you want your business to flourish through online advertising, you need to generate as many keywords as possible. Without the resources of time and people, that can seem overwhelming. But it is possible to beef up your campaign with minimal effort.
Wordtracker
Get list upon list of keyword variations with Wordtracker. Basically, you type in a keyword phrase, and it spits out hundreds more that might work for you. You have to pay to play; but Wordtracker isn’t too expensive and offers memberships ranging from one year to just one day. If you can’t decide, try it out for free first.
www.wordtracker.com
KeywordMax
If you’re a one man (or woman) show, you likely don’t have the time to manage your keywords the way a large company does. KeywordMax is a one-stop-shop for keyword management, offering keyword research, tracking, bid management and click fraud monitoring.
www.keywordmax.com
Hitwise
If you want to get an idea of the competitive landscape of your industry, Hitwise is the tool for you. Hitwise offers a plethora of statistical analysis—overviews of Web sites in several niche categories, reports on the search terms and engines people have used to find products and services, reports on where your traffic comes from and where it goes when it leaves, and information about trends, demographics, conversion rates and more.
www.hitwise.com
Freebies
Yahoo and Google
If you have PPC accounts with Yahoo and/or Google, you can use their keyword generation tools as much as you want. Put in a keyword and they come up with others they believe will work. But don’t have blind faith that because Yahoo or Google gave you the phrase, that it will work in Yahoo or Google—those keyword phrases have success rates similar to and sometimes worse than keywords generated in other ways.
Rusty Brick
This is cool. Type in primary, secondary and tertiary keywords, click on the type of match you want (broad, phrase or exact) and it dumps out a list of phrases. This site also offers an array of other Web tools.
www.rustybrick.com/keyword-phrase-tool.php
Keyword Generator
Another great tool, keyword generator is true to its name. Type in keywords as prompted, putting similar words together (i.e. buy, get, find), click generate and you’re on your way to a robust list of words. This would be a great site for those of you attempting to implement the long-tail, or keyword phrases made up of 4+ words.
www.related-pages.com/adwordskeywords.aspx
Generating great keywords is the first step in creating a successful campaign. I’ll be back with the second installment of Search Advertising: Trade Secrets next week. As you wait with baited breath, you can try out some of the aforementioned keyword generation tools.
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Comments
Before you start using these powerful tools, it could be worthwhile just jotting down words and phrases on a piece of paper and connecting them with lines to illustrate possible combinations.
With this little preparation step, you will get much more out of the tools.
Also, remember to spend some time on your negative keyword list: do you really offer boat, free, group, malpractice, pet, or travel insurance? Can you provide insurance claims, fraud, jobs, laws, licensing, regulations, schools, software or tax? If you don't, you should hide your advertisment whenever these words are present in the search term.
Posted by: Magnus Wester | October 21, 2006 04:16 AM