Do you lack keyword discipline? Do you lack focus? Do you think I’m taking this very loose Karate Kid reference too far already?

Though keyword density seems to be losing more and more strength in the SEO game, maintaining a solid focus with a specific, core keyword on a page still carries weight, can streamline your keyword hunt, and can make the puzzle-solving process of fitting multiple keywords into copy that much simpler. Since I’m still relatively unable to hit the bike trails here in Kansas City, thanks to our nasty weather, allow me to entertain myself by pretending we’re a bike seller pushing the very winter-friendly Surly Pugsley… a bike I wish I had in the garage at the moment.

As usual, I recommend hitting our free friend: Google’s Keyword Tool. We’ll toss in “surly pugsley” and see what we’re workin’ with.

No big surprise, “surly pugsley” is the winner… well, along with “pugsley surly”. Crap!

What do we do in case of a tie then? How about breaking this stalemate with the help of another free friend: the Wordstream Keyword Tool.

I'm having difficulty believing Kansas City is drawing more searches than the rest of the globe. Ah well...

Wordstream seems to have given us a pretty clear cut answer, so we’ll stick with our Surly Pugsley keyword and go from there.

Well, that solves that.

Now, here’s where we need to pay close attention, you don’t want to begin and end every sentence with your keyword. Your copy needs to read fluidly; if the keyword sticks out to the reader as though an excited child wrote the product summary for his or her favorite toy, then you’ve gone too far. Also, back to the original point of this article: you don’t want to have keywords spread all over the place, and by that I mean do not sacrifice a focus on your main product by watering it down with handlebars, wheelsets, tires, saddles… you get the idea. I’m obviously not advising you to ignore your peripherals, just focus those on their own pages. This focus (if anyone searches the term “focus” I may rank) on your individual product pages will strengthen their punch and make the search engines take notice… like Ali Mills on Daniel LaRusso!

OK, that was the last one, I swear.

I thought I’d share with you guys this week a recent shopping story (oooh, exciting!) that should allow me to highlight a few very basic things people, lots of people it turns out, seem to overlook when putting together a PPC campaign. So come with me, won’t you, on my adventure to buy a bicycle tire – wheeee!

Chapter One: Landing Page of Doom

Tires are kind of a big deal on a mountain bike, and though the Kansas City area is short on mountains, there are still gnarly trails aplenty that are fully capable of, and happy to, throw you headlong into the dirt, jagged limestone outcroppings, trees, poison ivy, stuff like that there – point is, it’s nice having a tire set you’re familiar with, and all I wanted was a replacement for my rear hoop. These are never in stock at my favorite local shop, and to order one in you will pay a premium, so I took to the interwebz to find a new Schwalbe Rocket Ron… and so it began.

Since I deal with PPC campaigns every day I’m inclined to look through the paid search before natural, I suppose more out of a professional curiosity than anything else, and here is where the number one result, though not giving the tire’s model name, matched the make. I took it as a good sign as Schwalbe, a German manufacturer, isn’t as popular here in the States as they are in Europe, so I clicked through. I was dropped on a landing page that was jam-packed with Schwalbe tires, 16 pages worth in fact, with 28 models per page. So, yeah, I wasn’t taken to the tire I wanted, but hey, I was close now – right? This is where it crosses into site design territory, as there was no search bar to guide me directly to what I wanted, and even when I adjusted one of the few variables: the tire size, mine still hadn’t shown by page two. A non-SEO person would maybe be less of a baby about it, but I couldn’t be bothered and decided to look elsewhere.

The lesson here is to aim your PPC ads at a landing page that fits your customer’s search, or at the very least drops them somewhere close! People don’t want to solving the navigation puzzle of your site, and especially when you offer something that is not unique to you, try to keep that sales funnel as short as possible for them.

Chapter Two: The Land of Not Crazy Low Prices

Here’s a quickie: Don’t say you have crazy low prices unless you actually have crazy low prices – it will anger the person who discovers it… you know, the person who was possibly going to give you their money.

Chapter Three: Bounce

Two clicks in and I’m treated to a picture of my tire with a red-lettered, “This item is currently out of stock.”

Back ‘er up – *click* *click*

In this specific case it’s kind of understandable, you’d have to be on the ball to pause your ad after you run out of a freakin’ tire, one item out of the hundreds you stock, but this is still a hit to your ROI. Sure, you could argue that at least you drew a customer into your site, but how realistic is the scenario that they’ll adventure around looking for something else in this case? I was not a customer looking for “mountain bike tires” that’s much different than someone looking for a specific brand and model, and it’s absolutely important to keep this in mind when building your campaigns. If you’re going to go as far as building an ad group around specific items then it only makes sense to stay on top of inventory and hit the pause button if there’s going to be a delay in restocking.

Chapter Four: The Grail

The fourth ad was the first ad that actually had the model name in the ad, and hey, a sale! I was a bit skeptical when the body announced free shipping on orders over $240.00, because, well, that would be a bulk order of tires, and I worried that this was likely a poorly put together dynamic text ad that was about to add some disappointment to my shopping adventure.

Dynamic text can be a great eye-catcher as it matches exactly what the customer is looking for, but boy, if you don’t put the time in when building it, you can really do more harm than good. Before my finger had time to twitch I’d already considered how unrelated the landing page would be, this “sale” having ran through the stock already, if it even existed at all, and why I didn’t just quit screwing around and go buy from the site I usually do. Then, just like that, there it was…

I was taken directly to the item I wanted! There really was a sale! It really was in stock! Yes, I really was this excited to find the thing I’d set out to purchase. And consider this excitement stemmed from all that crap I’d just sifted through; this site was my hero, not because they did anything amazing, but because they did what they were supposed to do! These other businesses spent money to frustrate and run off a potential customer. Comparatively speaking, they’d have come out ahead by doing no PPC at all!

If you’re managing your business’ PPC campaign ask yourself if you’re making it easy for your customers to give you their money. Are you frustrating them? Are you making them write angry blogs? What’s the ROI on that sort of business model anyway?

I was at the grocery store yesterday having an in-depth conversation with my 8-year-old son about what kind of “meat” must be in those jarred spaghetti sauces in the pasta aisle – you know the ones I’m talking about? How is that OK to just sit out on the shelf like that? What must be in there?

Anyway, in the middle of our speculation I registered the intercom saying from overhead something to the effect of, “…follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more deals – something, something, food.”

“Apparently, the grocery store has a fan page,” I told my son, and he chuckled a confused chuckle asking, “What?”

Mmm, so I stowed it away and after dinner remembered to look up Hy-Vee Incorporated’s Facebook page… juuust to see what kind of action was being dealt on, again, a grocery store fan page. At work we’re constantly talking with clients about how to use this whole social media thing to engage and draw in customers, and yes, we’ve had to get creative more than a couple times, so this intrigued me.

And there it was, Hy-Vee was putting on a clinic how to use Facebook as a marketing tool. There are videos, there are pictures from an event they sponsored, they’re a company with over 55,000 employees and they’re actually interacting with fans on their wall! Sure, there are a couple spots that could be better and/or updated, but I was happily surprised, so much so I joined their throng of followers… yes, I am now a fan of my grocery store.

Just last week good ol’ eMarketer released a report comprehensively and long-windedly titled the “Reasons for Friending or Following Companies Through Social Media According to U.S. Consumers, December 2009”.

As you can see from the report, though people are most interested in getting the first word on deals and specials, they’re also seeking a bit of that personal touch by getting a sneak peek at new products and services. So, what does a grocery store have to offer? Why, the aforementioned food preparation videos, a little interaction with the fans by answering questions – that personal touch that shows they’re listening to you.

I suppose the question now is: what’s your social media plan? Can you compete with your local grocer?

Let’s say you’re writing for a fan page dedicated to the growing, styling and maintenance of dundrearies, because, well, why wouldn’t you? Listen, it was the closest I could come to playing on the Something Something for Dummies book franchise and I thought it was clever, just humor me and let’s roll with it…

Edward Sothern's jaws giving birth to a... style?

OK, so you’re looking to grab more members – it’s the Worldwide Web after all, there has to be more than three of you on the planet, right? So, how do you draw these other tastefully be-bristled folks to you?

First, for the sake of this post anyway, ya’ gotta have a blog, which, quite honestly, I can’t imagine your dundreary site not having, as there has to be tons of new styling gels to test, monocle swap-meets, pretentious art house meetings to organize, political discussion, this thing should be buzzing. As we’ve discussed many times before, from a search engine optimization angle, this is the fresh content the engines adore, but they can’t do much for you if you aren’t using the right keywords in your writing. You need to find out how people are searching for your subject matter – what are they typing into the search engines when they want to know if sporting some extreme dundrearies can drown them? Is that even a common search? Let’s find out!

As with any good keyword hunt, I find it’s best to start with Google AdWords to sprinkle some seeds and see what sprouts up. I spotted AdWords “dundrearies” and “dundreary” and this is the best it could muster:

Hmmm, doesn't appear to be a popular search in Kansas City... or anywhere else.

Wow, that’s a little disappointing. Clearly, we’re dealing with a fairly niche lifestyle choice here, but hey, we have a better idea now of how people are searching for their information and which words carry the most strength. Starting with the keyword “dundrearies” we now have a breakdown of which of the *sigh* four words and phrases should be included the most in your future posts.

Armed with this knowledge be careful not to overdo it from here on out. A good guideline to follow is to not go over 5% keyword density in your writing because not only will the search engines start thinking you’re trying to manipulate them (they don’t like that), but your writing starts to look like crap. So, for example, lets say you’re putting together a feature on the best new pomade for styling your dundrearies into stylish curls and the word count is roughly 500 words. Multiply 500 by .05 (for my mathematically challenged brothers and sisters out there, that’s your 5%) and you come up with 25, which means you don’t want to go beyond stuffing 25 keywords into the entire piece. That’s a total by the way, I don’t mean for you to try that with each and every keyword, that could get messy.

Simply maintaining your blog gives you the opportunity to not only build on existing keywords, but if you check periodically you can also seamlessly plug in new keywords should they arise. And by doing a good job you show yourself as an authority on your subject matter, and provided you’re constantly researching and staying on top of your industry, then you really and truly are – right? Yes, imagine, the online leader in dundreary technology… dare to dream my friends.

Back in November we talked about how the Google Trends tool can help you situate your company to best take advantage of the potential vogue status of an item or service you may offer. Seasonal trends, fads, classic nouveau, If you can master the Google Trends crystal ball, you can gain a step on your competition. Now, if you’re up for it, you can go one further by taking advantage of social media trends. It can get dicey, but here you have the chance to discover keywords as they’re still discovering their potential, and just like scouting talent for a pro baseball/football/futbol/(curling?) team, you’ll always be riding that line between blue chip and flash in the pan.

How this works is that before something starts hitting its stride in search results, someone has to start talking about it first. As the chatter picks up, more and more people start looking for more information, looking for an item, looking for this hot, new service. What can you do to stay on the cutting edge?

A solid place to begin is with the big dog: Facebook’s Lexicon. Here you can compare multiple keywords and see whether a product is on the rise or fall and what seems to have more strength in the marketplace… or at least what’s building its own infamous reputation at the moment.

Also, it would pay to keep an eye on the “New” Lexicon for what promises to be a richer data grab as it looks to deliver information about the cross-section of people behind the searches as well. And hey, clearly the more information you can pull in about your client base the better.

Next up is the good ol’ Twitter-monster. Yes, Twitter has a search tool of their own, which is all right if you’re looking to sift through every individual post, but if you want something a bit more user friendly then look no further than the helpful Trendistic site. Again, you get the posts to read through, but you also get embeddable charts, the ability to break down trends to the hour, and, like Lexicon, you can compare trends to suss out which horse to saddle up and ride.

What cool new trend is building that can sweep your company up in its swell? Get out there and search for it!

Just over a week ago Verizon Blackberry users discovered a slight change in their default search browser, losing the quick buttons for Google, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and others for the singular, shiny and new (to them) “Bing” option. It remains to be seen whether the rumored exchange of a cool $500 mill. from Microsoft to Verizon is worth the customer outrage, but hey, that’s… business?

Further rumored details are that this is part of a five-year exclusivity plan, so Verizon smart-phone users may not be seeing the end of this anytime soon. The question for us cool SEO kids is, as always, “How does this affect me?” Though this isn’t the point of my question, if you’re a Verizon user, then you have to actually type in Google to get there, losing seconds of precious time EVERY time. Oh noes! Personally, I use T-Mobile, primarily because I was led to believe Catherine Zeta-Jones visits your house… *ahem* and I’m still waiting. But I digress…

The thing is, this is still too new to see what impact it will have on the search engine arms race. Verizon’s the big dog here in the U.S., but will Bing gain much market share with this move – will we start to see it in our Pay Per Click budgets? Is Bing looking ahead to try and bully into the future smart phone search market? Or, what seems to be most likely at the moment, will “google” remain the most searched term in Bing’s search engine?

Back in September we talked about how the simple act of claiming your Google Local Business page would give you a small boost in your Google 10-pack ranking, which, as we covered, translates directly to fame, fortune and the domination of all who oppose you. Well, should you want to buttress this newfound popularity a bit let’s cover another factor in this land of Local Search Visibility: the volume of your customer reviews.

That’s right, it’s not good enough to just claim the thing and leave it by its lonesome, now you have to actually nurture it. Let’s think about what it will take to get your customers to bother actually going all the way to your listing, and then having to type words… “Ugh, I didn’t expect homework, I just wanted to buy a pair of shoes!” See, this imaginary person I just made up doesn’t even want to do any of that!

How about if we incentivize this whole thing for them? Maybe a 5-10% discount on their next purchase? Maybe you run a competition for a month or three where a random commenter wins a prize? You could even incorporate a video into the listing (yet another boost in the Google 10-Pack – ho-ho!) where you pick a name from a hat, throw a dart at a wall of names, see which bowl the neighborhood cat eats from, however it is you decide to divine your winner. Make it fun, make people want to go and at least check it out, and make it fun for you, or whichever lackey you put on it, to actually do it.

Local Search can be a boon to businesses of any size, all it takes is a bit of attention and maybe just a bit of imagination.

With Thanksgiving gone and the holiday buying season having bashed us square in the face this past week, I started thinking about how best a DIY shop owner can prepare and position themselves for the carnage this time of year brings. Thing is, I quickly realized that in regards to SEO, it’s essentially already too late to ponder such a question. If you want your site to organically rank for this season’s hot items you really need at least a two-month lead. Not only do the search engines need time to index your content, but you also must remember that if you’re targeting the Christmas rush, those people have kicked off their shopping spree already. Sooo, PPC campaign, anyone?

Regardless if you’ve been caught flat-footed and are scrambling to cobble together some PPC ads, or are, I dunno’, on the ball and prepping for Valentine’s Day, let me show you a handy tool that can help you position yourself for glorious windfalls no matter the occasion. Let’s check out Google Trends.

And let me quickly tell you that the graph and numbers are only relative to the, “average search traffic in the chosen time period,” which creates a baseline where the, “subsequent terms are then scaled relative to the first term.” Yeah, I stole that from their FAQ, but it usually seems to be the first thing that comes up when I show this to people, so I wanted to keep you from getting too excited.

Anywho, go ahead and type in, “long stem roses,” to see a terrific example of a powerfully obvious trend. You probably could’ve guessed the result beforehand, but let’s say you’re running a small toy shop and are wanting to gauge consumer interest in a couple items. I can tell you that the new Space Police Lego sets have been forced into a lot of conversations by my eight-year-old son lately, along with some kick he’s on with working on cars, so there’s an erector set in the mix as well. Using these as search examples, our imaginary shop owner can compare and contrast the old standby erector set with this new Lego line to see which is garnering the most attention from consumers.

Here we see an alien learning to respect crosswalks.

If you perform this search today you’ll see the Space Police are noticeably cooler at the moment, though both are on an upswing, clearly riding the wave of the holiday season, as shown by the previous years’ data. From this information our imaginary owner could pick a direction for a PPC campaign, use it as an additional way to forecast demand in regards to ordering product, or plan future SEO campaigns. This could allow our owner an opportunity to build some nice organic results for the timeless erector sets, while leaving a PPC budget for whatever the next super-awesome, super-cool, “all my friends have one, so I need one,” toy-thing of the season. So, go play with Google Trends and see how it can help you and your business.

Persuasivity: The word I just made up (ARGH!…nevermind, it’s all over the ‘net already) to describe what your writing needs to be to sell your possibly not very exciting product. No, not you lion-tamer-for-children’s-birthday-parties, not you pyrotechnics college, not you monster truck rental service; I’m talking to the vacuum cleaner sales and repair shop, data management software vendor, the cardboard box suppliers of the world.

If you’re selling a product or service that’s unique to your business then you should have no issues with cobbling together all your unique selling points and working the simplest angle: “This is the only place you can find this, the choice is obvious!” For the majority though, you likely offer something readily available, if not locally, then at least elsewhere online. In this case you need to give your product descriptions a bit of a pop, not bashing the reader over the head, not being too cutesy, but something that gives the reader all the necessary information without being too bland. I don’t think I have the space to put together a comprehensive writing class in this post, *ahem* nor would you want to sit through it, so let’s take a quick look at some of the biggest traps and simplest solutions for your product descriptions:

1. What does your cool thing do and to what awesome end does it do it?

It doesn’t get much more basic than this. Let’s say you’re selling running shoes – what is there to say about these shoes? Without getting into the hyperbolic we can safely say, “They cover your feet.” That’s a solid description, but will it shift many pair of these sweet shoes? How about we change it to, “They cover your feet in style.”

Boom, you just sold some shoes!

Explaining that a feature of your product saves time, saves money, turns a sandwich into a banquet, whatever it does, no matter how obvious you think it may be, is a nice reinforcement of what a terrific product it is.

2. Hmmm, how is your price so cheap on this item?

Especially when it comes to online sales, unless you’ve really built trust in your brand, people are skeptical of noticeable price breaks. It might not hurt to explain that you ordered too many, maybe the manufacturer had a closeout for that model and you’re passing along the savings, maybe your car dealership is too close to a baseball field/driving range – it’s worth mentioning this to ease any kind of customer concern.

3. Oh, cool, I didn’t know that.

If your particular item has any interesting background your average customer may not be aware of, throw it in. A good friend and former client of mine manufactured carbon fiber components for a wide variety of industries: everything from satellite components, to racecar bits and bobs, and hush-hush “defense contract” business. They also happen to produce barrels for paintball markers… now do you think their background might, just maybe, be a bit of a hook for the paintball market?

4. This Potatoes-In-A-Box mix reminds me of Mom…

If you’re up for it, consider latching onto your readers’ emotions. Now, watch it, you don’t want to get disingenuous with some over-the-top rhetoric about how if every household were to buy your blender, terrorism would end; maybe you want to start simple with something like, “Now you too can make margaritas like Grandma used to make with our stainless steel Blend-A-Whirl.”

Something to that effect…

5. PROOFREAD!

Oh yeah, it might not hurt to go back through once more to make sure the price you have listed is current, maybe the color, sizes, whatever it is the customer will want to know before adding to their shopping cart. Finding a listing that does contain the information they’re searching for is only a mouse click away after all.

Now, go out and write my pretties! Sell! SELL!

No matter how at odds you might be with computers, the Internet, or technology in general, Mr. or Miss Business Owner, I have a simple tip (hey, with video instruction!) that can help you help people in your general area find you… to, you know, give you money. Now, this is but a fraction of our local search visibility package, but we’re talking about Google, the most-used search engine in the world, so this is not minor.

What this video fails to mention is that your website is more than likely not included in your listing until you claim and edit it. There are so many people who see their physical address and numbers are correct and leave it at that, of course most of them don’t even realize the possibilities and options right in front of them either.

The second thing is that by simply claiming your site you immediately get a boost in Google’s 10-pack (that list of businesses beside the map in certain searches). It’s a tidbit that gets picked up in Google’s algorithm and gives your listing a nice kick in the pants for the smallest amount of effort on your part.

It’s time to break out of our old-timey phone book mentality and take advantage of the little angles we can be working online; naming your business “A1” anything may still get you listed first in the big book of yellow pages, but with more people searching for products and services online than anywhere else, becoming just a bit more Internet savvy can be a boon to your business.