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| Using YouTube as a Keyword Research Tool for SEO Posted: 11 Oct 2010 03:34 AM PDT Posted by kieronhughes This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. This isn't a post about keyword research for video content on YouTube, but about exploring the ways in which it can be used to find relevant data, information and keywords in topics where you have a low understanding of the services and industry. Now for an example... You've just taken on the SEO contract for a private speech therapist based in the UK, and need to carry out industry and keyword research into the sector to best understand the opportunities available, and to structure their in-development website accordingly. You don't know much about speech therapy, but you've been given some information by your client and now you're on the hunt for keywords. Heading over to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, you put in "speech therapy" to see what suggestions/volumes are thrown up.
Now although the results displayed by the Google Keyword Tool might be relevant to what you are looking for, they don't provide the bigger picture, which is what you should be looking for.
All of this information can no doubt be found by carrying out your own research on Google/your other favourite search engine, but it can still be difficult to sift through the results to find the correct information you are looking for... and this is where YouTube can really help. Using YouTube as a Keyword Tool Unlike creating a web page, uploading a video to YouTube is very accessible to anybody with a video file and an internet connection. The great advantage of the upload process is that Google prompts people to provide descriptive content about the video, such as explanatory text (description), a relevant title, and appropriate tags - so not only is it easier for the videos to be sorted, it means more data is available for us to mine. A search on YouTube for "speech therapy" provides 3,870 results, and at random I chose a video recording of a speech therapy class. Scrolling past the video to look at the related information provides a great initial insight:
From the above information we can get the following keywords:
Even with a somewhat basic knowledge of speech therapy it would have been difficult to know that "oral motor therapy" and "apraxia" were related to problems with speech - and it's a great stepping stone in our keyword research. Scrolling further down the page to analyse the comments, we see:
Which provides us with further keywords and opportunities:
Other comments on the page are equally as helpful, with examples such as "decreasing hyper sensitivity" being another useful research avenue. Looking around YouTube, comments can actually be much more helpful than the published video data. Conversations often arise between people, and this is an essential place to look if you want to know more information. Once you have taken the time to browse the videos, note down some of the related information and make a list of possible opportunities, then you can go back to the Google Keyword Tool (or whatever tool you might be using) with a whole load of ammo for your next stage of research. The advantage to this second iteration is that you will have also used YouTube what it is intended for - to watch videos, and to find out more information about the services and conditions related to speech therapy (greater understanding of your client's business means you can ultimately do a better job for them). Also note that you should research any of the phrases you find in more detail before optimising a website for them - more about this point at the end of the article. From just the initial view carried out on YouTube above, we have gone from a sitemap looking similar to this:
To something more representative of this:
The above sitemap has been generated after looking at only one YouTube video on the subject, so imagine the level of data you could get into if you carried out full research? By following an iterative process of looking at YouTube, understanding the opportunities, and analysing the search volumes, you can begin to form a visual picture of how products and services are related - something that can be then portrayed back to the client for approval and additional ideas. Clients can often be too familiar with their business, and miss out a basic level of information when attempting to explain what it is they offer - and this is usually the most valuable detail from an SEO perspective. Carrying out your own research is vital to covering all of the best angles when working with a new website, and you shouldn't just stop at the list of service offerings that the client provides you with. Take things one step further, and you'll no doubt find the website is in a greater position to dominate search visibility than some of the key comptitors in the industry. Use All of the Data Available With people of all ages, backgrounds, specialties and even personal experiences uploading and contributing to YouTube, it really is a gold mine of information and can help a great deal for search marketing campaigns. If you're researching a particular service/product/industry, why wouldn't you use all of the information that is freely available? - especially when you have a user-updated resource such as YouTube at your finger tips. The one point I'll leave on, is that YouTube shouldn't be used for all of your research on a particular subject, as it is, after all, open to mislabelling, incorrect information and of course the efforts by fellow SEOs to promote video content ;) I'm no way affiliated with anyone in speech therapy, but I'm sure the children's communication charity I CAN would appreciate a donation if you're feeling generous: http://www.ican.org.uk/Support%20Us/Donate/Donate%20Now |
| Hands-On Tips For Link Building Posted: 10 Oct 2010 01:40 PM PDT Posted by Paddy_Moogan One issue we seem to come across quite a lot as a search consultancy is helping clients do their own link building. As we all know, link building can be a difficult task even when you're a full time SEO, let alone if it's not even your main role within a company. To overcome this, we try and provide processes and examples which are easily followed and provide the best return on time spent. The point of this post is to provide you with easy to follow tips for finding blogs and websites to get links from. I'll provide specific examples to help with this too. I want these to be as actionable as possible rather than just giving you theory. As you might have noticed from my previous posts, I like to display processes in a graphic where possible. This post can be split down into this basic link building process:
What are you USPs & ResourcesA USP is your unique selling point, what makes you different from your competitors. For me, this is one of the most important parts of your link building strategy. This is the stage where you are able to identify what you can use to get links that your competitors can’t. These are the links that can ultimately make the difference between 3rd and 1st in Google rankings. We've written about this a few times including this case study of using bespoke products to get links. Therefore the first step should always be to list your USPs. This can help you find the quality links quicker. The USPs that you find will then feed into our research on finding places to get links from which will be covered below. Key Pro Tip – Don’t just look at the website to try and find the USPs. There is a big difference between the USPs that you spot on a website and those that you’ll find in a company as a whole. Some of the examples below will not be found by just looking at the website, you need to get them from the company itself. I love giving examples, but being a USP, only you can really find out what they are! The link above is a great example of one that Tom found. My advice would be to get inside a company and find out everything you can about them to find these USPs. Having said that, there are more generic "resources" which could be applicable to a number of websites and companies out there. I've listed a few examples of these below along with how they can help you secure links. Influential Staff If you have staff who are quite well known in the industry, then this can certainly help you on a number of fronts. They can provide you with intros to their business associates who in turn may put you in touch with website editors. They can also try and call in favours from people to arrange guest blogging opportunities perhaps, ask suppliers to give you a link from their website. Stock/Products If you are an Ecommerce website, you can use spare stock and products to get links in a number of ways. You can send samples to industry experts, bloggers or just regular customers and ask them to write a review on their website. You can also donate products to a good cause like a charity or a sports team and ask for a link to your website in return. Discount Vouchers I love this one. You can use discount vouchers to get links by letting industry sites and bloggers know about them. Encourage them to use the discount vouchers themselves and to share them with their readers. This makes the blogger look good, will keep their readers happy and send more traffic to your website. Email Lists This one can work as a link building bargaining chip. If you ask for a link from someone and they want a link in return, many of us will say we can't do that. How about offering them a feature in your newsletter that goes out to x number of people every month? They will benefit by getting exposure to lots of targeted people and will probably see a spike in traffic as a result, whilst you get the one way link you want. External Web Properties such as microsites Similar to email lists, these can be used as bargaining chips to give people exposure whilst not linking to them directly from your main site. This works even better if you have control of pages which are not domains you own. Think about Facebook business pages, Twitter pages or even pages on content platforms such as Hubpages. Existing Link Bait or Content Looking at the existing content on a website or reviewing previous attempts at link bait can be very worthwhile. Sometimes there may be some amazing pieces of content created where the promotion didn't quite work that well or it didn't attract as many links as it deserved. If you find content like this, then you have a shortcut to a great link bait campaign. Environmentally Friendly Company Policies I go into more detail about this one below as I use it as an example. The principle however is that there are various websites and initiatives online that will give links and exposure to companies who are conscious of their effect on the environment.
Charity Work carried out by the company This is great from a PR point of view and can sometimes get you links from news sites, but it can also get you link from the charity websites themselves. Some will have pages where they list the people and companies who have supported them. These are good places to get links from whilst doing something great for others at the same time. Resource in terms of staff who have “spare” time An example here could be a client who have customer service or call centre staff who are not always busy. There may be gaps in the day when they can do other tasks to help out with the SEO. Small tasks like creating bits of content, Tweeting on your behalf or joining forums and social media sites are all simple tasks which can be delegated. Whatever your USPs are, the key is to make sure you use list them and feed them through into your link building campaigns. At this point, you should have a list of USPs which you can now use to find websites that will link to you because of them. Lets move onto the next step which is finding the links you want. Start with the Basics – Google it!Sounds obvious, but seriously this is the best place to start. Lets take an example of a USP of our company having some “green” credentials or being environmentally friendly policies.
In the interests of saving time, I’m going to give an example of how to narrow this down a bit. But I wanted to stress the point that a search as obvious as this can bring back some good results. To narrow things down a bit, you could do this:
The addition of inurl:links tells Google to only show results where the URL contains the word "links". Just adding this reduced my results significantly and more importantly, gave me a better set of results and therefore a better chance of getting links quickly. Using Advanced Google SearchesI gave a few tips on this in my previous SEOmoz post on Market Research for Link Building but wanted to go into a bit more detail here and provide a few extra search queries for you to use. Note that you can choose to add keywords to these queries. However depending on the scope of the guest blogging you can do, you could leave keywords to create less specific search results, which might open up new areas and angles. Don't Forget your USPs Continuing with the idea of using your USPs, if I had a site that always had some kind of discount voucher or special offer running, I could use the following search: frugal blog +"discount vouchers" This will return blogs that are focused around saving money by giving tips and discount vouchers to their users. The perfect sites to contact and share your discount vouchers with. Oh and if you want a real quick list of sites, here is a massive list of discount sites :) Finding Guest Blog Post Opportunities I’m not going to preach to you about the benefits of guest blogging as a link building technique, it's enough to say it can work very well. Here are my favourite search queries for finding these opportunities: inurl:guest-post –how to – seo This one works on the basis that many blog owners will highlight the post being a guest one within the title which then puts the wording into the URL. Also, again to save time, I’ve excluded “how to guest post” style articles and SEO as they were scattered amongst the results and take time to filter out manually. inurl:label/guest –how to –seo Similar to the one above, this one is aimed at Blogspot blogs, results don’t seem quite as good but there are still plenty of opportunities. inurl:category/guest This is great as lots of standard Wordpress blogs will use this structure for their URL so you usually get a decent amount of results. keyword +blog +july 2010 inurl:guest The advantage of this one is that you are limiting your results in such a way as to only show active blogs. Chances are that if a blog includes a recent month and year on the page, they are active and are therefore more likely to respond. Finding Directories unlikely to get you into trouble We are always asked – will I get a penalty if I get a link from this directory. Well its a tough question to answer and not in the scope of this post. Instead I’ll point you towards the guidelines in this section of the SEOmoz Guide to Link Building. To try and help find directories that are unlikely to cause you an issue, try a search query such as this: keyword inurl:directory –buy –anchor text –pagerank –pr You can add all sorts of additional words to this, but the idea is that you don’t want to get links from a directory who are blatantly giving links in order to pass anchor text and PageRank in return for money. Use the Similar Sites Feature on GoogleReally quick tip here but this can be quite effective. When you are doing the research on finding sites in Google, you will come across a few gems which are perfectly suited to the types of site you want. When you find these, use the Similar feature on Google to find sites which are along the same lines:
To take things a step further, you can tweak the search to include different keywords, such as the original one we started with: The great thing about this kind of query is that it keeps things as relevant as possible. It also helps if you choose a fairly authoritative website to use as your related one because Google seem to provide sites which are of a similar authority. Getting a bit more creative with competitor researchThere are a few tools around at the moment that are designed to help with local search and finding places to get citations from. Rand mentioned this one from Whitespark in a blog post on link building last week. However I have a couple more tips that could also help. Search for Competitor Phone Numbers This can be a little hit and miss if I'm honest but if you come across certain competitors who are very active in getting citations and links from business listing sites, then this can be a goldmine. You can cut down the time spent on this by using multiple competitor phone numbers at the same time: "0800 123 4567" OR "0700 123 4567" OR "0845 123 4567" As I said, can be a bit hit and miss but certainly worth a try and very actionable. Quality ControlAnother common question we hear from clients is "how do I know this is a good page to get a link from?" Again, a tough one to answer as many experienced SEOs will use their instinct as well as tools, so they 'just know' if a page is good or not. Unfortunately, many SEOs do not have this level of experience and your clients certainly will not be able to do this. So here are a few questions they can ask themselves instead. Some will be made easier to answer by using some simple tools which I've also provided. 1. Has the page been cached? Unless the page is very, very new, then the answer should be yes if you want a link from it. Check using the Google Toolbar or SEO Book Toolbar 2. How many outgoing links are there on the page? Its hard to put a fixed number on this as there are legitimate reasons for lots of outgoing links on a single page. However in general, I'd be a bit wary of a page that had more outgoing links than internal links. If you are going to put a figure on it, then I'd say that if outgoing links are heading into the 100's, then be careful that the quality of these links are good. Check using the Search Status plugin for Firefox. 3. How many incoming links are there to the domain and page? I'm always surprised at how many people don't look at this, many tools make this quite easy and quick. What you are looking for is a decent amount of quality links coming into the domain and a handful coming into the page you want a link from. Check using the Search Status plugin, SEO Book Toolbar or the SEOmoz Toolbar 4. Does the site appear top for a Google search for the site name and the URL? If it doesn't appear anywhere, then there is a reason for this and this is the most surefire way of quickly seeing that a site has been penalised. Check using Google! 5. If Matt Cutts looked at it, would he want to keep it in the Google index? Its important to be very honest with yourself on this one. If the answer is no, then leave the page and move on! Essentially you are looking at the site as if you were Google and being honest about whether it is a quality, useful site or not. There is a bit more intuition involved in this one so you can't really check with a single tool unfortunately. Go Get Em!Lets recap what we should have done so far in this process.
So we have the final step of actually getting the links. Now the fun starts! For me, getting the links comes down to three things:
If you can do these things, you will improve your link building conversion rate. Lets now look at each one in a bit more detail. Using your assets and USPs I've already mentioned this above in relation to finding links, however don't forget this when you are contacting people to actually get the links. If you want a link from someone because you are a green company, tell them! Back this up with a page on your website describing why you are a green company so they can see that you're genuine. Make it obvious what the USP is, here is a great example from Rackspace who are a web hosting provider -
In short - make it obvious why someone should link to you. Getting yourself noticed In order for someone to link to you, you need to get yourself noticed by them. I'd tend to try and get someones attention before actually asking for a link. There are quite a few ways to do this:
Direct Email By far the most popular option used by most SEOs. Yes, it can work. People say it doesn't, but from my experience it does. There are loads of ways of approaching someone via email and here is a great article over at Search Engine Land by Garrett French on this. Also there are lots of great tips in this Search Engine Guide article by Jennifer Laycock. These articles are really good and I'd advise you take a look at them, in the meantime here are some quick tips:
Phone Call This is a great way to get links, just pick up the phone! It can be a bit tricky in some industries where the site owners are not always at their desk or work online. However you can usually get a much better response over the phone and save a lot of time by getting a quick answer.
Yes, I know, we're all geeks and don't like using the phone. But it isn't really that hard and you can soon get into the swing of it after a few calls. On the other hand, if you really can't do this yourself - get someone else who can. Especially if you have staff who are good on the phone and can be quickly trained up on this. Depending on the industry, this can be a great one to get peoples attention. I gave a list of ways to connect with people on Twitter in my last SEOmoz post but here is the list again for easy reference:
The key it to get their attention and build a relationship so that they can help you in the future. Blog Commenting No, I'm not talking about dropping links on random blogs and getting attention by being a spammer. I'm talking about finding the high quality blogs of the people you want to get links from, then providing constructive, useful comments. This can lead to them clicking through to your website and seeing your name which will help for when you actually contact them. They'll already be aware of you and your site and therefore are more likely to sit up and take notice of you. Send them Traffic All quality bloggers and website owners will check their analytics to see who is sending them traffic. If you can get yourself onto this list, they will come take a look at you and become familiar with you. You do not even have to link to them from your own site, remember the USPs of microsites and email lists? You can use a microsite to link to them or you can link to them from an email you send out to your subscribers. Either way, they will notice you and you've put yourself in a much better position to contact them and ask for a link. Building a Relationship If you are successful and secure the link you want, don't just take the link and run. Keep in contact with the website owner as you never know when you may be able to help you again. This can even lead to deeper business partnerships which can benefit you both way beyond just getting a link.
Image Source and Good Article from Stoney De Geyter If they don't give you a link, don't just ignore them. Reply and be thankful for their time and ask if you can contact them in the future if other pieces of content may be of interest to them. In short - don't burn your bridges. ConclusionAbove you have loads of hands-on tips and a process for getting quality links, use this yourself or pass it to a client for them to use. Either way just make sure you actually do it! Link building doesn't need to be that hard. |
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