Keyword Planning & Helpful Tools

On Wednesday, the Digital Marketing class, our GOMC clients and some other Chatham University student's visited Google's Pittsburgh Office to learn more about the AdWords and especially the Keyword Planner, as we will soon start developing our first campaigns. Timothy James and his associate showed us around the building, and then James presented us some useful facts about AdWords. On the webpage, there are some great pictures of the office, and since we were not allowed to take pictures, I suggest you to take a look at them. What sticked the best on my mind from James' presentation was that you can get better with AdWords the more you use, so if you have a lot of time, energy, and interest, you can become very good at ad planning.

When it comes to the actual Google Keyword Planner, you have to sign up for AdWords in order to use it, and create a first ad campaign. However, on the second sign up page, you can play with the keywords: I had never realized that one can search for essentially the same thing in many ways. That's also another point Timothy James made in his presentation; one should search for all kinds of related words before choosing certain ones, as competition might have many good keywords that you would like to use too.

Another keyword planning tool is Moz, which is slightly more sophisticated website for SEO and keyword planning. It helps with pretty much all kinds of SEO issues, like rankings, content, and of course, how to improve the keywords on your ads. The big drawback to Moz is that it is not available for free, after an initial 30-day trial. In addition, it seems to be very similar to the services Google offers for free, but maybe more neutral and better for more accurate advice.

What I learned from the Google Keyword Planner is essentially how to set up an AdWords campaign, and honestly, it was not that difficult. However, the planner itself is quite handy too, as you can see the number of searches for specific keywords, but I was slightly confused as what the number meant (searches per day/week/hour/month?). I did not sign up for Moz, so I can't be sure what their keyword planner looks like, but they suggest on the website that they analyze the keyword suggestions more carefully than Google.

On-Site SEO

Since I will be missing class on Friday, the 23th of January, I am writing this blog post on the third chapter of the Internet Marketing Essentials online book, "On-Site Search Engine Optimization". The number one thing I learned was that one should optimize all keyword phrases according to the website they have, and how big their website is. Also, all keywords should point to specific webpages, instead of just the homepage, from where the visitor would have to click onwards, as the map illustrates.

Source: Internet Marketing Essentials

Other important aspects of on-site SEO are relevance of the webpage content and its quality. Relevance is measured by how well the keyword is related to the page. For example, if the keyword appears in the webpage's URL, it gets a lot of relevance points. Quality, on the other hand is measured by the click-through rate from SERP (Search Engine Results Page), low bounce rate from landing page or overall good quality of the content of the webpage.

What I learned from this chapter is the basis of on-site SEO. As of right now, I feel that I could assist my group's client for the Google Online Marketing Challenge a little bit better, when it comes to attracting more visitors through SEO. I also learned more about relevance and why it is so important to be very descriptive about the website's content and link appropriate keywords to each webpage.

I still have little knowledge when it comes to the internet, but I feel I'm getting a better understanding of it every class. However, as I was reading the chapter, I could not understand a header tag. What is it and what exactly does it do? I also thought about how the chapter describes the usage of long tail keyword phrases, and how small websites benefit more from that than bigger ones. What if not that many people search for longer than one- or two-word phrases? Wouldn't that make it harder for a small website to gain a higher ranking on search results? I certainly try to keep my search words to a minimum, but I guess I can't know what other people are doing, at least not until I learn more about Google and how it works.