4 analytics alternatives to the late, great Google Keyword Tool

Target audience: Marketing professionals, SEO specialists, PR pros, analytics managers, brand managers, businesses, nonprofits, educators, Web publishers, journalists.

Guest post by Megan Totka
ChamberofCommerce.com

Google has done it again. No, they haven’t come out with a new feature, tool, or platform designed to enrich our digital lives — they’ve killed another useful and beloved feature that millions depended on daily. First it was the Google Reader … and now it’s the Google Keyword Tool.

This move feels like Google has casually flushed years of SEO work down the drain and sent experienced, confident Internet marketers to scramble around in the dark.

Why Google nixed the keyword tool

Back in 2011, the search engine giant rolled out SSL encryption for all searches performed on Google through a signed-in user account. This prevented everyone, including marketers, from obtaining search data through the free keyword tool for those secured searches.

At first, Google claimed the encryption would impact less than 10 percent of all searches conducted on Google. Data from Hubspot found that by November 2011, more than 11 percent of organic searches were being affected — and by January 2013, that number had risen to 55 percent.

Now, Google is adding SSL encryption permanently to its search engine (you’ll notice that when you visit the main Google page, the address now begins with https — and if you try to remove the s, you’re redirected to the secure page). This effectively renders the free Google Keyword Tool useless, because it only reported data for non-secure searches.

Google stated that the changes were made to provide additional protection for searchers. However, marketers are still welcome to pay for keyword data through Google AdWords and Keyword Planner, since ad clicks are still non-encrypted. (The operative word here is “pay.”)

What can small business marketers do now?

With the Google Keyword Tool suffering an untimely death, where can your small business turn to find the best keywords that are relevant to your business?

You can, of course, use Google AdWords. There are a few drawbacks to this strategy, including the inability to get data on organic searches and the fact that it costs money. However, AdWords can be an effective strategy for small business.

There are also other free keyword tools available. They may not be as effective or far-reaching as the Google Keyword Tool was, but you can still get a good overall idea of which keywords to optimize for maximum effect. Four that we like are:

1Bing Webmaster Toolbox: You might have forgotten about the “other” search engine, but second place isn’t bad. Microsoft’s Bing holds a respectable 17.9% of search engine market share — and the search trends are basically the same, just on a smaller scale.

2Ubersuggest: Calling itself “suggestions on steroids,” this handy tool will generate hundreds of suggested keywords based on your relevant search terms.

3Wordpot: This free keyword finder offers some pretty powerful keyword analysis, including daily search volumes.

4SEO Book Keyword Tool: Powered by the paid Wordtracker service, this tool delivers rough daily search volumes, links to keyword research, vertical database references, and more. There’s also a free PPC competitive research tool available through the site.

Above all, focusing on writing great content, using relevant and authoritative links, and building your community will still help your small business website rise through the search engine ranks—even without the Google Keyword Tool.

How will you adjust your SEO marketing strategies in light of the most recent changes at Google?

Image courtesy of Michael Reuter

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The post Where have all the keywords gone? appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Or, why your keywords suck and are outdated

You probably built your website years ago. You’ve probably never updated your CV, just added your latest jobs and clients to the top. Your corporate bio, what you do, your products and services were probably written back either when your company opened, when you ported your brochures to the web, or the last time you did a major revision. Like I said, probably years ago.

Why does this matter?

Language evolves very rapidly, and how it evolves has little or nothing to do with what you call yourself, how you describe your products and services, or the keywords you have locked and loaded into your tweets, your websites, your hashtags, your textual links, your Google AdWords contextual ad campaigns, your Facebook ad programs and Twitter promoted tweets.

If you don’t refer to your services in the same way that others do, you’ll be surprisingly invisible when it comes to your prospects finding you on the Internet. If you don’t add the exact, literal titles, subjects, hashtags, and keywords that people are using to find you and your valuable services, then you won’t be found at all.

As I have said, Google may well be the most sophisticated, intuitive, and relevant search engine going, but there’s a terrible secret that even Google doesn’t want you to know about when it comes to folks searching for and finding you:

Google plays dumb until it needs to be smart.

Literal is quicker & simpler, so know your buzzwords

Google is amazingly, painfully literal and only gets smarter when — and if — it can’t find relevant results that satisfy its customers immediately and easily. When it can’t find what you’re looking for, Google will search its databases for name variation, for light synonyms, and the like. If Google Search doesn’t need to be ingenious, however, then it’ll just be useful, serving only results that explicitly mention the exact keyword strings that the customer shoehorns into search.

Why, you may ask, does it play dumb? Well, being smart is very resource-intensive so if Google is literal, all it has to do is find a match in it’s cached-and-prepped index. Literal is quicker, simpler, and mostly a better result than when Google tries too hard to be clever. It’s win-win until it doesn’t result in you or your business anywhere to be found. And that’s your fault, man — own up!

When I started in digital, what I did was called new media marketing. Then it became social media marketing, then blogger outreach, then digital PR and digital marketing. Another example is a service I offered which helped balance bad search engine results on Google. I called it defensive SEO then defensive search. Now it’s part of Online Reputation Management (ORM).

Who knows what digital PR and ORM will be called in the future? It’s always evolving and one needs to not only keep up with what the professional wordsmiths and copywriters are calling what we do; we also need to know what sticks, what people adopt, and finally, what the general public calls what you and I do. Knowing the terms that people that are not part of our acronym-loving digital Internet cabal are using is important — we’re very often way too clever for our own good.

So, have you brainstormed recently? Have you interviewed your friends, clients, Mom, Dad, high school mates, wife, husband, kids, and colleagues? Ask them what they would search for if they were involved in a particular situation needing services like yours.

How do I clean bad search results from Google?

Folks don’t often get onto Google with a set of keywords or a professional industry style guide to help them choose the la phrase juste. They’re just writing words into Google as though asking the netherworld for answers via their handy Ouija board or Magic Eight Ball.

And it’s not so much about dumbing down or becoming a simpleton, it’s about covering all your bases. Dude, even dumb people have money, have businesses, and have things they need from you. It would be foolish to only avail yourself to a clientele who thinks exactly like you do.

So, give it a go and make a schedule. Keep your ear to the ground and be sure to interview prospects to find out what the cutting edge of your industry’s language is, as well as what the long tail of your prospects’ language is. Then make sure that this language is constantly rolled into the already-rich dough that is your businesses Internet and web assets: bios, social media profiles, social network platforms, websites, micro-sites, personal sites, promotional pages, your blog, and Tumblr — everything you can.

And if you do maintain the keyword-based advertising campaigns for yourself and your clients, you need to work on updating your keyword list as well. These strings go stale surprisingly quickly. In fact, I don’t want to waste any more of your time — get going right now!

Good luck and happy hunting!

(Disclosure: I am a former employee of Reputation.com and they continue to sponsor my work)

The post Are you using updated keywords for your business? appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Guest post by Eugen Oprea

Do you know what is the most common question that I get every day on social media, forums or email?

“How do I get insights about my Google Analytics data?”

People approach me saying that they have had a Google Analytics account for years, but that they look only at page views or the number of visitors they get.

This is wrong. This is so wrong when they have powerful free Web analytics tools that they can leverage to learn more about their visitors and use those insights to better serve their visitors.

In this article, I’m going to show you some Google Analytics tricks that you should use for your website. If you don’t use the latest version of Google Analytics, login into your account and click the New Version link from the top right corner of your screen before we get started.

Establish goals

1Although this is a straightforward process, it’s actually neglected by the majority of people. After you install the tracking code on your website, you need to set up goals.

The goals you set up for your website are the foundation of your website analysis because everything gravitates around your goals and conversion rates, the goals that are ultimately your business goals.

If you’re wondering what goals you need to set up, start by asking yourself what is the purpose of your website. Is it an ecommerce site and you want to sells tangible goods? Is it a blog where you want to make revenue from ads? Do you sell ebooks or services?

Then you can go and start setting up goals base on your business objectives.

If this is still unclear for you, here are some examples that will give you traction:

• ecommerce site – enable ecommerce tracking and start checking the conversion rates for your products
• Engaged visitors – people who spend more than one minute on your site
• Readers – people who visit at least two pages on your site
• Calls to action – use event tracking (see below) to measure calls to action
• Best performing ads – again, use event tracking to measure your best performing ads
• Subscriptions – check how the visitors who subscribe to your list behave
• Purchases – if you sell ebooks or courses you can get insights about your buyers

Later, these goals will help you track conversion rates and get insights about what are the main traffic sources that send you visitors who convert, what are the keywords that send you customers, which page your visitors use most to sign up for your newsletter, where your customers are from, etc.

Use these examples to get started, but please note that every website is unique and it will have unique goals.

Connect your Google Webmaster Tools account

2Google Webmaster Tools is another free product from Google that helps you see data about your website, such as the number of impressions for your search queries and their position in Google or the number of links to your site or diagnosis information reported by Google after crawling your website.

Additionally, you can check Google +1 metrics, your site performance or submit a sitemap for Google to index.

But the really interesting part is the fact that you can connect your Google Webmaster Tools account with your Google Analytics account and get access to the new Search Engine Optimization reports.

Once you do that, you’ll be able to see three new reports in your Google Analytics account: Queries, Landing Pages and Geographical Summary. They will help you learn more about your top performing search queries (keywords) and landing pages.

Then, you can use that data to identify:

• Keywords with a low click-through rate, but a good average position. Once you know them, you can change the meta title and description of your page to improve their click-through rate.
• Landing pages with a good click-through rate, but a low average position. These pages can be easily run through an on-page optimization process that will improve their rankings.
• The countries of your organic visitors and who your target market is.

To connect your site from Google Webmaster Tools in Google Analytics, go to the Traffic Sources section, select Search Engine Optimization and then one of the three reports.

At this stage you’ll see a page with the benefits of linking your accounts and a button where it says Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing. Click that button and then click Edit from the Webmaster Tools Settings.

Then, you’ll be redirected to your Google Webmaster Tools, where you can connect it with Google Analytics.

Enable site speed

3Site speed is also a neat feature of Google Analytics that lets you see the load time of your pages. This will help you check what pages need your attention and help you determine ways of speeding up the load time of your pages.

If you are wondering why this is important, I can tell you that the load speed of your pages can significantly improve your visitors experience on your site and it’s also a ranking factor in Google.

So a good load speed can make your visitors happy and can also increase your rankings.

Along with the number of Page Views and Bounce Rate, you can see the Average Page Load Time (in seconds) and the number of visits that have been used as a sample for every page on your website.

Additionally, if you click on the Performance tab, you can check different buckets of your page load time and see what is the average load speed of your pages.

The Map Overlay will show you what is the load speed for different countries or territories.

If you needed to add an additional code to your Google Analytics tracking before, now that is no longer required and Google Analytics will automatically add data to your reports.

Enable site search

4It’s a fact that visitors who use the search box on your site are more likely to convert than the ones who don’t. This happens because they are more engaged with your website, with your content or with your products and services.

The beautiful thing about site search is that it lets you discover the exact keywords that people use to search for your products, so you can take this a step further and use them in your search engine optimization campaigns.

You can actually use the most important keywords that people use to search on your site to optimize your pages and drive more targeted traffic to your website.

Additionally, they might look for products or services that you do not have on offer, but you can add them with little effort and increase your sales. Or if you have a blog, site search is a great way to see what your readers are looking for and get a ton of article ideas out of them.

If you would like to enable site search on your website, first make sure that you have a search form on your site and then enable Site Search in Google Analytics.

Track events

5Event tracking is a powerful feature in Google Analytics that, among other things, can help you track:

• How many people download your ebook
• What ads are performing better and who clicks on your ads
• Which signup form converts better (sidebar, below the post, about page)
• Who pauses, fast forwards or stops a video
• What errors a visitor encounters during the checkout

But that’s not all. Using the latest version of Google Analytics, you’re also able to set these events as goals that can help you see the performance of your events based on different metrics.

Enabling event tracking is not a hard process. All you have to do is just add the code below next to your URL, before you replace the default values.

onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘category’, ‘action’, ‘opt_label’, ‘opt_value’]);”

These default values will help you identify your events and here’s what they represent:

• Category – You can use this element to identify what you want to track: eBook, video, signup form, ads.
• Action – This element can be used to define the interaction of your visitor and can be: click, button, play, stop. Personally, I use it to specify the place of my button/signup form/ad.
• Label – Use this to identify the type of event that is tracked.
• Value – This element helps you specify a value for you event that can be used when you set up a goal for your event.

If you would like to see a working example, here’s what I used to track a link to my new product, where “Ads” is the category of my link, “Sidebar” the place where I added the link and “WAB” the label.

<a href=”http://www.webanalyticsblueprint.com/” onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘Ads’, ‘Sidebar’, ‘WAB’]);”>

Then once you set up your links, all you have to do is just set up that event as a goal, using the Category, Action, Label, and Value conditions you have set up for your event.

Real-time reporting

6Google has taken analytics one step further recently and introduced Real-Time Reporting, which displays information about visitors who are on your website at a specific moment.

You are able to see how many visitors are on your website at that moment, where they are on your website, where they come from (keywords and referrals) and where they live.

Additionally, you have access to another three reports with more insights about their location, how they arrived on your website and what pages they visit.

To access the real-time reports, you need to go to the Home menu > REAL-TIME (BETA).

The Locations report will provide you information about the number of your visitors and the countries where they are located. You can also check their location on a map.

Traffic Sources will display information about where they come from. You’ll see the medium and source along with the total number of your visitors.

The Content report will show you what are the active pages that your visitors read and how many active visitors are on each of the pages displayed on your report.

Multi-channel funnels

7With Multi-Channel Funnels, Google Analytics provides even more value for users who are passionate about conversion rates.

If before you were able to track the last source that the visitor used to convert, with Multi-Channel Funnels you are able to also track other sources (ads, referrals, social media, organic) that the visitor used to reach your website from.

Let’s say for example that your visitor (Cindy) landed for the first time on your website from Twitter and subscribed to your RSS feed. Next time, Cindy used the feed reader to come and read your new articles. Ultimately she was looking for advice on blogging and found your eBook using a search engine.

Now, because she knows your site already, she will buy it and become a customer.

Using this example, in the old version of Google Analytics, the search engine was used to be credited for the conversion, but now, with Multi-Channel Funnels, you can see the whole path that Cindy took to convert: Social Network > Referral > Search engine.

To check the Multi-Channel Funnels reports, go to the Conversions section.

Watch this video to learn more about Multi-Channel Funnels:

Use campaign tracking

8Tracking online marketing campaigns will help you get past that large number of direct visits that come from URL shorteners like bit.ly or clients like TweetDeck.

Additionally, it will help you track more accurately links from other websites and links that you use to promote your content or campaigns.

In order to use campaign tracking in Google Analytics, you need to tag your URLs with special parameters. Those parameters can be added to your links using the URL Builder tool from Google.

Once you tag your URLs with the mandatory parameters, use them as they are or use an URL shortener when sharing them.

Then, check the Campaigns report, under Traffic Sources > Sources to get insights about your online marketing campaigns.

To see step-by-step instructions and how to check Google Analytics Campaign Tracking reports, read more in this article.

Plot rows

9Plot Rows allows you to create instant segments of your data in tabular reports. If you usually look at standard reports, you can use Plot Rows to get more insights from your metrics.

To use this feature, you need to select two rows from any tabular report and then click the Plot Rows button from the bottom of the table.

Once you do that, you’ll see that the chart has changed and you are able to see additional information there about the items that you have selected. In other words, it instantly creates a segment with two of your items compared with the total metrics.

Use this feature to check how your main keywords, referrals or pages compare with each other and with the overall metrics of the site.

But make sure that you select items that do not have a big difference between their metrics (i.e., compare a keyword with 2,340 visits with one that has 154).

Custom dashboards

10In the old version of Google Analytics, you used to have only one dashboard available. Now you can create up to 20 dashboards customized to your needs.

To create a custom dashboard, go to the Home menu and Dashboards and select +New Dashboard.

Once you do that, you’ll need to choose whether you’ll want to start from scratch with a blank canvas or get some pointers with the Starter Dashboard. You can then use slick widgets to create custom metrics, pie charts, timelines or tables.

To get started with custom dashboards, have a look at my screenshot above and try to duplicate it or check out 5 Insightful Google Analytics Dashboards. Then you’ll be able to customize it and add the metrics that are relevant to your business.

Flow visualization

11Flow Visualization definitely deserves a separate article to present it, but in the meantime I will outline its benefits.

Google Analytics rolled out two reports, Visitors Flow, under the Audience section, and Goal Flow, under the Conversion section.

Visitors Flow

The Visitors Flow will display the path that your visitors have taken to navigate through your website.

You’ll be able to see, based on a selected dimension, such as country source or keyword, the exact path of your visitors and where they stopped to read your content.

On hover, the report displays for each page additional details, like the total number of visits, how many visitors moved to a different page and how many of them dropped the funnel and left.

If you click on a page, you’ll be able to highlight the traffic that went through that page, explore traffic through that page or display in a popup even more details.

Goal Flow

The Goal Flow report is essentially a better representation of the Funnel Visualization report and contains the same dimensions as the Visitors Flow report.

But the main difference between this and the Visitors Flow is the fact that the Goal Flow report doesn’t uses all pages, but the steps you configured in the conversion funnel.

Additionally, you can also use advanced segments to filter your data and get additional insights from the Visitors Flow and Goal Flow reports.

Your turn!

In this article I presented 11 tips that you should use for your website and ultimately some of my favorite features in Google Analytics, but now it’s your turn to do the same. What do you like most in Google Analytics and what features/tricks you think that everyone should know about?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

The post 11 Google Analytics tricks to use for your website appeared first on Inside Social Media.

I‘m covering SMX West — the Search Marketing Expo, taking place at the Santa Clara Convention Center this week — as press, alongside hundreds of marketing professionals, SEO gurus and webmeisters who are chiefly interested in how to boost their search marketing IQ.

For instance, 200 to 300 people turned out at Tuesday’s session on SMX Boot Camp: Keyword Research Tools & Techniques by Christine Churchill, founder and CEO of KeyRelevance. I haven’t spotted any other writeups of the session, so I’ll share the highlights here — because I believe that the community becomes richer as we become better informed about the tools available to us.

Keyword marketing

“Keywords are the bedrock of search marketing,” Churchill told the audience. After all, she pointed out, we still live in a text-based world. How often do you type terms into a Google search box? Yes, exactly.

Why do keyword research? She listed several reasons:

• It’s a fundamental step in search marketing.
• It’s a way to correct bad keyword choices.
• You increase conversion by speaking the customer’s language.
• You develop a list of relevant terms to target in SEO (search engine optimization), pay-per-click, blogs, images, videos, press releases and social media marketing. (Yes, you should add a descriptor to your images and videos and include a keyword in the headline of your press release.)
• You can glean competitive intelligence: see what the competition is doing.
• Keywords can provide insights for your site design and navigation.
• Knowing traffic potential helps plan budgeting (mostly for pay per click).
• You can discover new keyword opportunities.
• Consider going beyond well-known keywords. “There’s a long tail for popular keyword searches, too.”

Keyword sources

Churchill recommended creating a keyword list using diverse sources:

• online and traditional print magazines
• company and product reviews
• online thesauruses like thesaurus.reference.com
• talk to focus groups, customer interviews, support or sales personnel
• discussion forums, user-generated content and blogs
• analytics
• and this: look at keywords your competitors are buying in pay per click and in SEO.

Keyword research tools

Here are some of the leading research tools that social media marketers should keep top of mind:

• Google keyword tool
• Wordtracker (paid service)
• Trellian keyword discovery (paid service)
• Google Webmaster tools (it’s a good way to find out how Google perceives your site
• Google Insights
• Google Trends (allows you to compare popular phrases — you can see which terms are popular by state or region, and you can even look back at specific date and see what was popular a year ago)
• Google’s Search based keyword tool (free)
• Hitwise (a high-end competitive information tool)
• Keyword Discovery (searches multiple databases: global premium, historical global, international, news, shopping, eBay. By entering a key phrase, you can see questions related to the search term, which helps you come up with new content ideas.)

I’ll work with my colleague Joanna Lord to provide a deeper look at these at a later date.

More search and data mining tools

• adCenter Labs (an advertising and data mining toolet from Microsoft)
• Clusty (a search engine that offers clustered search allowing users can see related terms)
• Quintura (it works by navigating by “clouds”; bold words are most related, good for brainstorming and broadening keyword buckets)
• Ask.com (provides keyword suggestions and shows related searches)
• Google Suggest (as you type in a phrase, Google offers keyword suggestions in real time)
• Yahoo! (Churchill says she likes Yahoo’s keyword selection tool the best but didn’t explain why)
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool (learn which keywords you should be targeting to increase your website rankings and traffic)
• SEOBook’s Permutation Tool (free)
• Microsoft’s Ad Intelligence (a new plug-in for Excel 2007)
• Technorati (the blog search engine — type in a phrase and below posts it will show related tags)
• Flickr (explore popular tags on Flickr)
• Amazon’s most popular tags

Best line of the morning, from Churchill: “Traffic alone isn’t the goal. You want targeted traffic that resonates with your audience and will lead to greater sales of your products.”

Interesting factoid: 80% of searches on the web are noncommercial, says Churchill. People conduct three kinds of searches:  navigational (I want to find your site), informational (what’s in a Mai Tai?) and transactional (buying a product, subscribing to a service).

Competitive intelligence tools

• Hitwise
• comScore Marketer (find out what terms are working)
• Trillian’s Competitive Inteligence
• Keyword difficulty tool
• Spyfu
• Keycompete (enter domain name and they’ll show which domains are being bought)
• Compete
• Keyword Spy
• Keywords Analyzer

Some final tips from Churchill:

• Longer phrases often convert better
• Single words rarely perform well
• Look at popularity as traffic potential
• Review keyword competition
• Group keywords into buckets of related terms

Use keywords everywhere, Churchill implored: in blog posts, press releases, images, videos, podcasts, tags, social media and website metadata titles.

Keyword tips

Single keywords don’t work well, she pointed out, so look for two- to three-word phrases. Also, don’t embed keywords in graphics (a bit confusing, since we were told to add keywords to images).

The post Keywords, search marketing and data mining appeared first on Inside Social Media.