1. Beyond Keyword Research
Advanced Keyword Research Tactics
Bryson Meunier
Natural Search Associate Director, Content Solutions
Resolution Media
2. Resolution Media Overview
• 85+ dedicated search marketing professionals
• Headquartered in Chicago, IL with offices in
NYC and San Francisco
• Acquired by Omnicom Media Group in 2005
• Ranked Top 20 Search Agency by Ad Age in
2006, 2007 and 2008
• $150MM+ in Annual Search Media
Management
4. Keyword Research 1.0
• Search Volume only
consideration
• High volume keywords
not necessarily qualified
• Content that doesn’t
connect to audience
less likely to convert
1. Presentation’s called “beyond keyword research” because it’s going beyond first phase of keyword research
2. As I’ll explain it starts primarily with search volume for web search.
3. This was a good starting point, but marketers can increase relevance and conversion potential from web search by qualifying by query intent
4. And demographic profiling
5. Going beyond that (infinity and beyond as Buzz Lightyear says), we will be going beyond web search, looking at techniques for mining mobile and video queries, and preparing for the future of semantic search
In the beginning, there was the Overture Keyword Tool and it was good
Showed search volume and popular keywords
Match driver made it imperfect, but so did its focus on volume
High volume keywords are not necessarily the keywords that are going to bring in the highest volume of qualified users
Not many tools to assist search marketers in targeting: OSTST, WordTracker, Keyword Discovery and others
Three basic types of user query intent. Various types within three basic types.
Discovered through academic research by Andrei Broder (A Taxonomy of Web Search, 2002: http://www.sigir.org/forum/F2002/broder.pdf ) and expanded upon by Rose and Levison (Understanding User Goals in Web Search, 2004: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=988675 ) and others.
Google uses it to determine relevance, as explained in a September blog post last year (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/search-evaluation-at-google.html ) and the leaked Search Quality Rater’s handbook earlier
Different marketing goals may prioritize a different type of query intent
If you simply looked at search volume, you might have decided to optimize for shoes, but if your audience was male between 18-25, would you have made the right choice?
If you knew your audience you could look at demographic information in free tools like Google Ad Planner and Microsoft AdIntelligence and in subscription based tools like comScore Marketer. If you want to have the most and best data you will use them all.
If you look at the data for shoes you’ll actually see that females and users between 25-50 make up the majority audience searching for the general term. If you were selling young men’s shoes, you would have been misled by the majority search volume. Doing demographic qualification helps make the right marketing decision.
Yahoo! query study, the largest of its kind at twenty million mobile queries was released in 2008 and showed that people search differently on mobile devices.
Because of things like voice search, small keyboards and the context from which they search, the queries that are entered on mobile devices are different than desktop queries. Marketing to this audience means doing mobile-specific keyword research, which can’t be done with tools like Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery or the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
There were a number of ways to do mobile keyword research without a mobile keyword tool. In November of 2008 I detailed 7 ways of doing it on my blog: Relative Searches/Predictive Text
Engine-Direct Research
Query Stats
Industry/Academic Research
Web Analytics Referring Keywords
Desktop Tools for Mobile
Hypothetical Scenario
In the first week of January this year, Google released their own mobile specific keyword tool within AdWords. To reach it you need to set up a mobile campaign within AdWords, and within that campaign is a tool that finds mobile-specific searches and search volume. This is the easiest way at present to do mobile-specific keyword research
Unfortunately the same kind of tool doesn’t exist for video search: update: YouTube keyword tool released yesterday: https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool
Strange because of volume of video search compared to mobile
In terms of market share, YouTube is now the second biggest search engine behind Google search.
Recent hitwise report shows users are looking to be entertained in video search: searching for pop music, comedy and movies.
Query intent is also transactional because of the nature of the web site
Match demographic with video engine demographics
Use YouTube Suggest or YouTube promote to get video-specific queries
Finally, looking a bit further into the future we can look a few weeks in the past to a statement made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "Wouldn't it be nice if Google understood the meaning of a phrase and not just the words you type?" asked Schmidt. And the company wants better search from mobile devices.
Yahoo! already supports RDF and Microsoft bought Powerset in 2008
In order to optimize for semantic search, marketers should continue to understand what they’re promoting conceptually and not just the keywords they use on their pages. How do the keywords relate to each other? How are the concepts interlinked and presented?
Free tools like Visuwords and Thinkbase can be used today to understand semantic relationships between words and concepts. Moving beyond keywords in this sense should help marketers take advantage of semantic search.
To recap, “beyond keyword research” goes beyond search volume based keyword research 1.0 to include query intent and demographic qualification for web search, and beyond web search: mobile, video and semantic search. I hope you found this presentation helpful. As you can see, these methods of advanced keyword research are very new, but they are currently some of the best ways you can go beyond keyword research 1.0 and into the brave new world of search marketing. Download this presentation at BrysonMeunier.com/SMX, where you can find more information related to this topic. Thanks!