February 11, 2009

Keywords and data mining

There's a different feel in the air at SMX West, the Search Marketing Expo, taking place at the Santa Clara Convention Center this week, than at most of the other tech conferences I attend like Web 2.0, TechCrunch 50, Supernova or Pop!Tech. Namely this: People aren't sharing. I've been enjoying the sessions as a member of the press. But it's as if these hundreds of marketing professionals, SEO gurus and webmeisters have individually decided not to blog about the sessions they're attending, instead choosing to scrupulously record notes and disseminate their findings only to the inner sanctum back at corporate HQ.

That, at any rate, is how I interpret the fact that 200 to 300 people attended Tuesday's session on SMX Boot Camp: Keyword Research Tools & Techniques -- yet no one wrote about it on their blogs. Or maybe Twitter has made everyone lazy.

With that in mind, I'll provide a detailed synopsis of the excellent presentation given by Christine Churchill, founder and CEO of KeyRelevance. Because I believe that the community becomes richer as we become better informed about the tools at our disposal.

Keyword marketing

"Keywords are the bedrock of search marketing," Churchill told the audience. After all, she pointed out, we still live in a text-based world. How often do you type terms into a Google search box? Yes, exactly.

Why do keyword research? She listed several reasons:

It's a fundamental step in search marketing.
It's a way to correct bad keyword choices.
You increase conversion by speaking the customer's language.
You develop a list of relevant terms to target in SEO (search engine optimization), pay-per-click, blogs, images, videos, press releases and social media marketing. (Yes, you should add a descriptor to your images and videos and include a keyword in the headline of your press release.)
You can glean competitive intelligence: see what the competition is doing.
Keywords can provide insights for your site design and navigation.
Knowing traffic potential helps plan budgeting (mostly for pay per click).
You can discover new keyword opportunities.
Consider going beyond well-known keywords. "There's a long tail for popular keyword searches, too."

Keyword sources

Churchill recommended creating a keyword list using diverse sources:

online and traditional print magazines
company and product reviews
online thesauruses like thesaurus.reference.com
talk to focus groups, customer interviews, support or sales personnel
discussion forums, user-generated content and blogs
analytics
and this: look at keywords your competitors are buying in pay per click and in SEO.

Keyword research tools

Here are some of the leading research tools that social media marketers should keep top of mind:

Google keyword tool
Wordtracker (paid service)
Trellian keyword discovery (paid service)
Google Webmaster tools (it's a good way to find out how Google perceives your site
Google Insights
Google Trends (allows you to compare popular phrases — you can see which terms are popular by state or region, and you can even look back at specific date and see what was popular a year ago)
Google's Search based keyword tool (free)
Hitwise (a high-end competitive information tool)
Keyword Discovery (searches multiple databases: global premium, historical global, international, news, shopping, eBay. By entering a key phrase, you can see questions related to the search term, which helps you come up with new content ideas.)

I'll work with my colleague Joanna Lord to provide a deeper look at these at a later date.

More search and data mining tools

adCenter Labs (an advertising and data mining toolet from Microsoft)
Clusty (a search engine that offers clustered search allowing users can see related terms)
Quintura (it works by navigating by "clouds"; bold words are most related, good for brainstorming and broadening keyword buckets)
Ask.com (provides keyword suggestions and shows related searches)
Google Suggest (as you type in a phrase, Google offers keyword suggestions in real time)
Yahoo! (Churchill says she likes Yahoo's keyword selection tool the best but didn't explain why)
SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool (learn which keywords you should be targeting to increase your website rankings and traffic)
SEOBook's Permutation Tool (free)
Mirosoft's Ad Intelligence (a new plug-in for Excel 2007)
Technorati (the blog search engine -- type in a phrase and below posts it will show related tags)
Flickr (explore popular tags on Flickr)
Amazon's most popular tags

Best line of the morning, from Churchill: "Traffic alone isn't the goal. You want targeted traffic that resonates with your audience and will lead to greater sales of your products."

Interesting factoid: 80% of searches on the web are noncommercial, says Churchill. People conduct three kinds of searches: navigational (I want to find your site), informational (what's in a Mai Tai?) and transactional (buying a product, subscribing to a service).

Postscript: I'm relaunching Socialmedia.biz in a few days so blogging will be light until then. TypePad has become largely broken -- it wiped out this post twice tonight -- so I'll be posting at my beta site until this domain is forwarded to the new site. Here's the post at my upcoming site.

February 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (8) | |

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Comments

Thanks for the post and your new site looks great.

Posted by: Kfir Pravda | Feb 11, 2009 10:29:14 PM

Quinture is just a junk

Posted by: Alex Rakov | Feb 11, 2009 11:02:32 PM

Wow JD, Thanks for the indepth coverage. :-)

JD, on the Yahoo suggestion tool (and we are talking about the suggestions that appear when you start to put a phrase into the Yahoo search query box) - I like it better than the other search engine suggestion tools because it provides examples of the phrase embedded within phrases as well as at the beginning of a phrases. The other search engine's suggestion tools only show you the phrase at the beginning. Its a little thing, but handy for brainstorming.

Alex - Not sure if you were at the session, but I explained Quintura was mostly used for brainstorming - it identifies word associations that are often overlooked. There are many many kewyord tools available. I always encourage people to try more than one tool and to use different tools for different phases of keyword reasearch

Thanks again for the excellent writeup.

Christine Churchill

Posted by: Christine | Feb 14, 2009 8:00:43 AM

This is a great resource that I look forward to sharing with my network soon.

Posted by: Brian Campbell | Feb 15, 2009 8:18:52 PM

Thank you for the synopsis, as a student @ stockholm university I cant spend hundreds of dollars attending seminars.

I couldnt agree less: Wheres the transparency of the CEOs in new media!

Thanks

Posted by: Hampus Landelius | Feb 16, 2009 3:21:37 AM

Awesome post JD. I'll be sure to repeat the jewels at the Web Apps Conference hosted by Carsonified in Miami next week - February 23-24

Posted by: Jermyn Shannon El | Feb 16, 2009 4:32:52 PM

JD, damn, missed this. Just what I needed for the listening session - was researching keyword tools, but not able to find all. Thanks again