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Excessive Worry About Competition

Written on July 6, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

Excessive Worrying = Missed Opportunities

Do you worry too much about who you are competing against? Do you feel competitive research leads to many more “move on please” rather than “let’s go!” types of outcomes? Believe it or not, it may be a good sign.

Competition is usually a good thing, it means something is worth fighting for. A lot of hucksters try to push ways to “Uncover hidden markets that nobody else knows about, that you can make millions from with little effort, and that is yours for just $47.”

Here is the problem with lots of opportunity and 0 competition: businesses follow the money and shorten the supply chain. If an ad market is ripe it means that some of those advertisers are also going to be publishers in the same darn market, targeting the same darn keywords. So if there is big money there will be competition. It is unavoidable.

It isn’t so much that specific niches are glossed over, but more to do with the fact that the bigger a site gets and the more keywords it targets the less time it has to focus on optimization at a granular level. These kinds of sites leave the door open for you to come in and attack some of their profitable keywords by creating niche sites around those topics.

Consider that our competitive research tool shows a site like ehow.com coming in with 2,948,950 organic keywords they are ranking for in the top 20 (our tool is powered by SEM Rush). Lots of opportunity there!

However, if you are interested in your public-facing status then chasing the long tail of a large site may not be the sexiest thing in the world to you. If you are more interested in profiting from your efforts versus tooting your own horn then what should matter is how you can maximize profits while keeping expenses low.

Certainly I’m not advocating that you only focus on niche keywords. If you have the resources then you can go after just about anything you want. In either scenario, long-tail plays or broad keyword plays, there should be less worry about who your competition is and more focus on what their weaknesses are, and how you can beat them.

There is an intimidation factor that is at play in just about every situation where competition exists:

• Business
• Sports
• Personal Relationships

Much of that intimidation is perceived by the underdog or the new competitor. The following points are worth keeping in mind:

• The best team is not unbeatable
• The biggest site is not strongly optimized for all their keywords
• The girl or guy you are quite fond of is actually approachable

Many of the competitors at the top of the heap are there for a reason, they’re good. However, it doesn’t mean they are invincible or beyond reproach. In fact it’s quite the opposite. Some of the upper echelon sites in your market likely have become lazy or so big that can no longer reasonably go all out on all their profitable keywords. There are no shortage of tools out there that can help you find potential keywords for your sites by looking at profitable keywords of a competitor’s site.

You can’t win every battle you fight but if you win more than you lose then you are on the right track. Competing, in and of itself, is not going to mortally wound you if you lose :-). Look at is as a learning lesson.

• What could you have done better?
• Where could you have pushed harder?
• Do you need to rethink how you view potential opportunities?

The great thing about SEO is that (providing you don’t torch the site) there is no 4th quarter, final set, TKO, or bottom of the ninth. Your timing for failing is based on when you think it’s a good time to pullout and move on to another site or use a new approach. The effective holding cost for a paused project is ~ $0. And who knows, maybe a future algorithmic update or another search engine will take a liking to your site. As long as you have analytics installed you are passively collecting market data - not a bad deal.

Google can be the referee that makes a horrible call which ends the game but more often than not you get to be the decider of when to push and when to pull.

So rather than worrying about your competition you are better off tracking your competition and figuring out where they are outperforming you. I like to keep a running log of ideas and processes that my competitors are implementing along with notes on where I think they are weak and how they could do what they are doing more efficiently.

Armed with that information, along with your findings with free tools like SEO For Firefox, you can start in on a thorough review of your competition and the feasibility of competing against them. Some core items you’ll want to consider are:

• Number of backlinks from unique domains (don’t be *wowed* by the total link count)
• Anchor text distribution of external links
• Domain age, relative to when the site went live (with a few links)
• Presence of the site in some of the better directories like Yahoo! and Business.Com
• .Edu Links
• .Gov Links
• Is the exact match ranking?
• Is it all big brands?
• Are there lots of interior pages ranking?
• The on-page optimization of the site/page
• PageRank
• and so on…

There are a number of tools available which can help you find weak spots in areas where your competition is possibly profitable and where potential opportunities exist for you. We did a review of the following spy tools
:

• SEM Rush
• Compete
• Keyword Spy
• SpyFu
• iSpionage
• Alexa

We outlined a competitive intelligence strategy recently in addition to having quite a bit of killer tips and posts in the competitive research threads inside the forums.

So while you shouldn’t ignore the competition completely you shouldn’t be consumed by it, particularly if it’s just a few metrics that you find daunting. There are enough tools out there where you can try and clone most of their best strategies but at some point you will have to go beyond what they are doing.

Studying a competitor’s on and off page strategies, then finding ways to exploit weaknesses and build on strengths, will produce a better ROI for your business rather than searching for “The Fountain of No Competition” promised by that really nice internet marketing fellow you got that email from :-).

And SEO is just one phase of your analysis. Does everyone have the same business model? Are there other options? Do they all have similar site structures? Are they so inspired by one another that they are missing huge market segments?

Original post:
Excessive Worry About Competition

10 Reasons Why Your Analytics Are Failing & 13 Tools To Help

Written on June 29, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

Web Analytics are a key indicator to the health and performance of any website, but online marketers often get lost in the complexities and details, forgetting how important analytics actually are and why.

Analytics can provide a wealth of information but marketers often look at high level indicators such as: top content, bounce rates, entrance sources and keywords without tying it all together. In most cases, there is a tremendous amount of insight that can be used to make smarter marketing decisions, but most companies barley scratch the surface. At the OMS Minneapolis event last week  Adam Proehl gave an excellent presentation on analytics failures and successes. I’ve taken my notes from that presentation and combined them with my own opinions to create this list.

10 reasons why your web analytics are failing:

You speak numbers to non-number people.

It takes a numbers person to dig though large amounts of analytics data, figure things out, and draw conclusions. However, most people aren’t “numbers” people.

Many marketers like charts and clear, action orientated data. Charts are good, numbers in red and green help, and so does simplification. Don’t present tabular data just because it make sense to you. Try and think about who you’re presenting the information to and how they like to consume information. Some people like tables, others like graphs. As online marketers make an effort to understand the audience on the web they’re trying to reach, so should they understand the internal audiences that they report results to.

The statistics are fuzzy.

It’s easy to combine different pieces of data and come out with a great conclusion, even if they don’t go together.

For example, did you know that Michael Jordan and I have a combined total of 6 NBA championships?

While that statement is true, the conclusion is a bit skewed. Yes, Michale’s 6 plus my 0 do equal 6, the fact is that that I didn’t do any of the work for those championships, but I’m still getting the credit as I was included in the statement.

In analytics it’s important to break out the data so that it makes sense, not just so it looks good. It’s easy to combine two pieces of information in ways that make things look really good, but in reality, is something being hidden?

The averages are flawed.

Averages are great unless there is a major spike or dip. Then they have a tendency to skew the data a bit too much.

Based on the graph above, you could say that we’re averaging 1652 people from StumbleUpon a day. But in reality, most days there were less than 50. The big spike just screwed up the average.  As quickly as that spike came, it can also disappear and making decisions based on the daily average isn’t a best practice.

Sometimes things just don’t work.

There are lots of things that can go wrong with the analytics from a website and that has to be taken into account. The tracking code could be implemented incorrectly, maybe some special tagging was setup improperly, there could be issues with site architecture or maybe there are just things that are out of our control.

Analytics isn’t perfect and the reporting is never going to be 100% accurate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the numbers are wrong.

The important thing is to fix the issues you can and work with the numbers you have.

You don’t understand the customer.

Why are people visiting our site? What are they doing while they are here? What stage of the buying cycle are they in?

Thinking that you know your customers is one thing, but you really need to watch their behavior and see what they are actually doing.

Maybe visitors are focused on research or maybe they can’t find what they’re looking for when they get to your site. These are things analytics can tell you if you look and once you know what your customer is doing, you can modify your site to fulfill their needs.

You don’t connect the conversion dots.

Getting visitors to the site is one step. The next step is making sure you have content that is going to satisfy their need. As stated above, analytics can help with this, but once prospects fill out the contact form, what happens next?

How many decisions are made by looking at top level analytics alone? Someone has to tie leads back to the website to determine what is working and what isn’t.

For example, in a B2B situation, a whitepaper download may be bringing in lots of leads, but none are qualified. Maybe there is a CTA (call to action) form that is bringing in few leads, but they convert very well. Analytics can’t tell you what happens with a lead after filling out a form, and connecting that data is very important.

You don’t dig deep enough.

Looking at one metric in analytics and making a decision seems like a good idea unless you’re not seeing the whole picture.

A good example would be bounce rates to a landing page. Just because the bounce rates are high, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. You need to dig into the data and find out the conversion rate as well.  Changing a landing page because the bounce rate is higher than normal but that also has a higher than normal conversion rate may result in lost sales.

You don’t tie in outside data.

Marketers should be looking at other online and offline marketing efforts and tie them into web analytics wherever they can.  Ideally, an online marketing program should track different sources for different outcomes such as: people from Twitter to conversion, knowing which conversions came from email campaigns and what offsite marketing tactics are working.

You don’t take the time.

Analytics isn’t easy. It’s not something anyone can do in an hour a day (except maybe those that read this book of course). If website marketers really want to get valuable information out of analytics, they need to invest time and resources into talent that can make that happen.

Analytics can seem complex and yes, it takes time and talent to make sense of them, but in the end analytics can paint a picture of how users are interacting with a site, what the user behavior is, and point out ways to make your site more successful and profitable.

Bonus: 13 analytics tools to help you out.

• ShareThis – Social sharing button that can tie data into Goggle Analytics.
• Snip and Tag – Firefox extension that allows you to easily copy a URL and tag it with Google Analytics code.
• GA? – Firefox extension that quickly shows if Google Analytics is installed on the page or not.
• Better Google Analytics – Firefox extension that enhances Google Analytics.
• Enhanced Google Analytics – Another Firefox extension that enhances Google Analytics.
• Twitalyzer – Analytics for social relationships.
• Bit.ly – URL shortening with analytics.
• Google URL Builder – A way of tagging URLs with Google Analytics code so they can be tracked on external sites.
• Excellent Analytics – Microsoft Excel plugin to pull Google Analytics data directly into Excel.
• Site Scan GA – Scans a website to find out what pages have analytics installed and which ones don’t.
• Web Analytics Solution Profiler/Debugger (WASP) – Firefox plugin that debugs analytics.
• Crazy Egg – Heat mapping tools that allow you to visually understand user behavior.
• ClickTail – Heat mapping tools that also track where uses are when they bail on a form.

What are some of your favorite web analytics tools?

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SEO Site Audits: Getting Started

Written on June 2, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, seo

Posted by Lindsay

A typical SEO site audit takes me around 50 hours to complete. If it is a small site (<1000 pages), I am working efficiently, and the client hasn't requested a lot of extra pieces, this figure can come in as low as 35 hours. If the site is large and has a lot of issues to document, the time investment inches closer to 70 hours.

At SEOmoz, we usually asked for a project time-line of six weeks to complete a full site audit. You need the extended schedule for resource coordination, editing for uniform voice and additional considerations when a team is involved. Even working on my own I prefer a six week time-line because it allows me to juggle several projects simultaneously and to put-down and pick-up various pieces as the mood strikes.

Regardless of how much time I spend on an audit, the best stuff is usually revealed in the first day. At the beginning of a project you’re excited, the client is excited and there is so much undiscovered opportunity! In this post, I’ll outline my recommendations for making the most of day one on a new SEO audit project. I’ve organized it by retro digital clock time stamp for your visual pleasure.

Template Preparation

You have a 9:00 client call, so you better get cracking! Take the time upfront to get your documents ready. The first thing I do once I’ve received a signature on the dotted line is prepare two files; my Excel scorecard and the Word audit document.

The audits I’ve worked on have always been extremely custom. Even so, the base document without client content is around 20 pages. This may sound like a lot, but once you prepare a cover sheet, table of contents, the appropriate headings and sub-headings for all the important SEO factors, and short (reusable) descriptions about each factor… it adds up to a hearty file.

I recommend that you create the base Word and Excel files and save them. Try not to work backwards off of an existing audit that you have on hand. Before I was an SEO myself, I was an SEO client of several smart folks. More than once the deliverables I received included other client names. It happens! ‘CTRL+F’ is not fool proof.

The Client Call

Whether you closed the deal yourself or you are lucky enough to have a fleet of salespeople doing that type of leg-work for you, a client kick-off call once the deal has been signed is important. Spend an hour getting to know your primary contacts. Hopefully this includes a senior stakeholder, a marketing lead, and a development lead. More often then not, these meetings are over the phone with the assitance of a web conferencing tool like GoToMeeting.

A sample agenda is as follows;

• Introductions (all)
• Site Tour (client)
• Past & Present SEO Initiatives (client)
• Key Areas of Concern (client)
• What is Required to Get Things Implemented (client)
• Review of Statement of Work & Deliverables Schedule (you)

When you come out of this meeting, you should have an excellent understanding of the website, business needs, and key pain points from the client. You’ll also have had an opportunity to set expectations.

Bonus Tip: If you are working with an in-house SEO person, find out about the projects they have been trying to push through. You may be able to help them get that SEO enhancement moved up the development pipeline and make them look good in the process.

Coffee Break!

Use this time to recharge your caffeine and make notes about the call.

Leverage Your Coworkers

If you are part of a consulting team, like we had at SEOmoz, ping the other SEOs. This is expecially true if you will be tackling this particular project solo. Send them an email and request that they conduct a quick 15 minute assessment of the site. We did this with great success at SEOmoz. With a dream team that included Rand, Jen and Danny the output of 45 combined quick assessment minutes was incredible.

If you are an indepenent SEO, you can still use a system like this. Form a group of trusted SEOs and provide this support for each other. Be mindful of NDAs and potential conflicts of interest (see Sarah’s post on consulting contracts for more great details).

Free Form Exploration

I’m pretty structured in my approach to SEO auditing, but there is nothing structured about my process during the free form exploration phase. I’m all about creating efficiencies through discipline and a deliberate work plan. That is what gets the project done and brings home the bacon. However, I always set aside at least three hours for unstructured play and exploration.SEO is part art and part science. The actions I’m attempting to describe here are definitely more Pablo Picasso than Marie Curie.

I fire up all of my FireFox Plugins and browse the site, start GSiteCrawler, hit-up Google with a flurry of search operators, run LinkScape/Open Site Explorer, have a grand ol’ time in SEOmoz Labs, and check out the keyphrase landscape with Quintura and SEMrush. One find leads to another and I never know where I’ll end up. No two sites are alike and I’m still coming across things I’ve never seen with each new audit.

Analyze Page via the mozBar showing a less-than-fantastic title tag

I’d say I find 80% of a site’s issues and opportunities during this brief free form exploration. Most of the remaining 45+ hours of a project are spent elaborating on the findings and detailing the action plan to support my original finds.

Be sure to take notes and screen shots as you go. Bonus points if you manage to input them directly into your master Word file. Huge time saver.

Lunch

Try to step away from the laptop, but bring a notepad with you. No doubt your brain will still be working as your hands work to fill your belly.

Client Email

Based on the morning’s kick-off call and your findings in the free form exploration process you no doubt have a few questions for the client. If you don’t already have access to Webmaster Tools and analytics, now is a good time to ask. I usually have questions for the client about things that aren’t always apparent from an external view of the site such as how their expiring content policies work. This follow-up email keeps the communication lines open, impresses the client because you’ve uncovered so much opportunity already, and gives them a chance to ask additional questions or provide more info.

Populate Some Data

At the end of a busy day I like to shift my focus to something that requires less brain power and benefits from simple funcitons like copy & paste. I usually wrap up my day by populating things like the current robots.txt file (for analysis later), top 25 links from Open Site Explorer, etc.

Top Pages via OSE - Yikes!

TV is the New Mobile

Written on June 1, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, seo

When Google enters a field sometimes they do so quietly, but when they decide they want to own something there is nothing quiet about their approach. They are not content to pick one niche and one model (the way that Netflix does):

Google keeps fighting on multiple fronts. Like boxing a glacier, over time they just wear the market down.

Google wants to turn Youtube watchers into mindless drones who are spared the expense of thought:

“If too much of your brain is occupied with the process of choosing, it takes you out of the experience of watching,” explains James Black, a NowMov co-founder.
…
“We’re looking at how to push users into passive-consumption mode, a lean-back experience,” Mr. Davidson says.

They want Youtube to be like television, because the TV ad market is far larger than the web ad market, and they already own search. They are desperately searching for new markets for avenues to grow.

Google spent $106 million buying On2, and then open sourced their V8 video codec:

It’s the “first one is free” approach that a drug dealer uses, and it’s not a “free” play, it’s a “we are the new railroad” play. For one-tenth the amount they paid for that crappy old codec, they could have paid Firefox’s licensing fees in perpetuity, if being a sugar daddy is what they want. They don’t want it. This is a “in your face, Apple” play, and a monopoly play.

And in addition to owning Youtube, tons of dark fiber, and their video codec, Google announced their Google TV effort. The person who controls the set top box has the market data.

Mark Cuban highlights the gaming that will occur in manipulating the rankings

The success of Google TV will come down to one thing….PageRank. Can you imagine the white hat and black hat SEO battles that will take place as video content providers try to get to the top of the TV Search Listings on Google TV ? Like Google said, there are 4 billion TVs and growing and the US TV Ad market is $70 BILLION. There is a lot at stake if Google TV takes off. How Google does its PageRank for this product will have a bigger impact on the success of the product in the TV market than anything else it does.

but if Google is passively monitoring the network they are far better than a guide. It becomes easy for them to see when their recommendations were not relevant & adjust. And if a network screws them multiple times they can always provide a dampening factor in their rankings.

If successful their TV efforts can tear down the walls between different types of content:

Google will do what it does, and that’s insinuate itself between information and the user. And the fretting will be minimal.

As for the impact of Google TV, this has the potential to challenge the TV hegemony. By blurring the lines between TV and the Internet, Google TV has the potential to destroy classifications of content. No more “TV shows,” just “content.” No more “Web videos,” just “content.” And, once the distinctions are completely undermined, then direct distribution via the Internet becomes more viable. Google TV could replace Big TV as the aggregator, then it just becomes a matter of who offers the fattest pipes.

Once Google has the aggregate usage data they can use it any way they like. The concept applies to any market. Economies of scale advantages breed more economies of scale. Apple and Amazon want to have proprietary ebook formats? Fine. Google will assist publishers in creating the default common e-book format.

It is not just regular algorithm updates that can whack your traffic. A couple years out these additional content formats will be a big issue for many web publishers because if Google gets a significant sample size & market leverage in any of these parallel markets then some of these other content formats will start bleeding into the search results. And that (along with market competition) can quickly drive margins into negative territory for many publishing business models.

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TV is the New Mobile

7 Essential SEO Tips for Small Businesses

Written on May 21, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, seo

When it comes to marketing in the current economy, small businesses need all the help they can get. They don’t have the ad budgets, the personnel or the time that the bigger competition has. But none of those factors really matter to search engines, and SEO is a great way to both level the playing field and steal marketshare.

Here are a few tips that small businesses can use to improve their SEO and user experience.

1. Turn everything into content

Content is still King. Search engines still love unique content, and the more useful content there is on your website, the more opportunities you give searchers to find your products and services. Rob Snell gave a fabulous presentation at PUBCON South, and one of the main takeaways was how to turn everything on an e-commerce site into content. Here are some ways to “free” extra content on your site. Here were some of his tips:

• Record everything and transcribe it all into text. Interviews, conversations, product DVD’s, personal opinions, etc.
• Turn support emails into FAQ pages on your site
• Turn PDF’s into HTML pages (although PDF files can rank on their own)
• Start generating videos of everything

2. Make it personal

Small businesses have a major advantage that most bigger businesses don’t:  A personal voice. By making your voice heard, you’re showcasing your authority in your market, and adding trust. Buyers love hearing recommendations or reviews, and are more influenced to buy from those vs. product feature and benefit pages. Consumers use search engines to research products, and other than the lowest price, they’re looking for recommendations. Give them some! If you have a catalog, make a buyers guide in addition to product listings. Show you’re an expert and turn your knowledge into personalized business. Teaching is a great way to make sales.

3. Optimize for local search

Odds are that your small business can take advantage of local search. 63% of consumers use search engines to research information about local companies. Start with Thomas’ excellent guide on local SEO tips that range from claiming your profile to adding media to submitting to content aggregators.

4. Improve your site’s speed

Small business sites can be notoriously slow. Site speed is usually one of the last things that small business owners care about. But now that Google has introduced speed into the ranking algorithm, it’s time to seriously start checking out how fast your site loads. But more importantly, when you improve your site’s speed, you’re also improving your customer’s experience. Don’t make users wait to buy your products! You can use tools like Web Page Analyzerand the Firefox extension YSlow! to see what’s taking your pages so long to load. If you’re using a blog or shopping cart software, search for caching plugins for your software.

5. Refine internal linking

Internal links can add value to your site considerably, but many small businesses don’t understand that you have to develop a linking mindset in order to really capitalize on it. It takes extra time to research old post links and include them in your articles, but the benefits are great. Sites like Copyblogger do an excellent job of referencing older posts in their articles. Not only does this strategy help with SEO, it also adds to the user experience, giving them more Think long and hard about your site’s linking architecture. Is your navigation schema getting to all of your content? Aside from adding sitemaps, related products and posts keep both visitors and search engines happy. Popular posts lists are also great for making sure your best content is getting seen and linked to.

6. Create content for people

If you’re generating content specifically for search engines, you’re missing a major chunk of your market. Humans don’t like to be bamboozled, and when they come to a page on your site that was obviously made for a search engine, they’ll leave in a hurry and never come back. Plus, only humans can link to your site. If you want to get more inbound links and retain customers, you need to write for customers. The goal to higher search results is still to get more people to your site. After all, search engines can’t buy anything from you.

7. Don’t fret about getting nofollow links

It’s easy to get carried away with only trying to get incoming links without the dreaded nofollow. But really, a link is still a link. If that link can bring in a potential customer, then you want it. If you’re only looking for specific types of incoming links, than odds are you’re missing lots of the low-hanging backlink fruit and worrying about the wrong things.

Who knows how long the nofollow link will be around? If you’re smart, you worry about what’s most important: creating great content. You can’t control how Google ranks things in the future. Focus on things you can control, like creating a killer experience for your customers. In the end, if you focus on giving your customers and visitors great content, many aspects of SEO will take care of itself. Great content attracts great links, especially when you promote it and leverage social SEO channels of distribution. If it’s good for your potential customers, odds are it’s good for SEO too.

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7 Essential SEO Tips for Small Businesses |
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Wordstream PPC and SEO Tool Review

Written on May 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

Wordstream Review

Wordstream is a suite of online marketing tools which cover Keyword Research and Management for PPC and SEO Campaigns. They also offer a Firefox plug-in which we’ll cover in a bit. Wordstream gives you access to three free tools:

• Free Keyword Niche Finder
• Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Free Keyword Grouper

While there are many free and paid keyword tools on the market Wordstream does offer more in the way of integration with industry leading products like Google AdWords and Google Analytics. Recently Wordstream earned the Editor’s Pick award in the Google Analytics Application Gallery:

Google Marketplace Award

Wordstream’s keyword data is produced via “blended” data which they acquire from multiple sources. The discuss their data sources on the FAQ section of the Free Keyword Tool. It’s important to note that they do not simply pull keyword data from Google like many other “keyword research” tools do.

Both PPC and SEO campaigns can fall victim to poor organization which leads to poor site or campaign architecture which eventually leads to poor results as data becomes more and more difficult to accurately manage. Wordstream aims to aid in your keyword research, PPC campaign management, and SEO execution.

Free Tools

Free Keyword Niche Finder

The Keyword Niche Finder attempts to find niches of a core keyword. In this example I chose insurance. Usually, I’ve had better results with this tool by using really broad keywords. The longer you get into the tail the less associations the tool can perform hence the less niches available for you to analyze.

You can choose to have the niches emailed to you (you’ll get a zip file of all the niches shown on the screen, not all the available ones so be sure you’ve got the ones you want, and they come as separate .csv’s within the .zip) and you can get started sorting through the niches shown to get an idea of what part of the insurance market you may want to pursue. Let’s say I’m not interested in travel insurance. So I click the X to get rid of that and another niche pops up, “uk” insurance. Note the number of niches has gone down and I’m left with a new niche to evaluate, “UK”, within the insurance market.

So after sorting through the available niches I’ve narrowed it down to the following niches:

So I’ve decided to pursue the life insurance market so I click on the bucket and I’m shown 774 keywords for that niche. As you can see, there is a filtering option but that is available to paid subscribers. Relative frequency refers to their “blended data” approach meaning the term life insurance quote typically is searched more often than life insurance exam in aggregate.

If this is the only niche you want to target simply remove the other niches and request the emailed .csv (need to leave at least 2 active niches for export though). This way you’ll receive the keywords you want for further processing in whatever spreadsheet application you use. This tool is somewhat limited as it is a free tool but it can be a pretty useful way to get a broad view of niches available in a specific market when first starting out.

Plus, it’s a pretty slick way to bounce back and forth between different niches without having to re-query a keyword tool every time you want to look at a different market.

Free Keyword Grouper

Wordstream’s Keyword Grouper tool where you can enter up to 10,000 keywords and have Wordstream group them by category and word/modifier association.

This tool can be quite useful when you pull data from something like your web analytics or PPC programs and receive a variety of new keywords back. The Keyword Grouper tool will group using modifiers (cheap, free, buy, etc) which helps you identify new market segments or new keywords you may have been missing out on initially.

I think the idea behind the tool is solid but I also think you’d want to spend some time going through your own results to further refine your data. The following screen shot was produced after entering the following data:

• home insurance 88
• auto insurance 39
• home insurance company 33
• auto insurance quote 28

The groupings are mostly sensible and they also filtered in some modifiers that I didn’t originally include but ones that I know are valuable in this industry. Aligning your keywords to your site’s structure is always a good idea when doing SEO and this tool can help a bit in that area. The tool (free) is not perfect but it does provide useful, actionable data.

Wordstream put out a helpful Keyword Grouping white paper as well.

Some Opinions on the SEO Myths & Realities Fight

Written on May 10, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, chat, marketing, seo

Posted by randfish

A few weeks back, Stephan Spencer authored a post for SearchEngineLand entitled 36 Myths that Won’t Die But Need To. I certainly recommend checking out the post, but be warned of some highly contentious comments. The tweets and offline feedback were similarly up-in-arms and it’s easy to understand why.

SEO

How I Get Things Done - And How You Can Too

Written on May 9, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, seo

Posted by willcritchlow

Warning - this is a more personal post and one that isn’t about hardcore SEO tactics. Despite this, I think that I have some useful lessons to share and I hope you find it useful. For thoughts on similar principles but more from an SEO project perspective rather than an individual efficiency angle, you could read project management for SEO.

How I get things done as founder of an SEO agency

After becoming a dad 6 weeks ago, I have been trying desperately to squeeze efficiency gains out of my day. Just before my daughter was born, I was stretching my day out and was regularly at my desk by 8am and still there well after 7pm at night plus working in the evenings and at weekends. Many of you may work even longer hours than this. I don’t think it’s uncommon among business owners. In a previous life, I worked in management consulting and the hours were brutal. I always wanted to build a company that didn’t rely on long hours, but somehow even (generally) succeeding at that didn’t stop me working long hours.

As a general rule, I was fine with it and not coping too badly.

However

I don’t want to be the kind of dad that is never home. I want to be there for bathtime.

But I also don’t want to compromise my ambition. I don’t want Distilled to suffer and I don’t want to hold up or let down my team or our clients.

So, I’m left with finding a few hours a day of ‘efficiency savings’. I need to get better at what I do and more efficient at how I do it. It’s not like I wasn’t trying before, but now it’s serious. Since I’ve been putting so much effort into it, I

Google Gmail Such a Drag…and Drop

Written on April 16, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

You know how it goes.

You’re sending and email and you want to attach a file.

If you’re in Gmail, that would normally involve clicking “Attach a file” and selecting the files you wish to add to your message.

What a drag!

Actually, that’s not a drag, man. This is!

See that? That’s a screenshot of someone using either Google Chrome or Firefox 3.6 and actually dragging and dropping files right into the email message!

And you thought you weren’t going to have anything fun to do this weekend!

Read the original here:
Google Gmail Such a Drag…and Drop