5 Ways How to Select Best Keywords For Google AdWords

In this article I will share some tips on how to select keywords for Adwords.

A good place to start with search engine marketing (SEM) is the use of keywords because that is how your customers find you, right?

• If there is anything that you remember from this article, remember these 3 things:
• Think holistically about the different ways that customers could reach you
• Align your keywords and their management with your overall business outcomes
• Delete your low search volume keywords

There are a few ways to develop a list of keywords for your AdWords campaign. Think of the words on the website, your services and products that you offer. What terms do you think your customers use to describe or search for you? What terms do your competitors use to be found?
Remember the story of the 3 bears? Goldilocks tried the porridge and one was too hot and another was too cold and one was juuust right. Well, you can think of keywords for AdWords in the same way. Some are too broad and some are too long and some are juuust right. In SEO, we LOVE Long Tail keywords because those are very relevant. They may not be searched as much as a broad term, but when they are, its money in the bank. Unfortunately, you can’t have a lot of long tail keywords in AdWords because of the low search volume. Compared to shorter keywords (those with two to four words), keywords that contain five words or more drive less than half the volume of clicks and impressions on average. It also hurts your quality score. I’ll explain this a little later.

Let’s say you are David Bouley, the owner and chef of Bouley’s French Restaurant in New York City and you want to have a campaign to sell more gift certificates to your restaurant. Using the term Gift Card is too broad because it will trigger all kind of searches that are irrelevant. He doesn’t want people seeing his ads when searching for Harry & David Gift Baskets. UsingRestaurant Gift Certificates is a little better because it triggers those searching for that more specific gift certificate, yet it can still be a problem because it can show up for Olive Garden gift certificate, or Chili’s, which target totally different diners with a different price and dining experience expectation in mind. A good keyword phrase could be french fine dining giftcard or french fine dining gift certificate. This targets diners who are interested in a French Fine Dining Experience. Another possibility could beBouley’s Gift Certificates, however I bet the search volume would be very low.

Keyword Tools

There are many software tools available to assist you in finding the best keywords for your campaign or website. One of them is the Google Keyword Planner. What I have found though, is that these tools are not as accurate as you may think. The search volume has been off and the bids weren’t as accurate as what I saw when my campaigns went live.

I was told once by a very successful online marketing professional, Matt Trainer, who has made a good living by helping major brands with getting massive targeted traffic and customers into their sales funnels, to take 10 – 15 minutes and step away from the computer and actually think how I, as a potential client would search for that product or service. I’m sure you can think of the right terms just as well as any software can. Heck, you can even think of what terms your competitors are using. Like many things in life, you just gotta take action and step out in faith. Give it a try yourself and, you may start to realize that this practice will work better for you too if you try it and practice it. Maybe you have already seen the same things that I have experienced.

Grouping Keywords

Google LOVES tightly themed, related and relevant content. You want to match keywords to a user’s search terms and to the ads as well as the landing page you are sending them to visit. I arrange keywords within the adgroups. It also makes it easier for you to manage and maintain your account. If you are on a tight budget, keywords are often grouped at the campaign level for greater budgetary control.

Stay Clear of Low Searched Keywords

Watch out for low search volume keywords. As Stated earlier, SEM doesn’t like long tail keywords. These terms often haven’t driven a single impression in months or even years because people aren’t performing searches on them (not because your bid isn’t winning any auctions). While you want them on your page for SEO, Delete them in SEM campaign if you have other keywords that could potentially cover that traffic. My personal preference is to have 2 – 3 long tail keywords that are super relevant even though they don’t perform well because when people do search for example: Buy Bouley’s NYC Gift Certificates, His ad will show up and the person looking for that and ready to buy a $500 gift certificate for a 5 course French Fine Dining luxury experience will have found exactly what they want.

Let’s Get Negative

Just as important as the keywords people use to find you; Negative keywords are an essential part of a well-rounded keyword strategy. In order to increase the profitability and improve control over the flow of traffic in your account, use negative keywords to the fullest. On the most basic level, negative keywords prevent you from showing ads to people who are less interested in what you have to offer, even though their queries may be syntactically related to the keywords in your account.

So, let’s go back to the example of David Bouley’s French Restaurant. He doesn’t want to show up for searches of gift cards from Pizza Hut, or Chili’s or Applebee’s, etc. So a sure fire way to assure we are targeting the most relevant audience is to add these restaurants to the negative keyword list along with gift baskets and Harry. Once the campaign is running, you will see in the keyword details reports what terms are triggering your ads and then you can add the appropriate ones to the negative keyword list.

Having a strong negative keyword list will be valuable as it improves the performance of your campaign and improves the quality scores of your ads.

Scoring High Marks on Quality

You know how you have those warning or indicator lights on the dash of your car? They turn on when you need to check your engine, or if your oil or gas is running low? Well, you can think of the Quality Score of your keywords as a warning light: something that alerts you to potential problems which need to be checked. A lot of advertisers spend a lot of time on this. A good rule of thumb I go by is a score under 6 is a stronger indicator that I need to check the relevance of the term and how it’s performing and if I need to tweak my landing page or ad or both.

Attempting to use tricks, shortcuts or short-term solutions to force the quality score up isn’t the way to go. Rather, you’re better off to focus on your long-term performance outcomes and look for ways to reach them by improving your user experience. Google is ALL about the user experience and so should you.

That should be enough for now to get ya started. I’d love to read your thoughts on this.

6 Ways to Get More Results from SEO Right Now

As PR pros today we are tasked with a mountain of responsibility. Not only do clients demand monthly press mentions, but many lean on their PR firm's for social media and search engine optimization (SEO) advice, and in some cases execution. Unfortunately, much of the SEO advice out there currently is based on anecdotes and myth. Fortunately, a new search engine ranking factors study was recently released that helps shed some light on what's truly important for getting SEO results in 2016.

But, since I'm not an SEO expert, I thought it would make sense to interview someone who is - Dmitry Dragilev, founder of Just Reach Out (which I covered a few articles ago). Together, we are going to walk you through the highlights of an important SEO study and show you how you can use its findings to maximize the SEO benefits that your clients receive from your PR campaigns. So without further ado. . .the Q&A:

Q. As a PR professional, what is the best council I can give my clients about SEO, especially considering that the methods/strategies change with each Google algorithm change?

A. Backlinks remain an integral part of Google's algorithm. One of the chief reasons businesses hire PR firms today is that as PR pros we are very good at generating mentions from authoritative sites. More often than not, these mentions come in the form of links.

According to the new study, backlinks were the #1 most-important ranking factor that they investigated. Specifically, sites that generated links from a diversity of different sites came out on top.

For PR pros, this means that mentions from smaller blogs or niche publications can benefit our client's SEO. Therefore, we shouldn't necessarily shy away from a mention just because it's not on the cover of the Wall Street Journal.

Q. I used to spend a ton of time on Moz analyzing our client's earned media power and used to put a premium on domain authority. Is that still a thing?A. Simple answer? Yes! A website's overall link authority boosts all pages. The study I referenced above discovered that a website's overall link authority played a major role in how well each page on that site ranked. In other words, a brand new page on an established site will tend to outrank a new page on a smaller site.

This impacts our work because we're often unable to get links pointing to specific pages on a client's website (for example, a product or service page). But rest easy - even links pointing to a client's homepage may boost the rankings for those high-priority pages.

Q. I write a ton of contributed content and typically include imagery. Is that imagery helping to move the needle on those articles?

A. Image-rich media ranks very well in search, so yes it does make a difference. In the old days of faxing press releases to journalists, images didn't matter much. In fact, unless you earned a cover story, your client's media coverage usually didn't include an image at all!

In 2016, things are very different. It's common to see an image on almost every page on the web today. This study we are referencing here confirms that, whenever possible, it's smart to add images to your content. They found that content that contained at least once image tended to rank above content without any images.

This means that PR professionals should aim to use images in more areas than just with contributed articles - consider adding imagery to your online press materials, including press releases and press kits.

As I mentioned up front, as PR professionals we are now often tasked with having at least a basic understanding of SEO. The data-backed SEO tips provided by Dragilev should not only help you and your agency better understand SEO, but actually improve the rankings of your clients in search.

3 Ways to Find Blog Post Ideas That Generate Backlinks

Finding ideas to blog about is a tough job, even for an experienced blogger.

No matter, how good are you at brainstorming ideas, you run out of ideas some of the times.

There are dozens of posts that explain to you how to find blog topic ideas. The majority of those posts fail to explain how to find ideas that drive real backlinks to your blog.

The best way to build natural backlinks is to produce great content and properly promote it. For that, brainstorming ideas for blogging that have the potential to drive high-quality backlinks is essential.

The specialty of this post is that in this post, I will explain you to find ideas that drive you high traffic and backlinks.

Let’s get started.

1. Quora:

It’s a goldmine to find ideas for blogging about. Leveraging it for building your blog and finding inspirations, can do wonders.

Let me unveil you the dirty little secret of finding post ideas that drive backlinks to your site.

Head over to Quora.

There, search for the topic of your interest.

In the above example, I searched for the topic ‘content marketing’.

There, I searched for the questions that have quite a decent number of followers.

If a question has good followers, that means it is a common question.


There’s the thing.

If you create content on the same topic, you’ll get great readership. Moreover, you may get potential backlinks if you present the topic in a unique way.

When you create content on the topic you find in Quora, I advise you to answer the original question along with a link back to your site.

By this, you’ll get additional targeted traffic from visitors and as well as the followers of the questions.

When targeted traffic comes to your blog, you’ll boost your social shares, and you may attract good backlinks.

2. Use the power of Google search:

Google is the best friend of yours to help you find the best topic ideas.

You may ask me – “What should I search for? I am dry”.

Here’s the trick.

Research after research it is found that following are the types of content that are shared and linked to most of the times.
Infographics
Ultimate guides
List posts
Case studies

Now you know what.

Before implementing this strategy, I advise you to install Ahrefs Toolbar for your browser. Ahrefs has the largest database of backlinks. The toolbar displays the number of backlinks the search results have.

I’ll get you clear. Keep reading.

2.1. Find infographics ideas:

Search Google for,

Your keyword + “Infographic”

It returns you all the top infographics in your niche. Most of the top results have a good amount of backlinks.

As I said earlier, for accurate results, as you can see in the above screenshot, you need to activate the Ahrefs toolbar. It displays the number of backlinks beneath the search results.

You can also combine multiple keywords for more results.

Like, if you are in blogging and SEO niche you may need to search for the term,

Blogging OR SEO + “Infographic”

It returns all the pages that have infographics either related to blogging or SEO.

Like this, by adding keywords, you can expand the number of potential post ideas you get.

3. Scan the headlines:

There are plenty of RSS readers, blog aggregators, and content curation sites, which collects the best resources and articles in a niche.

You need to just scan the headlines of the content curated on those ideas to spark up some new blog post content ideas in your brain. The content you are scanning should be popular to get backlinks.

Below are some of the best places to find content ideas like this:

• Alltop
• Flipboard
• Scoop.it
• Pinterest boards
• Feedly
• Blog communities
• Twitter hashtags

Just search for the keyword related to your niche in the search box for these tools, and get content ideas.

For Twitter, just search your keyword.

Now you need to examine the Tweets that got great engagement. You can find tons of ideas for you to blog about.

Wrapping up

These are some the effective ways to find content ideas that generate backlinks to your site.

I suggest you maintain an idea file and update it as you come across the ideas to blog about. It makes sure that your inspiration won’t dry out. Whenever you start writing a blog post, you can refer that file for oiling your machine up.

Make sure the content you create is of high-quality because no one links to your content if it is mediocre and do not deliver value to your readers.


I hope you found this article helpful.

Top 3 Tools You Should Use for Technical SEO Audits

Doing a search engine optimization (SEO) audit is no joke. It used to take time, the patience of a saint and too many spreadsheets. You may grow a white hair or two in the process. But, thanks to technical SEO audit tools, we are no longer doing those insane manual checks that we did in the past. Most SEO experts arm themselves with these tools so they’re no longer rummaging through raw data but making strategic decisions instead.

In this article I’ll share three of my go-to tools for performing a technical SEO audit: DeepCrawl (a cloud-based tool), Screaming Frog (a desktop-based tool) and Search Console (the free web-based tool from Google themselves). They all have their different strengths and use cases. Depending on your requirements, you may need to choose one -- or you may find all three useful in conjunction.

1. DeepCrawl

I really like DeepCrawl, because of its flexibility and the depth of the reports it provides. When starting a crawl, you can choose from numerous crawl types, right up to a full gap analysis of my entire site. You can also auto-schedule crawls, which is really useful. Crawls are highly customizable, so you can set the criteria for maximum / minimum links per page, content, title / URL length, load time, etc.


Here are the three things I like the most about DeepCrawl:
It can easily handle crawling millions of pages, so if you need to crawl a huge site, look no further.
It provides competitor reports -- not just the basic headlines, but the real nitty-gritty details on content, pricing and promotions, site architecture and even the brand’s key influencers.
It allows you to project manage your SEO team, creating tickets for issues and assigning them to people. It also alerts you if any issues pop up consistently in crawls. Plus, it maintains a history of all changes, so you can look back and monitor performance and progress over time.

If I had to improve one thing, I’d ask for more mobile-focused reports. (Their support guys told me to expect more of these in their next product update, so looks like that'll be solved soon anyway).

2. Screaming Frog

When it comes to desktop crawlers, Screaming Frog is an undisputed leader. The tool has been around for quite some time now, and webmasters managing sites of all sizes swear by it. If you are looking at crawling less than 500 URLs, you can even use it for free.

However, if you have a large website with over 10,000 pages, be wary, as desktop crawlers can cause server-response problems. Besides, it doesn’t come with collaboration features, which makes it far less attractive for SEO teams these days.

That said, in this price range, it’s one of the most useful crawlers, and here are the reasons it's in my top three:
It doesn’t die off when your memory is running low and alerts you beforehand. I especially like this feature, because this has happened to me a few times. All you need to do is save the project, increase random access memory (RAM) and restart it to continue.
Their bulk export option really makes life easier, as you can export all data, including internal links, outbound links, anchor text, image alt text, etc.
There is an option to accept cookies, so you can also crawl websites that make it compulsory to accept cookies.

And, though I like the tool overall, if I had to change one thing about it, I’d want them to improve the user experience to make it easier to customize crawls.

3. Google Search Console

While SEO veterans might find it funny to see this tool in the list, many SEOs are relying on it more than ever. The tool has come a long way since its earlier days and can offer a fair amount of insights. These are the three things I do love about it:
It gives you estimates on your position for a keyword, plus the number of impressions and clicks for your site on that keyword in Google search results. That may be basic, but it’s important and useful.
It gives a good summary of things that matter -- things like broken links, number of pages indexed, correctness of HTML markup, page loading speed, etc.
It’s free -- and it comes from the horse's mouth! (OK, that’s two things, but they’re both major plus points.)

The only thing I don’t like about Search Console is that it doesn’t always give a complete picture.

Remember, these tools may not be the best fit for your specific needs. All three have their particular unique selling points and solve specific pain points well. You should review them all and choose the one that’s right for you. The main things to consider are the size of your website, the volume of new pages you generate and the kind of insights you are looking for.

How to Optimize Your Website for International Search

Most websites are only optimized for the country that the business lives in, but for companies to expand, they should also optimize for international search. Search engine optimization continues to be the most effective way to drive traffic to a website. Focusing on one market may limit traffic and revenue if you aren’t thinking about international customers.
To expand to an international focus, keep these guidelines in mind:

Consider keywords in other languages

Make sure that you have considered keywords in other languages. Even if your site is English only, people will often search in their native language. If your site is optimized for keywords in other languages, you will show up in search. From there, chances are that the person looking will still be able to use your site. If the person does not speak English, he or she will be able to use tools like Google to translate the page and get an understanding of the products and services you sell.

Provide domains that are country-specific

Most countries have their own domain extension. German websites, for example, most commonly end in “.de” rather than “.com”. In order to make your website friendly for international search, it is beneficial to create landing pages with different domains for different countries. Search engines in-country will pick up the site that is most relevant for their market. For example, www.website.de would rank higher in Germany than www.website.com.

Translate content when possible

It is not essential to translate entire websites for international search since English is so commonly read and spoken. However, it is important to have at least some content translated and localized for international markets so that the site is relevant for search engines. Some websites have sections of the website that are translated with a disclaimer that only some of the content could be translated for local languages.

Focus on on-page SEO

Make sure to consider the following on-page SEO guidelines for international search engines:

• Alt Attributes and Imagery – Alt attributes and images need to have keywords and those keywords should be in all relevant languages.
• Consistent Mapping – If you do use the local domain, e.g. “.de”, make sure that that all navigation links on that domain also lead to a “.de” page. This tells Google that this page is in German and that the site is relevant for the German market. Also, make it easy for the user to be able to switch languages if you are not able to translate the entire website. Then he or she can get full content on the main site.
• Keywords – It is important to do keyword research for each region that you are selling to. Doing translation of your English keywords alone is not the most effective way to find the appropriate keywords for your target country. Think of how many ways we say different words in English. If there was just one translation, you might miss the most commonly searched terms.

International Social Media

Social media sites are not the same for all countries. For example, while professionals in the US use LinkedIn as their professional networking site, people in Germany use Xing. To further optimize for international search, set up social media pages for each market and populate them with rich content that contains keywords.
By considering the above, your international SEO strategy can be as smooth and effective as your domestic one.

How to Boost Your YouTube Ranking (Infographic)

Of all the pieces of content you create to promote your brand, none are more labor-intensive, perhaps, than videos.

With all that work, you want to make sure your video is seen. But that depends on how YouTube indexes it. So, how do you make sure you’re correctly boosting your YouTube rankings?
It's simple...sort of.

Take a look at this infographic below from TollFreeForwarding.com and Gryffin Media about boosting your YouTube ranking.