How To Find The Key Words For Your Research

Regardless of whether you are selling shoes or a marketing agency, the foundations of your success lie here, in the keyword research.  The keyword search is the one tool that determines what people are searching for and how it relates to your brand. In SEO it is an invaluable tool to help you discover what your customers are searching for. Today any site owner who hasn’t done any keyword research, is really going to miss out! Do you rank for the keyword that is pivotal for your business?

Ranking for the right keyword is the make or break for many companies, Keyword research cuts out a lot of the detective work that will help you discover what people are searching for. Not only does keyword research give you an idea of what people are searching for but actually the language they are using to search as well. A very useful insight when it comes to including these words on your site or blog.

Here’s how to get the best from your research:

• Identify the landing pages. This is your first port of call when searching for a keyword. Once you have identified what your homepages are then the next step is simple.

• Rough Keyword Research, this is where you will discover the simplest form of keywords that people will be searching for. Don’t forget to search for the long tail keywords. If somebody is searching for ‘dress’ then you can safely assume they are just browsing. However, if they searched for ‘Stella McCartney Saskia dress size 8’ – here is a customer desperate to buy, as a retailer this is not an opportunity you would want to miss! Long tail keywords are pivotal when it comes to discovering what consumers are looking for, imperative as these days more and more businesses are online and a faster pace of life and the ‘I want it now’ attitude of today’s consumers see online shopping at an all-time high.  If you can find the right search terms that your buyers are using then you have hit the rankings jackpot.

• Place each keyword in a system such as Google Keyword Checker; this will give you a guide as to the popularity of the keyword chosen. Once you have established the search volume of each keyword then you need to start to weed out the lower volume search words. You can also find out the words that Google ‘hint’ might be a valuable option for you to use as a keyword.

• The next stage is combining list #2 which consists of all these valuable keywords and establishing who the competition is and where they stand in terms of searches. Look at a list of competitors and search their Meta titles and landing pages for search terms that you haven’t discovered yet.

• By putting these words through the keyword search again and you can finally draw up a final list of keywords with a good search volume and then checking them against the level of competition and here you have your final list and the start of a successful campaign!

Searching for realistic search terms is as important as discovering the keywords themselves. If you can add a ‘human voice’ to the keywords then this automatically makes them sound more trustworthy, something that a consumer will believe. Without this valuable tool then your site will never gain the ranking you need to be successful. No savvy SEO would neglect the keywords. To get a true impression of what key words you need you have to have an understanding of your site and test and retest the keywords. Be realistic and never forget the power of the long tail keyword and believe in the terms you are searching for. This is the only way you can really get a taste of the true value of a search.

We are extremely excited to share the news that Verve Search has been shortlisted in 4 categories at this years European Search Awards in Barcelona.

We are shortlisted in 3 categories with our client Miinto (Denmark, Norway & Sweden) for SEO services which we named “The Organic Viking Invasion” :

“Best Use of Search Retail”
“Best Pan European Campaign” and
“Best SEO Campaign”

The last category we have been shortlisted for is “Best Low Budget Campaign” four the “Eyes of the World” Social/SEO campaign for Taxiadvertising.com,

The last year has been very exciting for Verve Search and we have seen an immense growth, both in terms of employees and clients. We are very lucky to work with some awesome brands and truly brilliant in-house teams.

We are looking forward to the awards in Barcelona and crossing our fingers we come back with several awards.

It was great to be speaking yesterday at International Search Summit. I met a lot of smart people involved in international SEO and shared the “Verve Search way” with them.

I promised I would share my slides ASAP, so here they are. I covered a topic sometimes omitted at SEO conferences, giving a mix of strategy insights and quick wins. So, without further ado…

I also wanted to thank everyone for being so supportive as this was my first speaking gig!

We have a client with a site running on asp.net – Microsoft’s proprietary coding system and in a recent audit or their website, we discovered that many of the pages were of massive weight, although on the surface there doesn’t seem to be much there to make up such huge file sizes.

Looking directly at the code – which you can do by selecting “View Source” from your browser menu of simply by pressing “Control-U” on a PC or “Command-U” on a Mac – we discovered a huge block of apparently random text: almost 193,000 characters in total. Mary Had A Little Lamb in Base 64This was Base 64 code which is used to represent binary data in ASCII format so that it can be securely stored and transferred. Actually, Base 64 is often used by hackers to embed code into a website in the hope that it is not picked up by website security scanners.

In total, this block of characters contributed almost 200Kb to the weight of the HTML file, or around one third of the code on the page. Since the ideal size of a web page is said to be less than 100Kb (a figure quoted in Google’s old “Best Practise” guide) that poses a real problem.

What is worse, this chunk of “useless” code was placed towards the top of the HTML, and we all know that “search engines only spider the first 10% of any page”.

Readers with experience of asp.net will by now have realised that we’re taking about ViewState here.

ViewState is used by asp.net to “remember” the status of web forms and widgets on page refreshes or post backs in the same way that other programming languages like PHP use Cookies. ViewState is turned on by default in asp.net and usually encodes the data from every control on the page, regardless of whether it is actually required.

Several Issues

There are other issues too. Some sloppier programmers have taken storing sensitive or private information in ViewState but since Base 64 is far from secure (there are many Base64 “Decrypters” available online) the data, if intercepted, can easily be decoded.

But the problem for discussion here is: Does a huge hidden ViewState affect SEO?

Certainly, good SEOs will always advise that …

• Page sizes should be kept as small as possible (and preferably less than 100Kb) to speed download
• All the vital information on the page, including the spiderable text and the primary keywords, should feature as far up the page as possible.
• Never include anything in the page code that isn’t needed, including unnecessary JavaScript libraries, directly-accessible sensitive data and useless hidden text which is storing data for no purpose.

On this basis, large ViewState fields might be said to break all three rules; however, as SEOs we soon learn to realise that all rules are made to be broken.

Firstly, the idea that Google and its rivals can’t get beyond the first 100k is a bit of a myth, and it was possible to see this by examining the text of the page in question: bits of the text well down below the massive ViewState field were there in the Google index. This especially true of hidden fields like ViewState which the bots recognise and skip over anyway.

Obviously, even if ViewState did contribute a 200Kb block in the way of the good stuff, GoogleBot simply skipped over it, allowing a good scout around even before hitting the mythical 100Kb limit.

In fact, Google WebMaster Trends Analyst John Mueller says he can’t remember any crawling, indexing, or ranking issues with regards to ViewState on asp.net sites: “We can crawl pages a few megabytes large, so even large ViewState values generally wouldn’t block that”.

ViewState could also be seen as a way of passing information between pages without “cookies”, and thereby a way to circumvent the EU Cookie Directive. In practice, the Cookie law has proved to be less of a drag that was feared and we’ve all become used to clicking away a pop-up to say we accept the use of cookies on a web site. In any event, the low security of Base 64 means it’s no good at preserving a lot of information anyway.

Steps to Take

There is a real problem, however, and that is file size. With the world now getting used to lower and lower bandwidth and download capacity – and by that I mean anyone using a mobile device – huge page sizes are bad news. Anything that can be done to reduce page size and thereby make downloads more reliable is worth doing.  Google has explicitly stated that download speed is a ranking factor.

For asp.net developers that should mean switching off ViewState wherever possible on a per-control, per-page, or server-wide basis using the Control.ViewStateMode property (There’s a full technical description of this at The Microsoft Developer Network see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.control.viewstatemode.aspx). This is now what the client has done, based on our recommendations.

Yet if you believe ViewState is absolutely essential – and I really can’t think why – it should at the very least be moved to the bottom of the code and try to reduce its size and scope.

Speed

I thought that I’d share some observations about online marketing and speed: basically, the relationship between the two and how you can inject speed into your daily process. Speed matters.  If you’re not getting things done quickly then your content isn’t getting online quickly and those blind search engine spiders aren’t going to find the great new stuff you’ve done. Remember, planning, brainstorming, blue sky thinking are all an important part of your process, but once you’ve found your challenge and decided upon how it should be resolved then, my friend, you need to put down your skinny latte and get on with it!

Enough with the Facebook status updates, this is important!

Identifying change

There are many different aspects of your website that need checking and monitoring and I’m not going to bore you with all the tools and apps that can alert you to changes. Change happens, and as SEOs or online marketing people you already know how important it is to react to change. It might be a PR Tweetstorm or a change in ranking for one of your key terms, either way you should already be using tools and applications to spot trouble as it happens, if not before.

Technical challenges need to be properly identified and the source of the issue highlighted fast. You need to know that you’re dealing with the underlying problem, not just its results. Try to get to the nub of the matter fast and stop whatever is occurring from continuing. Kludges, workarounds and sticky plasters are all well and good but they are seldom permanent solutions and the original issue may come back to bite you.

Creating something new

Once you have identified that change has happened you might want to do something about it. This is where Google Analytics or Twitter or a.n.other tool comes into its own, allowing you to identify what exactly has happened and build a response. This might be responding to negative publicity or rectifying a simple bit of code on a website, either way you need a process in place to get it done sharpish.

This is where the ‘process’ needs to be thought through. You have identified the problem, who do you need to implement the change and who do you need to inform that you’re going to make a change? Can this change get to the front of the queue? SEO changes are important and in bigger organisations this is sometimes lost in translation, even when you saying change ‘this’ to get more money, don’t change ‘this’ and lose money and your competitors will pick up the bit you have left behind.

Change can be difficult for some to accept but luckily change is sometimes out of our hands. There are three people in any SEO relationship: the SEO, the client and the search engine. And one of the three is deaf, dumb and blind (it’s the search engine, maybe not dumb, but they don’t give much away).

Once you have the backing of your client and they realise that change needs to happen, great things can happen. You can become like Usain Bolt, you can speed to make changes, you can update content and change code and you can make things better for your end user, you can ‘sell more widgets’.

Change for changes sake

The one thing that all great tools and applications give you is data, and data can tell stories. All life is a story and everyone understands that if explained properly, you’re making changes to result in a happy ending to the story. SEOs never make changes for changes sake, they make changes because they can see a bad ending and they want to make things better. The great thing about online marketing is that you can see results really quickly, so if you do ‘fail fast’ you can get on and correct things.

There is a lot of forecasting that happens in the SEO industry and some big long complicated algorithms that need to be applied and worked on to try and predict outcomes to changes, but the one thing that keeps me interested and keeps me coming back for more each day is no one ever gets it licked, some may get close but you’re never done.
Some Ideas for adding speed to your workflow

• Good monitoring. Make sure you have someone monitoring stuff like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Also consider a big ass application like Linkdex because when it all kicks off you want to have all the information in one place. There are also some automated applications that will ping you messages when you have multiple accounts to look at, like Robotto
• Find problems fast. Screaming Frog is always my go to application when I need information fast.

Meetings

• Stand up meetings are great. No one wants to stand for too long so everyone gets on with what they need to say.
• Massive white boards. Sometimes explaining things to people needs something visual, get a massive white board and write ‘Do this NOW’ on it, or draw a picture of what you’re going to do. Seems to get people’s attention and helps everyone understand why.
• No coffee, no biscuits. Just wastes time, you could be making changes to the live site instead of bleating on about biscuits from your childhood.

Communication

• You need the key peoples’ phone numbers to hand, have them on your mobile, have them on Skype.
• Only copy people into your email who need to be CC’d. Remember, it’s speed, not broadcasting.

Embrace your change and enjoy speed, its exhilarating once you get going!