Central Perk

joi, 29 septembrie 2011

Using Social Media to Get Ahead of Search Demand

Posted: 28 Sep 2011 01:42 PM PDT

Before I even start saying anything about keyword research I want to take my hat off to Richard Baxter because the tools and methodologies he shared at MozCon make me feel silly for even thinking about bringing something to the Keyword Research table. Now with that said, I have a few ideas about using data sources outside of those that the Search Engines provide to get a sense of what needs people are looking to fulfill right now. Consider this the first in a series.

Correlation Between Social Media & Search Volume

The biggest problem with the Search Engine-provided keyword research tools is the lag time in data. The web is inherently a real-time channel and in order to capitalize upon that you need to be able to leverage any advantage you can in order to get ahead of the search demand. Although Google Trends will give you data when there are huge breakouts on keywords around current events there is a three-day delay with Google Insights and AdWords only gives you monthly numbers!

However there is often a very strong correlation between the number of people talking about a given subject or keyword in Social Media and the amount of search volume for that topic. Compare the trend of tweets posted containing the keyword “Michael Jackson” with search volume for the last 90 days.

"Michael Jackson" Tweets

"Michael Jackson" Search Volume

The graphs are pretty close to identical with a huge spike on August 29^th which is Michael Jackson’s (and my) birthday. The problem is that given the limitations of tools like Google Trends and Google Insights you may not be able to find this out until September 1^st for many keywords and beyond that you may not be able to find complementary long tail terms with search volume.

The insight here is that subjects people are tweeting about are ultimately keywords that people are searching for. The added benefit of using social listening for keyword research that you can also get a good sense of the searcher’s intent to better fulfill their needs.

Due to this correlation social Listening allows you to uncover what topics and keywords will have search demand and what topics are going have a spike in search demand –in real-time.

N-grams

Before we get to the methodology for doing this I have to explain one basic concept –N-grams. An N-gram is a subset of a sequence of length N. In the case of search engines the N is the number of words in a search query. For example (I'm so terrible with gradients):

is a 5-gram. The majority of search queries fall between 2 and 5-grams anything beyond a 5-gram is most likely a long tail keyword that doesn’t have a large enough search volume to warrant content creation.

If this is still unclear check out the Google Books Ngram viewer ; it’s a pretty cool way to get a good idea of what Ngrams are. Also you should check out John Doherty’s Google Analytics Advanced Segments post where talks about how to segment N-grams using RegEx.

Real-Time Keyword Research Methodology

Now that we’ve got the small vocabulary update out of the way let’s talk about how you can do keyword research in real-time. The following methodology was developed by my friend Ron Sansone with some small revisions from me in order to port it into code.

1. Pull all the tweets containing your keyword from Twitter Search within the last hour. This part is pretty straightforward; you want to pull down the most recent portion of the conversation right now in order to extract patterns. Use Topsy for this. If you’re not using Topsy, pulling the last 200 tweets via Twitter is also a good sized data set to use.

2. Identify the top 10 most repeated N-grams ignoring stop words. Here you identify the keywords with the highest (ugh) density. In other words the keywords that are tweeted the most are the ones you are considering for optimization. Be sure to keep this between 2 and 5 N-grams beyond that you most likely not dealing with a large enough search volume to make your efforts worthwhile. Also be sure to exclude stop words so you don’t end up with n-grams like “jackson the” or “has Michael.” Here’s a list of English stop words and Textalyser has an adequate tool for breaking a block of text into N-grams.

3. Check to see if there is already search volume in the Adwords Keyword tool or Google Insights. This process is not just about identifying breakout keywords that aren’t being shown yet in Google Insights but it’s also about identifying keywords with existing search volume that are about to get boost. Therefore you’ll want to check the Search Engine tools to see if any search volume exists in order to prioritize opportunities.

4. Pull the Klout scores of all the users tweeting them. Yeah, yeah I know Klout is a completely arbitrary calculation but you want to know that the people tweeting the keywords have some sort of influence. If you find that a given N-gram has been used many times by a bunch of spammy Twitter profiles then that N-gram is absolutely not useful. Also if you create content around the given term, you’ll know exactly who to send it to.

Methodology Expanded

I expanded on Ron’s methodology by introducing another data source. If you were at SMX East you might have heard me express the love that low budget hustlers (such as myself) have for SocialMention. Using SocialMention allows you pull data from up to 100+ social media properties and news sources. Unlike Topsy or Twitter there is an easy CSV/Excel File export and they give you the top 1-grams being used in posts related to that topic. Be sure to exclude images, audio and video from your search results as they are not useful.

"Michael Jackson" Social Mention

One quick note: The CSV export will only give you a list of URLs, sources, page titles and main ideas. You will still have to extract the data manually or with some of the ImportXML magic that Tom Critchlow debuted earlier this year.

So What's the Point?

So what does all of this get me? Well today it got me "michael jackson trial," "jackson trial," "south park" and "heard today." So if I was looking to do some content around Michael Jackson I'd find out what news came to light in court, illustrate the trial and the news in a blog post using South Park characters and fire it off to all the influencers that tweeted about it. Need I say more? You can now easily figure out what type of content would make viral link bait in real-time.

GoFish

So this sounds like a lot of work to get the jump on a few keywords, doesn’t it?

Well I can definitely relate and especially since I am a programmer it’s quite painful for me to do any repetitive task. Seriously am I really going to sit in Excel and remove stop words? No I’m not and neither should you. Whenever a methodology like this pops up the first thing I think is how to automate it. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to the legendary GoFish real-time keyword research tool.

I built this from Ron’s methodology and it uses the Topsy, Repustate and SEMRush APIs. When I get some extra time I will include the SocialMention API and hopefully Google will cut the lights back on for my Adwords API as well.

I seriously doubt it will handle the load that comes with being on the front page of SEOmoz as it is only built on 10 proxies and each of these APIs has substantial rate limitations (Topsy – 33k/day, Repustate 50k/month, SEMRush-I’m still not sure) but here it is nonetheless. If anyone wants to donate some AWS instances or a bigger proxy network to me I’ll gladly make this weapons grade. Shout out to John Murch for letting me borrow some of his secret stash of proxies and shout out to Pete Sena at Digital Surgeons for making me all-purpose GUI for my tools.

Anyway all you have to is put in your keyword, press the button, wait for a time and voila you get output that looks like this:

The output is the top 10 N-grams, the combined Klout scores of the all users that tweeted the given N-gram vs the highest combined Klout score possible, all of the users in the data set that tweeted them and the search volume if available.

So that's GoFish. Think of it as a work in progress but let me know what features will help you get more out of it.

Until Next Time…

That’s all I’ve got for this week folks. I’ll be back soon with another real-time keyword research tactic and tool. if you haven’t checked out my keyword-level demographics post yet, please do! In the meantime look for me in the chatroom for Richard Baxter's Actionable Keyword Research for Motivated Marketers Webinar.

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President Obama to Students: "Set Your Sights High"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, Sept. 29, 2011

President Obama to Students: "Set Your Sights High"

Yesterday, President Obama spoke directly to students across the country in his third annual Back-to-School speech. The President encouraged America's students to use their time in school to try new things, discover new passions and hone their skills to prepare themselves for the kind of profession they want in the future.

Watch the video.

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan talk in a hold area before the President delivers his third annual back-to-school speech at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in Washington, D.C. Sept. 28, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

SEOptimise

Top 10 Retail SEO Mistakes UK Brands Are Still Making

Posted: 28 Sep 2011 04:39 AM PDT

Last week I asked on Twitter to see what common SEO mistakes were still being made by retail websites. This received a great response, so I thought I’d share the top replies with our readers.

I’ve picked some UK high street retail examples to help display the issues raised, but please note that we have no connection with any of these websites – so this is an outside perspective. There may be logical reasons for the examples which we are unaware of, but these have been used in order to highlight where SEO mistakes are commonly made.

Non-descriptive URL structure

Ideally you want to keep your URLs concise and keyword descriptive. So automatically generated, ID-based URLs aren’t going to help your SEO, unless you’re aiming to rank for g474502s2 - in which case Next.co.uk have dominated market share!

Long and messy URLs generated by CMS

Some content management systems really make a mess of URLs. From an SEO perspective you want to have full control over re-writing category-level URLs such as this one on Argos:

Linking to multiple homepage URLs

This is a common mistake – which is getting better across many sites, but if you click the logo or homepage link on some sites, you’ll find that rather than getting sent back to the root domain, you’re taken to a duplicate copy of the page on a new URL. See this example on House of Fraser:

Poor title tags/meta descriptions

I’ve worked with a CMS before that didn’t allow you to edit title tags at all – that was a bit of a problem! Hopefully your site won’t be quite that bad, but too often people just think about SEO for generating rankings – what about click through rates and conversions though?

Crafting an enticing title tag and meta description should be as important as writing a high CTR, converting AdWords ad – notice the difference between these two listings for Marks and Spencer – surely M&S would prefer you click on the natural free listing given the choice!

No user-generated content/reviews

For conversion rates alone, having reviews and user-generated content is an excellent way to boost your site’s performance. See this case study on how onlineshoes.com increased sales by 119% due to user reviews. But it’s also a great way of adding extra content to your products – giving the search engines that extra 200-300 words of unique and what should be well-optimised copy (because it’s about the product) could well be enough to make a significant increase in search rankings.

It could certainly be worth testing at the very least for a lot of brands, for example Ted Baker:

Forgetting about branded product search

One of the first things I check with our e-commerce and retail clients is branded search results. It’s often just taken for granted that you will be ranking for your branded keywords, so it’s assumed that non-branded search and first-time visitors is the main target. However, this isn’t always the case and it definitely shouldn’t just be assumed – these are almost certainly going to be your top converting keywords, so a small amount of effort here can easily pay off to ensure that you’re generating the majority of traffic – which let’s face it you deserve, it’s your product after all!

It’s amazing how many brands don’t rank for their own products though – check out these results for Sony W510 12MP which are dominated by Argos and Amazon:

Lack of static on-page content

Many websites struggle when it comes to having good, optimised content deeper in the site. For example, product pages which have very little descriptive text written about them could be much better optimised for search. See this example from Monsoon, which showcases the product reasonably well, but does little towards telling users and the search engines about it:

Pulling search results in as category pages

As above, sometimes category pages are very weak on content and often these are just search results which are being pulled into a page. Yes it may do a job for the user – but surely a bit more text here would help to give the search engines a bit more to go on. It doesn’t even have to be too detailed – a quick description underneath “Mens Hats, Gloves & Scarves” on the Debenhams site here would be a big improvement to optimise for the phrase “Mens Hats”, which they currently bid on using PPC, yet fail to rank in the top 50 positions in Google organically for:

Webpages & content too image-based

From the websites I’ve reviewed today, I’ve actually been quite impressed that most of these have now moved away from having content which is too image or flash-based. This is a clear SEO issue to avoid, as you want your site’s content to be as well optimised as possible – which means it should be text-rich. Topman is an example of a site which hasn’t quite got there yet – the only text currently on their homepage is navigational:

Duplicate content – same product, multiple categories

I’ve seen several retail sites in the past where they have caused duplicate content issues by having category-level subfolders within the product URL. Here’s one example from Blacks, where they have a product which is listed under two different categories, so they’ve ended up with two URLs for what is exactly the same product:

Because they sit under both categories, the URLs are duplicated – so ideally it’s normally best to avoid using category-level subfolders in product pages – see Amazon for an example of this. Also, canonical tags are there to help get around this issue if it exists – but ideally you’ll want to have each product page in a single location. Hope that makes sense, but Dan’s written a much more detailed post on product URLs causing duplicate content issues – so you should read that one if it doesn’t!

So those are the top SEO mistakes we’ve found retail websites are still making – a big thanks to Malcolm Slade, Rishi Lakhani, Paul Rogers, Stuart Turner, Ashley Hayward, Daniel Bianchini, Ian Galpin and Edwin Hayward who contributed via Twitter. And if you have any questions or comments on what you’ve found to be the biggest challenges, it would be great to hear about this in the comments.

Seth's Blog : The forever recession (and the coming revolution)

The forever recession (and the coming revolution)

There are actually two recessions:

The first is the cyclical one, the one that inevitably comes and then inevitably goes. There's plenty of evidence that intervention can shorten it, and also indications that overdoing a response to it is a waste or even harmful.

The other recession, though, the one with the loss of "good factory jobs" and systemic unemployment--I fear that this recession is here forever.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.

There's a race to the bottom, one where communities fight to suspend labor and environmental rules in order to become the world's cheapest supplier. The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win...

Factories were at the center of the industrial age. Buildings where workers came together to efficiently craft cars, pottery, insurance policies and organ transplants--these are job-centric activities, places where local inefficiences are trumped by the gains from mass production and interchangeable parts. If local labor costs the industrialist more, he has to pay it, because what choice does he have?

No longer. If it can be systemized, it will be. If the pressured middleman can find a cheaper source, she will. If the unaffiliated consumer can save a nickel by clicking over here or over there, then that's what's going to happen.

It was the inefficiency caused by geography that permitted local workers to earn a better wage, and it was the inefficiency of imperfect communication that allowed companies to charge higher prices.

The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

This represents a significant discontinuity, a life-changing disappointment for hard-working people who are hoping for stability but are unlikely to get it. It's a recession, the recession of a hundred years of the growth of the industrial complex.

I'm not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities. Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn't look like a job, not a full time one anyway.

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a 'real' job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn't a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

Gears are going to be shifted regardless. In one direction is lowered expectations and plenty of burger flipping. In the other is a race to the top, in which individuals who are awaiting instructions begin to give them instead.

The future feels a lot more like marketing--it's impromptu, it's based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people--and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.

This means we may need to change our expecations, change our training and change how we engage with the future. Still, it's better than fighting for a status quo that is no longer. The good news is clear: every forever recession is followed by a lifetime of growth from the next thing...

Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done.

This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.

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joi, 29 septembrie 2011

Using Social Media to Get Ahead of Search Demand

Using Social Media to Get Ahead of Search Demand

President Obama to Students: "Set Your Sights High"

SEOptimise

SEOptimise

Seth's Blog : The forever recession (and the coming revolution)

The forever recession (and the coming revolution)

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joi, 29 septembrie 2011

Using Social Media to Get Ahead of Search Demand

Using Social Media to Get Ahead of Search Demand

President Obama to Students: "Set Your Sights High"

SEOptimise

SEOptimise

Seth's Blog : The forever recession (and the coming revolution)

The forever recession (and the coming revolution)

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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