Research your Marketing Effort – part 2

In part 1 we looked at Market Trends and “How to spy on your competitors”.  In this article we are looking at evaluating keywords, discovering how competitive keyword phrases are, and choosing keywords that have a higher percentage of converting to sales.

Evaluating Keywords

Fortunately, one of the best tools is free: Google’s Keyword Tool

Let’s use it to find out about the competition on “Real Estate”

At first look, this looks great: huge search volumes. This is the keyword for me! Hang on – first, if you want to use Google Adwords to advertise your site, it is going to cost you about £1.49 per “click through” to your site. How much is a sale worth to you? If your site is good at converting “clicks through” to your site to a sale, then this could be good value. Say, you can convert 1 click in every 100 clicks into a sale. Then the advertising has cost you about £149 – could be good value! Results we have seen in the Real Estate industry suggest that you need about 1000 to 10,000 click throughs to get a sale. Now look at the costs.

OK – the alternative approach is to get your SEO expert to design you a site that is going to get high rankings for “Real Estate”. Your SEO expert will either rub his hands in joy about the bill he is going to give you or be frank and say “this is a very competitive term and this will cost a lot and we cannot guarantee you a top search engine ranking“.

Competitive Search Terms

What does he mean competitive? OK – do a search for “real estate” in google.com. There are 634 million competing pages. That is not the complete story – your SEO expert will do at least a little more research – he will add this phrase to Google.com “allintitle: real estate”. Basic SEO says you should put “Real Estate” in your title tags. The competing pages now reduces to 89 million. Another technique is to try “allinurl: real estate” as this is also a measure of what you are also competing against. A mere 21 million competing pages. So what does all this mean – well “Real Estate” is not a search term to chase unless you have a MEGA budget.

Long Tail Keywords

One technique that is advocated is to choose “long tail keywords” for both Adwords advertising and natural search engine rankings (latter by designing pages to promote these keywords). Long Tail Keywords refers to phrases with typically at least 3 words – say “buy spanish property”, “brittany property for sale”, or “miami luxury villas for sale”. Check the number of daily searches and the competition as above to select good long tail keywords with good search volumes and low competition! For natural search engine results, create unique content about the keyword (or keyword phrase). Do not scrape content from other sites or copy content from other sites. Repeated use of duplicate conent can expose your site to a Google Penalty.

Keywords that Convert to Sales

As well as the number of searches, & the competitiveness of keyword phrases you should also look at whether the keywords convert to sales. You have to get into the mind of the “searcher” – is he just browsing for information, doing research (further down the line) or wanting to buy now. Probably it is this last category that you are really interested in! For example, “President Bush” and “buy spanish property” – extreme examples but illustrate the principle well. Microsoft have a free tool to evaluate whether the keywords are more likely to convert to sales called Online Commercial Intention. On this page check Tool Input: Query. In our example let us try “President Bush” and “buy spanish property”- “President Bush” has a value of 0.04 and “buy spanish property” a value of 0.77. Anything with a value above 0.5 is likely to be a “buy” signal. So with this tool you can also select keywords that show a buying intention.

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