Advanced Keyword Research Tools — SMX Advanced

In this session, we’ll go beyond the ordinary normal keyword research tools and methods for targeting keywords. This is a big panel of folks up here. Our friend Keri Morgret is usually behind the laptop, liveblogging sessions; but today, this is her first time as a speaker – go Keri! Chris Sherman is telling us Bing is sponsoring the WiFi today; however, I can’t connect to it.

In this session, we have:

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
Bryson Meunier, Director, Content Solutions, Resolution Media
Keri Morgret, President, Strike Models
Myron Rosmarin, President, Rosmarin Search Marketing, Inc.

First up is Myron Rosmarin. Keyword importance is a metric that factors in popularity with relevance. There’s no easy way to measure relevance. Need access to a pro tool, he uses SEM Rush. Use a version of Microsoft Access that supports many rows.

This is meant to be a tutorial session, so each slide has images and steps. He said don’t worry about taking notes. I ignore him at first and quickly realize he’s right and there’s no good way to translate his steps without slides. I’m going to provide a link to his presentation deck as soon as I receive it for all of you.

Next up is Christine Churchill. She is talking about how SMX Advanced is kind of like a class reunion for all the search marketing vets. She is going to be talking tools today.

Free tools (not an exhaustive list):

• Google Keyword Tool
• Google Webamster Tools
• Google Insights
• Google Trends
• Google Content Taregting
• adCenter Labs tools
• Microsift adCenter Add-in for Excel

Google keyword tool:

Log in if you’re going to use this tool; more info available
Hit exact, not broad (which it defaults to)
Added new features in recent months; there’s an advanced option for mobile searches
Website option for URL is often overlooked, will tell you what Google thinks that site is relevant for

Google Insights

Beware, it’s addicting, she says. Gives demographic data for popular phrases.

Other tools:

• Google Instant (When people see the suggested phrases, they often use them)
• Soovle.com
• Ubersuggest
• Keyword Eye
• YouTube Keyword Suggestion
• Google’s Wonder Wheel
• Contextual Targeting
• adCenter Lab Tools – different source of data
• Ad Intelligence – build keyword lists fast
• SEOmoz keyword tool – quick and dirty feel for competitiveness of a phrase

In sum: No one tool is perfect, so use different tools. Don’t just look at popularity, there’s more to keywords than that.

Bryson Meunier is up. He is going to talk about hot dogs first. Yes, hot dogs.

There’s was a competition for cooking hot dogs. The winner won because he put mac and cheese on his hot dogs. He reminds us that we’re not at a hot dog convention. The reason why he brought it up is to add mac and cheese to your keyword tools.

Estimate local search volume with Google keyword tool, Insights for search and census data. Can’t get this with traffic estimator. Why estimate local search? Small businesses and big business with local presence.

Use census data to find population percentage relevant to the country to estimate the local search volume. Not accounting for regional — understand the local variations in search demand.

He put a fancy equation up to figure it out. Again, will have to look at the slides to see it.

Understand organic keyword opp by building a poor man’s SEO Xray. BrightEdge or Conductor are tools to use.

He is talking mobile next. Use keyword tools and Webmaster data. Find keywords that have as much or more volume in mobile search than they have in desktop. Demonstrate that people do search on your target keywords on mobile.

Use this to create mobile-focused info architecture for mobile site; product research for app development; calculate ROI for mobile site dev.

Add macaroni: City level demand, mine competitive keywords, find mobile opps.

Next up is Keri Morgret. She is going to focus on finding more negative keywords.

Why be negative? The search query report is not going to show everything.

“Honeymoon for three” is the query she started with and she saw that there was a movie result, but wasn’t what she was looking for. She began using IMDB to compile a negative keyword list.

Don’t let your KWs battle each other, use common sense. Negative KW lists make it easy to manage and put into buckets.

• Government sites are good; great is you’re running a branding campaign.
• ESL vocabulary lists are useful.
• Wikipedia “see also” is helpful. Disambiguation pages.
• Forbes Top 100 list.
• Affiliate keyword lists.
• Using Google itself (using the minus sign in the query).
• Don’t overlook abbreviations.
• Natural language — Yahoo! Answers.
• Monitor current trends in Google and Twitter.
• Stock symbols.
• Airport codes.
• Banned list for forums.
• SEOs using advanced query operators like site: or looking for links with keyword “add URL.”

Tools:

• Table2Clipboard
• OutWit Hub

Jessica Lee is the founder and chief creative for bizbuzzcontent Inc., a marketing boutique that focuses on digital content strategy and professional writing services for businesses.

See Jessica's author page for links to connect on social media.