Archive for April 2011

There are three different types of keyword search traffic data; broad, phrase and exact. This article explains the differences and advantages and disadvantages of each.

• Broad- Counts all the searches that include all the search terms, in any order and with any number of other words in between.
• Phrase- Counts searches that include the search terms in that order, with no other words in between but with any number of other words before or after.
• Exact- Counts only searches for that exact phrase, in that order and with no other words.
  

	Broad	Phrase	Exact
Traffic	Higher	In Between	Lower
Competition	Higher	In Between	Lower
Relevancy	Lower	In Between	Higher
Advantages	Gives an indication of the total potential search traffic of the niche	Gives a much higher relevancy than broad Gives a good indication of niche potential including medium-long tail keywords	Includes only the most relevant search data Easy to quantify competition
Disadvantages	Overall competition will be much higher and the competition of the included search phrases will be difficult to quantify Overall relevancy will be lower and the relevancy of the included search phrases will be difficult to quantify	Some included searches will still be irrelevant or undesirable	Gives only a conservative indication of search traffic potential

Phrase to Broad Ratio (PBR)

The ratio of phrase/broad searches can give us an indication of whether the search term we are analysing is the most popular order and fit for the broader niche. A low PBR could mean that a different order of the search terms might be more appropriate or that most people search with other terms in between the terms being analysed.

So which one should I use?

Never use broad match to analyse individual keyword search traffic, only as an indication of the total size of the niche and to calculate the Phrase to Broad Ratio, discussed above. Use exact match as a safe indication of search traffic with phrase match being what you can expect as your page/website gains more authority. In the longer term you can expect your traffic to approach the broach match figure but this traffic will likely have higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates as its much less likely to be relevant.

Keyword Competition Analysis

For keyword competition analysis, use phrase/exact match (which are the same thing when doing competition analysis). Broad match will give an indication of how many webpages are targeting the general niche while phrase/exact match will tell you how many webpages are targeting your specific phrase.

A Slightly Different Take

I should point out that there is still some disagreement in the internet marketing community over which match type is the most important to look at. The video below, from Market Samurai, gives a great explanation of each match type and also addresses keyword competition. The video also explains the alternative view that broad match data should be used when assessing potential keyword search traffic.

Traffic analysis is an important part of keyword research. Some adjustments need to be made to the raw data to get figures more useful for local SEO.

Google provides some very useful data through their generator tool that gives us the number of searches for different target keywords. For Australian keyword research we can only narrow the data down to the country level, not individual cities. Therefore some adjustments are required to give us an estimate of keyword traffic for a specific city.

One option is to attribute the number of searches coming from a city as proportionate to the relative population size. Adelaide has a population of around 1.28 million which is 0.064 of the population of Australia (20 million). The Google keyword tool tells us there are 60,500 (broad) searches for 'Indian Restaurant' in Australia every month. If we make our adjustment, we can attribute 3872 of those to Adelaide (0.064 x 60,500).

Keywords that already have a location included in them, such as 'Indian restaurant Adelaide' don't need an adjustment as the vast majority of searches are going to be from Adelaide already. Below is a table compiling search data for keywords that include 'Adelaide' as a location identifier and keywords that have been adjusted to Adelaide from entire country data.

Keyword	Adelaide Searches (adjusted)	Unadjusted Searches (Broad)
adelaide indian	5400	5400
indian restaurant	3872	60500
indian recipes	1734.4	27100
indian restaurants adelaide	1600	1600
indian restaurants	1420.8	22200
indian foods	1420.8	22200
indian takeaway adelaide	1000	1000
curry recipes	947.2	14800
indian curry	947.2	14800
butter chicken recipe	633.6	9900
indian take away	422.4	6600
indian grocery	345.6	5400
arya restaurant adelaide	170	170

This data is for searches over a month. Due to the nature of broad match data there is some cross contamination of searches, e.g. the unadjusted data for 'indian restaurant' would include searches for 'indian restaurant adelaide,' therefore this table should only be used as a guide.

There's both 'Adelaide' and adjusted keywords within the most searched terms so its important to consider both when assessing local keyword traffic.

The next step in keyword research would be to compare the competition for the various keywords. My post from last week covers local keyword competition analysis.

Just thought I'd point out a couple of milestones for the blog.

1. I reached 100 posts last week with my post 'Local Keyword Competition Analysis.'
2. Internet Marketing Adelaide came in at number 52 in Tony McCreath's 'Top 100 Adelaide Website Design Firms.'

I'm looking forward to many more milestones to come.

One of the important steps in keyword research is to assess the competition of the phrases you are analysing. The accepted method for doing this is to look at the number of web pages that are generated when you do a search (located directly below the search bar in Google's search results). When we are talking about local search, there are a number of different ways of searching to get more geographically relevant results. For Adelaide, these might include:

Local Search Method	Number of Results
None. (Google.com)	11 900 000
Google Australia (Google.com.au)	4 530 000
Google Australia + Pages from Australia	649 000
Searching for 'Indian Restaurant Adelaide'	170 000
Google Places Search	682

Note: Google places appeared in several of the normal results searches as well

The most relevant results seem to come from the Places search so we can probably assume the the searching trend will be towards that method of search, although adding 'Adelaide' to the search did result in a lot of relevant results also.

You may have noticed that my blog design has changed significantly. Once I had the chance to use my old blog design for a few months I discovered it had a number of short comings so I decided to change to a new design to improve the usability and effectiveness of my blog.

Changing a website's design is very easy if you are using a content management system (CMS) such as Blogger, which I use, or Wordpress, which is also very popular. All you need to do is go to a website that lists lots of different template designs and pick the one that's right for you.

These are the key features I wanted the new design to have:

• Two column design so the page was less cluttered.
• Sidebar on the right so the content is the first thing that users and search engines will see.
• Large text and clean font for easier reading of posts.
• Large posting (content) area to allow for longer lines meaning less scrolling and wider content such as images, videos and tables.
• Horizontal navigation that is highly customisable.
• Simple and clean design for faster page load times and easier reading.

I went through quite a few different designs before I settled on this one. This design is called 'Twenty Ten' and has been adapted to Blogger (by The Man Who Walked Thru Wall) from the most recent default Wordpress template. I would have liked to have something a bit more unique, many Adelaide Bloggers use this design, but in the end this one has the least number of problems.

Change Log

These are changes I have made to the template code:

• 11/04/2011 -Optimised title tags to show the post name instead of the blog name.
  
• 11/04/2011 - Added copyright info and link to this post in the footer.
  
• 11/04/2011 - Removed the large header image. I don't really have a relevant image to put there at the moment and I like the idea of having a small header to have more content viewable 'above the fold.'
  

• Foursquare Etiquette: Is there a wrong or right way to check-in?- Shai Coggins discusses the ins and out of Foursquare Etiquette. It an interesting post for someone who doesn't use Foursquare (like me) and I think it would be thought provoking for those who do.
  
• Social media: getting on with it-Michelle Prak blogs about Frocomm’s New Media Summit, a digital conference for PR professionals that she attended in Sydney.
  
• Twitter Or LinkedIn – Which Is Better? [4Mins41Secs]-A video and post by Loc Tran addressing the pros and cons of Twitter and Linkedin for business use.
  
• Content calendars are king-Another great post from Michelle Prak about using content calenders for your social media strategy.
  
• Tom Williamson (Twillyon) Interview-This is my interview with Tom Williamson, I think there's some helpful tips in here for everyone.
  
• How Rad is Foursquare 3.0?-Tom 'Twillyon' Williamson, social media expert, blogs about his take on Foursquare 3.0.
  
• .HtAccess 301 Redirect Generator Tool-Another free web development tool from Tony McCreath.
  
• The Search Engine Battle – Google Versus The Rest- A thought provoking article about the looming battle between Google and the Facebook/Bing social search engine.
  

Inbound link building by sponsorship is a link buying technique not yet discounted by Google.

Sponsored Links in Google's Eyes

Link Buying is generally frowned upon by Google and other search engines as a 'black hat' SEO technique. Google considers inbound links as 'votes' for the quality of the website being linked to. However, if someone is able to buy these links then its really only an indication of the size of their bank account rather than the quality of their website and content.

Google often penalises websites that buy or sell links that pass PageRank but sponsorship link building seems to have remained largely untouched. Many of the websites that have sponsors are for non profit events, clubs and community groups so it would be pretty bad PR for Google if they were to penalise these websites or their sponsors. If they were to take action they would probably just discount the links so they carry less or no weight.

Sponsored Links to Help Your Business

There are many organisations and groups out there looking for sponsors. The websites of these groups usually have a page thanking their sponsors. These are the pages you can try and get links from. Buying links this way is relatively low risk, can have great benefits for your website and can make you feel good about supporting those who need the money. Here are some guidelines for who to sponsor:

• Local or Topical- The most beneficial links are those from webpages that are related to your subject, your location or both. If you are targeting the local market then links from other local websites are important. Websites related to your subject (topic or industry) are also very important.
• Keywords- Related to the point above, ideally the 'sponsors' page will have keywords relating to your topic or location so the search engines know that the page is relevant to you which makes the links more beneficial.
  
• Followed Links- You want links that are 'followed' meaning the website is telling the search engines that we trust, endorse and 'vote' for this website.
• Anchor Text- The link will be more beneficial if the link text is one of your keywords rather than just your company name or your logo.
• PageRank- This is a measure of how valuable the page is. You want links from pages that have a higher PageRank.
• Number of links on the page- The fewer outgoing links on the page, the better.
  

Leverage social media by taking advantage of its unique features. Prepare and execute a plan.