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9 SEO Quirks You Should Be Aware Of

February 1, 2013 admin Uncategorized

They say the devil is in the details. When it comes to search engine optimization, those details include some important quirks you need to know about.
SEO Quirks You Need to Know

  • Conforming to search engine behavior
  • Keeping-up with changes in search engine behavior
  • Playing well with other websites to protect your SEO
  • Avoiding common practices that obstruct SEO

Here are nine examples of what I call SEO quirks. See how many you know about.

1. In Subfolder File Names, Use Dashes, Not Underscores

  • Good: http://www.domain.com/sub-folder/file-name.htm
  • Bad: http://www.domain.com/sub_folder/file_name.htm

Many developers favor separating words in file names with underscores (_) instead of hyphens (-). They are conditioned to this behavior because some programming languages reserve the hyphen, for example, as the subtraction infix operator.

On the other hand, Google was written for nerds by nerds; the search engine tends to see underscores as concatenation, or joiners, so technical terms like FTP_BINARY will appear on search results pages.

  • If you are creating a new website, use hyphens.
  • If you have a small website without a lot of inboud links, change existing URLs to hyphens and 301 redirect old URLs to new URLs.
  • If you have an enterprise site that uses underscores, keep your old URLs and CMS rules, but switch from underscores to hyphens as the naming convention for all new file names.

A word of caution, keep the number of words and hyphens to a reasonable amount. On category name or topic level pages, I suggest short and sweet, one or two hyphens. When you create file names for articles, you have a lot more leeway; try not to go to town or stuff keywords.

2.  Avoid Dashes In Domain Names

Select a domain that is your brand or represents your business in a concise, professional manner without dashes. Do not worry about keywords. While I do not know of any technical reason not to use dashes in domain names, from a practical perspective, they look cheap and compromising. That may raise a caution flag when you reach out for links and citations.

One of the primary reasons people select hyphenated domains is to insert keywords. Last year Google updated its algorithms to dampen the exact match domain benefit. However, long before this, the success of numerous brand name domains, many verging on the ludicrous, proved you do not need a keyword rich domain to succeed.

3.  In Subfolder File Names, Use Only Lower Case Letters, Numbers Hyphens

Google and Bing are both terrific at handing complex URLS with spaces and non-standard or encoded characters. Where the problem lies is when other websites link to your documents. If you do not encode special characters, the content management systems of those websites that link to your documents may encode them.

For example, spaces become %20. If those websites use different character sets than what your site uses, they may not translate special characters correctly. The safest thing to do is keep it simple by using only a to z and 0 to 9 and hyphens.

According to the technical standard, URLs are case sensitive. Most content management systems handle mixed case addresses by rewriting them to lower case, but check yours and do not assume this.

Also, some analytics and SEO tools are case sensitive and will report different versions of the same URLs separately. The safest path is to make sure all your internal links are lower case and make lower case the style standard for all copywriters and coders.

4.  The Great Subfolders Vs. Subdomains Debate

It used to be that search engines treated subdomains somewhat like different websites. Today, they are roughly equivalent. In fact, it has been this way for some time. This is good because most third-party applications, like hosted shopping carts, must be in a subdomain.

Search engines are pretty proficient at telling whether subdomains are related or not. For example, Tumblr, Blogspot, and WordPress.com subdomains are not related, while www.domain.com and store.domain.com are related.

If you use subdomains, do not isolate them. Make certain the navigation links between your primary domain and subdomains are well integrated. I have seen applications inside subdomains that will only link to the primary website’s homepage or employ nofollow links.

5.  Be Careful With Parameters

Parameters are variables in URLs. The standard method for creating parameters is to end the address with a question mark, then list parameter names and values.

For example:

http://www.domain.com?category=billiardsgame=nineballarticle=how+to+rack+the+balls

Your content management system may rewrite this into a user- and SEO-friendly format,

http://www.domain.com/billiards/nineball/how-to-rack-the-balls

Both of the above URLs are fine. I prefer the second example as it is easy to read and removes unnecessary words and characters.

You definitely want to avoid missing or non-standard delimiters,

  • http://www.domain.com?nineball (no parameters)
  • http://www.domain.com,billiards,nineball (non-standard parameters)

I have seen some wacky delimiter schemes.

Be careful of user identification parameters like uid=142536 where each visitor gets a different number or tracking parameters like source=xyz where xyz is different for each referring document. These create duplicate content issues.

Your choices include:

  • get rid of them; use cookies instead
  • use the rel=”canonical” tag to tell search engines which URL to index and credit with links and citations
  • tell search engines to ignore the parameters using webmaster tools (Google, Bing)

Another trick is to put parameters that do not affect page content after a #. Search engines almost always ignore everything after the # character in URLs, the exception being the AJAX hash bang.

6. Use Flash Or Silverlight To Insert Multimedia Elements, Not For All Content

While search engines tout their ability to crawl Flash and other rich media, they still do a poor job of it. Flash is great for inserting multimedia — like a video, animation, presentation, or sound file — into an HTML page.

Do not use an all Flash or all Silverlight website. Flash sites are particularly popular among artists, musicians, and photographers, which is a shame because these are people who could benefit from organic search. Keep in mind, Apple’s iDevices do not support Flash, so its popularity is waning anyway.

7.  Pick Only One Per Page, HTTP: Or HTTPS:

Google does not care if you use http: or https: — not!

While Google welcomes both http: and https:, on a URL-by-URL basis, pick one and stick with it. Let us say you have a shopping cart with secure https: checkout. If your crawler-friendly catalog pages resolve to both http: and https: versions, you could be in for a world of trouble.

I have seen websites where all the offsite links go to http: addresses and Google indexes the http: URLS. Then, all of a sudden, the addresses in the Google index change to https: for no apparent reason, and the website’s rankings disappear.

The simplest way to avoid this is with canonical tags that force http: or https:, whichever is the version you want indexed.

8.  Make Sure The Markup Visible Text Matches

When the text in HTML markup does not match what users see, search engines call it cloaking. Sometimes, cloaking is unintentional. One example I saw occurred in a shopping cart where all the links to all the product categories and subcategories were included in the markup of every page. Visitors only saw links to the subcategories of the category they were viewing. The content management system hid the other subcategory links via CSS.

I do not want to get into a debate about white hat vs. black hat cloaking here, especially since Google engineers seem loathe to discuss specific cloaking techniques. Probably because they do not want to give people ideas. The two exceptions, ones they use for demonstration purposes, are serving different content based on user agents and using CSS to position text off the screen (-999 pixels).

They are always quick to say there are no good reasons for cloaking and that they have special detection algorithms that ring the red alert phone. The bottom line for this quirks article is avoid unintentional cloaking.

9.  Using The Vertical Bar In Title Tags

Search for long winding road, long – winding road, long — winding road, and long | winding road. Notice how Google ignores the dashes but not the vertical bar? That bar separates long and winding, not just visually, but in the Google algorithm. If your website uses the vertical bar, experiment by replacing it with a dash and see what happens.

If you knew all nine of my SEO quirks, good for you. It is not easy to maintain a current, comprehensive knowledge of all things Google and Bing SEO. Do you have any SEO quirks of your own? Share them in the comments.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: All Things SEO

Article source: http://searchengineland.com/9-seo-quirks-you-should-be-aware-of-146465

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Keyword Research For Market Discovery: An Essential Tool For Export Marketers

January 22, 2013 admin Uncategorized

Have you ever read those blogs and websites which start with the words, “74% Of The World’s Consumers Don’t Speak English,” or “54% Of The Connected World Is Outside The US?” They’re usually the first post of someone who has just discovered “global” and has been shocked by the numbers.

International Business Is Becoming The Norm

I’m not going to do the shocking numbers bit this time, but what I am going to say is that the Web is so significant to business development in the modern age, that the businesses which are going to do well will all be international! In fact, international will be the new default position for businesses, and dealing with multiple languages, the norm.

You only have to look to the High Street in the UK, in other words, the main shopping areas downtown in the UK, to discover how important this really is. Almost all large and successful retailers in the UK, for instance, win business from other countries. And those who are not doing so well internationally…. well, they are not doing so well overall, either.

First Law Of Marketing: Target Customers Who Are Interested

One of the secrets of success is making the right decisions in the first place about where to target. If you think about it, this is the major cause of all business difficulties when beginning to market overseas.

Target customers who are genuinely interested in your product or service, in the right location to which you can deliver — and things will go swimmingly. Target customers who are not interested and can’t buy your product anyway; well, that’s another case study for me to go on display with at a future International Search Summit.

Making the right decision, however, isn’t easy. As part of the courses on international SEO that I run, we cover a way of thinking about using keyword research in the process.

The first step is to create your candidate list of target regions. (A region, by the way, would be France::French or Belgium::French, both of those would be regions in our terms. You can’t safely treat the world as countries with national borders these days — it’s far more complex than that!)

Using Google Trends Can Help To Identify Target Markets. Source: Google Webcertain.

Using Google Trends Can Help To Identify Target Markets. Source: Google Webcertain.

Creating a candidate list is sometimes determined by logistics, delivery capabilities, the legality of the product or service or other factors. But what do you do if you still have 40 to 60 potential regions to target at the end of the process? The ideal process is to undertake some local market research, perhaps in-street surveys or focus groups, but doing that 40 times over in maybe 20 plus languages would not be for the feint hearted!

Search engines to the rescue.  Fortunately, consumers reveal their purchasing inclinations through the keywords the put into the search query box of search engines — which then kindly enable us to investigate which keywords are showing up in their logs.

Now, it gets a little trickier, but you have to infer some meaning to what they’re searching for.  If you’re about to launch with a product that is already well known and established, this isn’t too difficult to do. The difficulty arises if you’re inventing something new, something which is market disruptive or something completely revolutionary. You are brave.

Look For Indicative Search Terms

But, keyword research can still help you here because there will always be some related terms that will be a good indicator of likely interest in the target region. As I sit here in a snow covered Britain, let’s imagine you’re about to launch some treatment you can use with summer tires to make them more suitable to run on the snow. You’ll want to check out the level of searches for winter tires, even though that’s the market you’re planning to disrupt.

But you also know these searches are historical — they only really show what happened yesterday — so how do you predict the future?  Well, partly, that’s where trends come in. Take the image below showing a search for “winter tyres” in the UK — noting the UK spelling.

Even despite the fact that Google made a geographical tweak in 2011 which shows more data for the UK than before, the patterns show that searches for winter tires have gone up dramatically. Not surprising, when you consider that the last two UK winters have been by far the worst for snow for many years.

Google Trends Shows The Growing Interest In Winter Tyres In The UK. Source:Webcertain

Google Trends Shows The Growing Interest In “Winter Tyres” In The UK. Source:Google Webcertain.

The Diffusion Of Innovation Curve

Now, the thing to remember if you’re checking out something that is truly revolutionary, is the diffusion of innovation curve — something marketers have known about for years.

Often, very successful products already had the creative pioneers and pathfinders  trying to find a solution similar to the one you are offering. This frequently means looking deeper at long-tail keywords because they show more clearly the intent of the user. So, [something that makes my tires stickier for winter] would be a good candidate for your product.

Next, all you need do is compare and contrast different markets — noting that you have to have a very good understanding of the meaning of terms in different languages — so, you can’t just match keywords one-to-one to each other. But, you can gauge which regions have the greatest interest in your solution from your candidate list of potential markets.

Expanding Your Findings

Then, some deeper in-market research can take place to supplement and enlarge upon your findings — but at least, you don’t need to do that in 60 countries and can start to narrow down to the targets which are really interesting!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Multinational Search

Article source: http://searchengineland.com/keyword-research-for-market-discovery-purposes-an-essential-tool-for-export-marketers-145820

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Back To Basics: Getting Started With Keyword Research & Content Creation

January 17, 2013 admin Uncategorized

Sometimes, the best path to success in SEO is going back to the basics of good old fashioned keyword research and content creation with the end goal in mind: the customer and the conversion.

In this article, I’ll look at a website that was submitted for review from a “Keywords and Content” focus. The site is Restoration Parts Source (RPS), an e-commerce website supplying restoration car parts and accessories for new, vintage and classic U.S. makes and models.

1.  Don’t Focus Only On Broad Keywords

In his submission, Michael, RPS’s Web consultant, listed some keywords that are important to them, such as [classic car parts] and [restoration car parts].

While you do want to improve search results for broad keywords like these if you can, the competition can be very high. Plus, you’ll often find the actual business from broad keywords may not be as significant as you expect.

In addition to traffic from broad keywords, we typically see traffic and sales generated from more specific keywords such as [ford mustang parts] that typically return category pages of an e-commerce site in the search results, as well as from searches on specific products themselves such as [Headliner for 1963 Falcon Hardtop], which typically return the product pages in the search results. In fact, for many e-commerce sites, it’s the more specific keywords that are responsible for the majority of the sales.

Ideally, you’ll want to do keyword research for each of the categories and many of the specific products. Test as many of these keywords as possible using a PPC campaign with conversion tracking.

After some time, using site analytics such as Google Analytics, you can get a list of the keywords generating sales from both PPC and organic search. If you focus on improving search results for those keywords, you should increase sales. See Organic Keywords: The First Step In Search Engine Optimization for more information on this.

2.  Do Keyword Research For Product Categories Specific Products

Use a keyword research tool such as the Google AdWords keyword tool to see what people are searching on within your territory for your product categories and specific products. For most e-commerce sites, this will take a fair amount of time; so, start with the important products.

If possible, test the keywords that appear to be relevant in a PPC campaign. Then use the results of the keyword research or the PPC campaign to improve your organic search results. Start with the basics, the HTML Page Titles and the content on the pages.

For example, on the RPS site, the HTML Page Title for the Ford category is simply [Ford Parts]. Not only is this not very enticing when viewed in search results, it is likely too broad. The HTML Page title should help searchers scanning the search results understand what they can expect if they click through to the page. Try to create an enticing message and ideally include one or two important keywords.

If RPS determines that [Ford Restoration Parts] is an important keyword phrase, for example, they might create a more enticing HTML Page Title based on their value statement (which is unclear on the RPS site; see more about this below), and/or based on one or more key features/benefits such as the following (with or without the company name appended at the end):

Discounted Ford Restoration Parts Shipped The Same Day

For more information, see 12 Steps To Optimize A Webpage For Organic Keywords.

 

3.  Add Unique Content On Category Pages To Improve Search Results

Armed with your keyword research and/or results from PPC, add some overview text to your category pages. Yes, on category pages, you don’t want to push your items down too far, but just a couple of sentences can make a difference in search results.

This also gives you a chance to present a sales message to your human visitors, many of whom will land directly on these pages from search results without seeing any messages you may have on your home page.

Here’s an example. Assume that from the results of your PPC testing, you learn that [ford mustang restoration parts] is an important keyword. Do a search on that keyword.

Below is the top organic result I got for a Google search on [ford mustang restoration parts]. Notice in the screen shot below, the reasonably enticing description Google generated for a top ranked listing.

It includes some of the words and phrases searched for in bold such as [Ford Mustang parts], [restoration] and even [restore], which Google knows is a variation of the word “restoration.”

Search description Google generated from text on a page

Search description Google generated from text on a page

 

The description above was created by Google directly from the text on the page (see screen shot below).

Description above was created by Google directly from the text on the page

Description above was created by Google directly from the text on the page (Click to Enlarge)

You can improve your search results, both rankings and click-throughs, by developing similar messages for your category pages that include one or two of the most important keyword phrases for the category. Very often, the search engines will create a description for the search results from the text on the page around occurrences of the keyword the person searched for.

Plus, having the keyword one or more times on the page should help your rankings (don’t stuff it!). You should also create a similarly enticing Meta Description Tag in case the search engine creates a description from it rather than creating a description from the text on the page.

RPS has an issue on some of their category pages which have little category-related text. Some categories have no items at all (this site review is about Keywords and Content, not a User Experience Audit, but I think RPS needs to rethink its navigation system so issues like this do not occur). Hopefully, their site search is helping people find the items they are looking for.

4.  Add Unique Content On Product Pages

Adding your own content to product pages, such as unique product descriptions, your own commentary and helpful messages, user reviews, videos and images will likely help improve search results by making your product pages unique. Plus, including additional content on product pages may get your pages returned in more search results because of the additional text.

Finally, and probably most importantly, your content can help increase sales by helping your shoppers make decisions on what to buy and make them feel more comfortable about buying from you.

Use your keyword research and/or the results from your PPC testing initially for the basics, such as creating an enticing HTML Page Title, ideally including one or two important keywords for the product. Also, take the time to write enticing Meta Description tags for your items or, at least, the most important ones.

Include at least some product description text on the product page (see below about using descriptions provided by your vendors). Keep the important product-specific keywords in mind while writing content for the page, but write for your human visitors, not the search engines.

Many of RPS’s product pages are very sparse on product descriptions such as this Headliner for a 1963 – 65 Falcon Hardtop. There’s just a short description and a product number.

Take a look at the search listing for the top ranking site when I searched on [Headliner 1963 Falcon Hardtop]. As with the category page example above, Google created an enticing search description directly from the product description on the page.

Search description Google generated from text on page

Below is the product description for the Dearborn Classics product page that was returned in the search results above.

Product description for the Dearborn Classics product page that was returned in the search results above.

Product description for Dearborn Classics product page returned in search results above. Click to Enlarge

Using more complete product descriptions such as the above should not only help RPS do better in the search results, it should help improve conversions to sales by providing a stronger, more complete product sales message to their shoppers.

However, it’s important to point out that the product description above used by Dearborn Classics is not unique. I searched on some of it and found the same text being used by many websites. This text is likely being provided by the supplier of these headliners. This is typical of many e-commerce sites that sell products manufactured by others. When the content on your product pages is predominantly the descriptions provided by your suppliers, you’ll be directly competing for rankings with all the other pages that include the same text.

So, when possible, rewrite the description or include a significant amount of your own unique content on the page such as additional product information, your own commentary, additional product images and/or videos, user reviews, etc., (see the next section for more about this).

Automated HTML Page Titles and Meta Description Tags

You won’t be able to write custom HTML Page Titles and Meta description tags for all the items of an e-commerce site that contains hundreds or thousands of items. It’s ideal to use an e-commerce system that creates decent tags using the product headline.

For example, one that creates tags for the HTML Page Title (along with possibly a tag line for the site or the category), while using the first part of the product description on the page for the Meta Description Tag, both of which can be manually overwritten.

5.  Give Your E-commerce Site Personality Build Trust

As I went around the RPS site as a typical shopper, I learned very little about the company and the folks at RPS. When people shop online, they need to feel comfortable before they’ll buy from a company they know little or nothing about.

You can make people feel more comfortable about buying from you by at least employing some basics such as: a professional looking, user-friendly site; a meaningful value statement; a great guaranty and return policy; trust builders like well-known e-commerce security and process badges and seals; user reviews and testimonials, etc.

Make sure these elements are obvious as people shop by putting them, if not on every page, at least prominently one or more pages during the typical buying path (category page to product page to cart, etc.).

You can go much further than the basics and show what sets you apart from the competition while personalizing the site by including: mentions of one or more key personnel; helpful articles and videos; buyers guides; your own commentary about product categories and specific products; additional product information; videos and images, etc.

You could improve conversion rates and improve your search results at the same time by adding unique content to your site, allowing you to reach more searchers. You’ll also likely reach more searchers who are in the early stages of information gathering for a new purchase, giving you the opportunity to influence what they buy and retain them until they are ready to make a purchase.

You can learn more about this in from my earlier blog post, how to how increase e-commerce conversions 2-4x and improve search marketing results by helping shoppers decide what to buy.

6.  Increase Page Strength To Compete With Top Ranked Sites

When Michael submitted the site for review, he mentioned how eBay is often one of the top ranking sites for many of RPS’s products. It can be difficult to beat eBay because of their link popularity (page strength, etc.), but you can, in many cases.

In my searches for some of the products RPS carries, other resellers similar to RPS often ranked higher than eBay. Plus, you really don’t have to rank higher than eBay. Getting to the top few positions should give you your fair share of searchers as many people do look at a few results. And, many people may be looking for a supplier directly and not want shop via eBay.

RPS should be able to increase its business from both search results and other referral sites by focusing on improving their link popularity and social media engagement.

Take a look at some of the ideas that can be employed by e-commerce sites in the following articles to help improve link popularity and social engagement.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Beginner | How To | How To: SEO | Keywords Content

Article source: http://searchengineland.com/back-to-basics-getting-started-with-keyword-research-content-creation-140788

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5 Tools You Never Thought To Use For Link Building

January 16, 2013 admin Uncategorized

Link building tools are everywhere, so much so that it’s safe to assume we’ve saturated the market, and it’s time to move on to building something else. While I rely on some of these as much as Instragram relies on selfies and food photos, some of the best tools I’ve found for link building were actually created to serve a completely different purpose. These are my faves.

1.  UberSuggest

I love UberSuggest. I love it in a box. I love it with a fox. Most love it as a keyword research tool — can you blame them? But, it also has some amazing link building capabilities for content ideas.

Be as specific as possible when you’re putting in queries. Long-tail keywords work great because they’ll generate better content ideas that easily translate into a blog post or article.

 

If Google is suggesting it, it’s going directly into my editorial calendar.

Wil Reynolds also suggested adding “Why does,” “How to” and “How often” to the start of your query to find the questions that people are actually asking about industry. Brilliant.

2.  Wikipedia

You can use Wikipedia to Search for the most general keyword that you have — if your main keyword is [all natural dog food], just search for [dog food]. On the main Dog Food page, the Contents section can give you some content ideas, but the References will be your real source of potential link prospects.

[Dog Food Reviews: Dog Food’s Finest Hour] caught my eye first. Looks like PetFoodTalk.com reviews different brands of dog food. Bingo.

Bonus: check to see if there are any broken links or links to a 404 page in the References section. The [Making homemade dog food recipes] goes to a 404; so, I’d create a piece of content about that,  and update the content in the Wikipedia page to point to a new page instead of the 404. If approved, the link will be nofollowed, but can still provide traffic.

Double Bonus: the other pages that show up under your general term are also worth a perusal.

3.  StumbleUpon

You mean there’s an entire website dedicated to bringing me directly to websites based off my interests? Hello, source gold.

Don’t search for your keywords on StumbleUpon; search instead for the general category (Interest) that they fit into.

For example, if I was doing SEO for a limo company or flower shop, one of my interests would be [wedding]. On the StumbleUpon wedding page, you’ve got oodles of potential sources.

You can also use the Expert tab so find the people who are Stumbling and liking the most wedding-related content. These people aren’t necessarily influencers, but they could be a part of your target audience, so finding patterns of what they share is extremely beneficial.

4.  Followerwonk

When something like Followerwonk allows you to “find, analyze and optimize for social growth,” your link-building radar should immediately be going off.

Search Twitter bios with your keywords [storage virtualization] or industry [technology]. A strong social presence likely indicates a strong website presence. Again, source gold.

 

Influencers are great, but you also want the writers from your industry.  You can do this two ways:

  • By including things like writer, blogger, or journalist in your queries when analyzing Twitter bios
  • Analyzing who’s currently following you (the marketer),  your client’s business, or your client’s competitors.

5.  Google Analytics

I love conversion-oriented link building tactics. It makes sense: you don’t build links for the sake of building links; you build links for the sake of getting customers.

In Google Analytics, find the location where you most of your customers are coming from.

 

Then, target getting links from location-specific websites. Think about promotion ideas you can do for that location. If possible, gear content around that location or that would be useful for those people coming from that location. You’re building link juice, but you’re also building customers.

Hat tip to Jason Acidre for coming up with that gem.

You can find more than just where your customers are coming from in Google Analytics. Find the browser, mobile device, or operating system with the highest conversion rate and create content around those topics.

For example, a lot of our mobile visitors who convert use Samsung devices. Knowing that — and our target audience being marketing executives — I may want to create content on how marketers can better use their Samsung, like “Best Android Apps for the Busy CMO.”

What are some other non-link building tools that you use to help streamline link building?

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Link Building: General | Link Week

Article source: http://searchengineland.com/5-tools-you-never-thought-to-use-for-link-building-144749

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Analytics Matched Search Queries Vs. AdWords Keyword Details Report

January 11, 2013 admin Uncategorized

A question recently came across my desk regarding the use of the Matched Search Queries Report in Analytics when compared to the Keyword Details Report in AdWords.

The inquirer was interested in the benefits or drawbacks to both reports, also asking if they were interchangeable. I figured this was a great question to answer in the Search Analytics field, so I’ll do my best to define and give my opinion regarding the pros, cons and interchangeability of these two complex reports.

First, we need to understand what each report provides data-wise. Let’s take a look at the basic data available for each one.

Matched Search Queries Report

This report offers insights into the keywords searched for that lead to paid advertising conversions. This report only includes AdWords data. Its standard information, without altering and creating custom reports based on this report, includes the following:

  • Visits
  • Pages per Visit
  • Average Visit Duration
  • % New Visits
  • Bounce Rate
  • Goal Completions
  • Revenue

The e-commerce tab of the report offers additional data:

  • Transactions
  • Average Value
  • E-commerce Conversion Rate
  • Per Visit Value

With this data, I can apply advanced filters, or custom filters, to single out a variety of segments of traffic. I can also look at search query versus landing page or exit page data using the secondary dimension feature. This data is much easier to manipulate.

With the matched search query report, we also have the option of looking at the data by match type. Knowing what types of keywords lead to the most revenue can help you make decisions about how you bid on keywords, as well as what types of keywords are worth the impressions as you build up to creating conversions.

I found it very interesting that in the data sample I looked at, Exact match keywords created more visits and more conversions, but less revenue overall. Broad match keywords created nearly double the revenue, with half the transactions. Phrase match keywords had the fewest visits and conversions, along with the lowest per-visit value.

Pros Cons For Matched Search Queries Report

Below is the list of pros and cons for the Matched Search Queries Report.

Pros

  • Shows data by match type
  • Can apply Advanced Segments to this data easily, which is helpful if you’ve built custom segments by demographic or geographic location
  • Can compare PPC performance against organic performance, overall performance, or just specific segments of traffic fairly easily
  • Easily see e-commerce data applied to each keyword, and to each match type
  • View keyword data by landing page

Cons

  • If you work in Excel to manipulate data, you can’t get all the data out in one dump; you’ll need to dump multiple reports and marry them together in a spreadsheet
  • You can’t easily see AdGroup level data here; however,  you can get it by using a secondary dimension, then export to Excel, then sort and filter to find what I need, but it’s a bit “clunky”

AdWords Keyword Details Report

First, if you’re a beginner, you might not know where to find this information. It’s not something that is front and center, glaring you in the face. I think it should be, but Google doesn’t right now. You’ll find the keyword detail report here:

You can look at this for all campaigns, a single campaign, or a single AdGroup within a campaign. When you’re diagnosing issues with keywords, and landing page issues, this report, in its most drilled-down format, can be very helpful. You can add 24 different data points to this report. I’m not going to list all 24 here, but what this report doesn’t show is going to be pretty apparent in the “cons” section below

I’m a big fan of the data in the Keyword Details report. It’s much more reliable and realistic than just managing PPCs based on the keywords you’re bidding on. In my opinion, PPC managers should spend a great deal of time deep into this data. The keyword you’ve bid on tells only half the story. Because of the great variety of match types, what your ads actually show up for holds much more weight than what you’re bidding on.

I also like the ability to add up to 24 different data points to one report and then have the ability to dump this all out into an Excel spreadsheet. This is much faster than dumping 3 reports and copying and pasting them together as we do in the Match Search Queries report.

Pros Cons For AdWords Keyword Details Report

Here are the pros and cons to the Keyword Details Report from my point of view. If you have other pros and cons, please feel free to share with the group in the comments section below!

Pros

  • You can find the Keywords that trigger your Product Listing Ads with this report. If you’re running these with a hookup to the Google Merchant Center, you know how difficult that data is to find. Just filter the report for all campaigns down to your Product Listing Ads AdGroup or Campaign.
  • You can add up to 24 columns of data to this report and export it all to Excel.  This makes the data much easier to manipulate much more quickly.
  • You’re given the keyword that you’ve bid on, with match type, that generated the actual keyword the searcher queried.
  • I can see if I have AdGroups or campaigns that are competing for the same term. If I sort the actual query by a single phrase – “Red Widgets,” I can see how many different AdGroups contain keywords I’m bidding on that generate that phrase.
  • I can see much more granular AdGroup data here. While AdGroup data is available via a secondary dimension in Analytics, it requires sorting, etc. to get there.

Cons

  • Even though you’re able to add 24 different data points to this report, you’re not given the site-specific data in the AdWords report. There’s no bounce rate, average time on site, average page views, etc., available when you’re working solely in AdWords.
  • There is no revenue data here. This seems like something that should be there, but it’s not available. I can see the cost, and the number of conversions, and the cost per conversion; but, I cannot see the revenue or the revenue per conversion. Cost per conversion is a figure that needs to be compared to revenue; you’ll have to do this in Excel or build a custom analytics report if you need this data (and you should).
  • It’s very hard to apply demographic or geographic filters to any data in AdWords. This is much easier in Analytics using Advanced Custom Filters.

Reports Are Not Interchangeable

While I think these reports are both very valuable, they are not interchangeable. Each offers insights that make them both important. I think if there were a way to dump the data from both reports into one Excel sheet, having all the queries match up – it would be an extremely powerful tool. Right now, I cannot find anyone who has done this any other way than manual entry. If you know of one, I’d be very excited to see it and to share it with the group.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Beginner | Google: AdWords | Google: Analytics | How To: Analytics | How To: PPC | Search Analytics

Article source: http://searchengineland.com/analytics-matched-search-queries-vs-adwords-keyword-details-report-144833

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