Do It Yourself Series (Part 3)

On Line Commercial Intent (OCI) is a useful metric for gaining insights on what SEO terms searchers use when they are ready to purchase. That can be very powerful information.

So we’ve identified 4 keyword phrases with good relevancy and highest volume.

They are:

House painter               60,500

Home painter                22,200

House Painting             201,000

Painting Contractors     90,500

Note: upper case and lower case letters are viewed as the same on search engines. You will get the same results regardless of which is used.

As the business owner you may already have some feelings on these terms. But lets go through the process, you may find some surprises.

Microsoft adlabs OCI Tool

There is an online tool to help measure what is called Online Commercial Intent (OCI) from Microsoft adlabs.

Here’s the link:  http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention

Me geek side thinks it very cool. But from a practical stand point I will over ride any results that tend to go against common sense.

Put your keywords in, select Query and Go. You will get a probability of commercial intent…how likely a searcher using this keyword phrase is looking to buy. “house painter” gets 57% and “home painter” get 99%. Big difference.

So here are our results for the 4 phrases:

House painter                57%

Home painter                99%

House Painting             61% non-commercial

Painting Contractors     59% non-commercial

Non-commercial means that the searcher using the phrase is more likely not intend on make a purchase now. My guess is that “house painting” is a “how to/DIY” keyword. But “painting contractor” non-commercial intent results is a bit confusing. So let’s dig a little deeper. Let’s try “painting contactor Philadelphia”

“painting contactor Philadelphia” has an OCI of 87%. Much better. But this may be a term that is better for commercial painters and less relevant for residential house painters.

This is where the business owners experience comes in.

Geo modifiers change the OCI. If we enter “house painter Philadelphia” the probability goes up to 96%. That makes sense, right? People who enter a town or city in their search are most likely looking for someone to perform the service. Geo Modifiers play a big role in local SEO. For some businesses the number of geo modifiers out weighs the number of core keywords.

So we are still left with “house painter” and “home painter”. They have a large difference in search volume and in there OCI metric. And there seems to be an inverse relationship. How to choose?

Combining Search Volume and OCI Information

Well you may want to just promote for both but if you had to choose you could do a little math to help the process. You can multiply the search volume by the OCI to get a keyword value score.

                                    OCI                 Volume            Keyword Value Score

House painter               57%                 60,500             34,485

Home painter                99%                 22,200             19,998

House painter still wins out by quite a bit. My vote for most valuable keyword goes to “house painter”. That doesn’t mean that “home painter” should not be used. But it does mean that you can probably get more business from good search rankings for “house painter” that for “home painter”. And that’s the bottom line right?

The keyword value score can also be used to make PPC bidding decisions. Jack up your bids on the valuable keywords and lower your bids on the less valuable to generate more sales and be more efficient. But that’s for another post.

Next installment - Add Geo Modifiers

This is where it all starts - the well spring of new customer acquisition, if I may. Keywords are the search terms people are using to find the services and products you are offering.

The trick is to identify keywords that:

1. Are most relevant to your service or product
2. Have a high search volume
3. And are being used by people who are ready to purchase or Online Commercial Intent (OCI)
4. And then add Geo Modifiers

And it’s actually a lot simpler than the “SEO Guys” would have you think! But it is very important that we pick the best keywords so that we don’t waste time, effort and money promoting the wrong keywords. We want the keywords that pay, the “money keywords”.

The keywords you decide on will serve as the foundation to all of your search marketing.

1. Relevancy

We need a starting point for our keyword research. And that comes from your judgment based on your experience as the business owner, who interacts with your customers on a daily basis and knows the way they talk about your service or product.

For example, do your customers refer to your painting service as “house painter” or “home painter”. After we do some research on search volume that experience will come in handy when we try and narrow things down.

You will want to make a list of all the keywords you think people may use to find you. These will be your seed phrases that we use to research and generate additional keywords.

2. Search Volume

We can source many online tools for this. But google currently receives 72% of the search volume, Yahoo 16% and Bing (MSN) 6%. Everything pales in the light of google. So if we are going to keep it simple lets just use the google keyword tool. Not only is it simple but it offers plenty of information.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

We will be using the seed phrases that you have identified through your experience with your business described above. We’ll use just two to keep this Demo simple. You will certainly have more than that.

In the “enter keyword” box let’s type in “house painter” and on the next line “home painter” and hit the “get keyword ideas” button.

You will see a drop down menu for show columns to display. If you don’t see “Local Search Volume” as one of the columns select it from the drop down. Select anything else you want to see. Leave “Match Type” as broad.

I like to download everything into a spread sheet and sort. If you are going to do that you will need to download both sets and combine them into one spread before sorting. But you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.

Now let’s see what we have here.

“home painter” is almost 40,000 behind “house painter”. But we will incorporate other factors in that may make “home painter” more valuable in the next section. But first lets look at the google additional keywords to consider.

Wow, look at “house painting” and “painting contactors”. Much higher than “home painter”! But, in the end, you as the business owner will need to weigh relevancy and OCI (see below). I’m going to through out house paint as a term DIY people would use to find paint.

So we are going to take the 4 volume winners and move to the next step, Online Commercial Intent. This will be our next installment.

With the advent of universal search video is becoming a fast growing online media. The search engines make an effort to serve relevant content in many different forms, not just web  pages. And your youtube video may show up on the first page of their search engine results.

Video production and promotion fees have gone down dramatically over the last year. Currently you can have a video produced and promoted on the major video sites for as little as $499. Learn More>>

Before implementing a video online we need to have top core keywords in hand as well the geo-modifiers. We will also want to write a keyword-rich, short description of the video similar to what would be used for a google local business listing.

There are two general approaches to promoting a video online; by uploading it the video sharing sites and having the video on your website. The later requires optimization for video search engine robots and setting up a video feed. If you have a great video and you want it everywhere there is no reason you can’t do both.

Video Sharing Sites

For this you become a member of the community and upload your video. They host the video for you and stream it to viewers. Some display vids only from there site (YouTube) and others also display results from a variety of sources (google video, Yahoo! Video and Blinkx) Here are some:

http://www.youtube.com

http://www.brightcove.tv

http://video.aol.com

Stumble Upon gets videos from YouTube, MySpace TV, Google video and others.

Video Search Engines

Index Videos the videos from your website but don’t host them. This is the focus if we are going to host the video on the client’s site instead of on a video sharing site. http://www.blinkx.com is such a site.

On Website

Okay, you have a video on your website…but who cares. The video, just like everything else on the site needs to be optimized so that the video search engines will index it.

Submit a google video sitemap to let google know where your video is and what it is about. This will help google to index it and possibly serve it up. The sitemap allows for a title and description which can be optimized for your keywords.

Put videos on individual URLs. The file name, text surrounding the vid, and links pointing to it need to contain keywords. Video file name should contain descriptive terms separated by dashes. You should also set up a MRSS (Media Real Simple Syndication) feed.

I think it’s important to find ways to quantify the value of a keyword to business. Most of the hype out there about SEO has to do with positions and page rank. But as a business owner wouldn’t you want to know what kind of return you can expect from your Search Optimization investments? How much should you pay to have your website optimized for a keyword or set of keywords? I’ll do my bes to quantify it in this post. Input is welcome!

The components:

Search Volume

Click Through Rate (CTR)

Conversion Rate

Average Sale

Online Commercial Intent Index

Relevancy

Competition

(I purposely leave our Gross Profit so we can look at the spend in terms of a marketing % expense)

The Basic Math

*Note: these numbers being used here are purely for the sake of illustrating the math. They are not an offer of pricing.

First let’s illustrate the math. Let’s say we have identified 10 keywords that get about 20K search volume per month. For CTR and Conversion rate we will use some standard industry numbers that may or may not be conservative.

1) Using our first three components we can estimate a potential number conversion (or leads)

Search volume x Click through Rate (CTR) x Conversion Rate = Estimated Number of Leads

20000 x 2% x 2% = 8 Conversions

2) Then we can estimate potential sales from those leads using our average sales and the estimated number of conversions. For our example we’ll us an average sale amount of $65.

Ave Sale * Potential number of new sales or clients = $ Value of Estimated Conversions

$65 * 8 = $520/month

3) Lets assume this is a hair salon and once a new client is acquired they will most likely come in once a month. Search Engine Optimization requires an up front investment that will pay off over the course of the following years. So for our example let’s use a 3 year time horizon.

Using our number from above let’s say it takes 9 months to get the top 3 positions and we will hold that position for at least the next three years. The revenue projection for the above example would be:

$520 x 36 (months) = $18,720 or $18k over the next 3 years.

What would you be willing to invest in return for this cash flow? That would depend on your marketing budget and the gross margin of your services/products…and the business owner’s leanings on marketing spend/risk aversion…etc.

Assuming a 15% marketing budget (for the sake of illustration) you may be willing to invest about $2,800. For SEO Marketing work this would be broken up into monthly payments to pay for the on going work. The budget could look something like this:

Over the course of the next few years we will need to tweak and do some additional work but the bulk of the effort will already have been done and you should be seeing results in terms of revenues.

The Other Components

Let’s look at some of the other, less quantifiable components left out of the above calculations:

• Online Commercial Intent Index
• Relevancy
• Competition

Online Commercial Intent Index (OCI)

OCI will have an impact on the conversion rate. If our set of keywords has a high OCI we will want to bump that rate up to 2.5% or 3$. This would make that set more valuable to the business. Learn more about Online Commercial Intent

Relevancy

We want all our keywords to be perfectly relevant but being that it is difficult to quantify we will have to use common sense, judgment and experience to assess. Again high relevancy will result in better conversion rate making the keywords more valuable.

Competition

Ahh, last but definitely not least. In a perfect market the cost of the effort to obtain SERP position should be proportionate to the potential gains of that position. I highly doubt that we have anything that resembles a balanced market in this realm. My impression is that the ROI of SEO exceeds any other marketing channel at the moment, including other internet channels. I think the market is still soft, especially for local search.

But the more competition in a market the more expensive it is to get the top 3 slots. In a highly competitive market we may need to bump up the market expense %. But a highly competitive market is highly competitive usually because we are talking about a growing industry with high profit margins. So the additional expanse may be worth it.

This exercise does not take into consideration the additional clients gained through word of month and additional services that can be sold to existing clients once they have been acquired…etc. The value of acquiring a new client is difficult to measure. But it is certain that the businesses that find the most effective and efficient ways of doing this are the ones that will succeed in the long run.

• What keywords will be used to get these clicks?
• What are the stats for those keywords
• Where will my ad be shown on?
• Will “negative” keywords be employed to avoid wasted click charges?
• What are the qualifications of the account manager (experience, adwords certifications)?
• What geo graphic area will it cover?
• How do I know for sure that the keywords, geo area and sites are holding to what the sales person actually told me?
• Will I be able to track sources and keywords?
• What is the term of the contract? If not month to month, why?
• Why should I expect to be able to compete with all of the other advertiser? Why will the searcher choose me?

Cheap clicks are a good way for a web marketing firm to get customers to sign contracts. But is it in the best interest of the business? Clicks or site visits don’t necessarily achieve business goals. We must connect with the right searchers, engage them with our site and influence them to convert. A program that simply supplies clicks will not allow a business to compete on the web.

This may sound a little abrupt but, if you are afraid of competition then you probably shouldn’t be in business. The hidden gem concept is about finding work arounds to the competition for high volume keywords. The idea of the hidden gem is to find keywords with low to moderate competition with decent search volume. This may have some merit for global search but for local they are not useful. As a local business your geographic search area is already limited. You will only be able to benefit from a fraction of the global searches for a keyword as it is. A local business needs high volume, high conversion rate core keywords.

What is the value of a hidden gem to a local business. Even if you can by pass the competition by using a clever phrase to get site visitors will this pay off? Is your goal to increase web site visits or sales? Hidden gems may not produce a good conversion rate.

In a way, the local SEO hidden gem is the core keyword paired with geo-modifiers. Most local businesses aren’t using geo modifiers in their Meta Keyword list. They are not optimizing for them. And geo-modified keywords tend to have a very good conversion rate.

We want to use keywords that will bring a lot of visitors who are ready to purchase to our sites. At its core that is what keyword selection should achieve. The keywords that we select should be relevant, have a high search volume and be the keywords searchers are using who intend to purchase.

For local SEO we don’t want to find the “Hidden Gems”. They won’t bring us enough traffic, and they may not be the keywords used by searchers who are ready to buy. Local SEO has a very limited target compared to global SEO, so we need to use the hard hitters.

How many keywords to optimize for is dependent on the nature of the slope of keyword/search volume graph and the over all search volume for the overall set. 

Keyword Selection Methodology

• Generate a list of probable core keywords.
• Assign an SEO Value to each of the top core keywords.
• Incorporate Geo-Modifiers

1. Generate a list of probable core keywords

Using online tools along with common sense, a comprehensive list of likely keywords. There are occasional surprises, but most times you will find that the keywords that get the most search volume are the ones you would expect. We are only interested in the highest volume keywords.

2. Assign an SEO Value to each of the top core keywords.

Keyword SEO value is measured by weighing relevancy, search volume and the Online Commercial Intent Index (OCI). We call the resultant value a Keyword Value Score (KVS). By combining these values to identify our keyword list we are focusing in on keywords that not only get a high degree of search traffic but gets visits from searchers who are in the buying phase of the purchasing process. I like to call these the “money keywords”.

3. Incorporate Geo-Modifiers

Many local businesses optimize for core keywords but neglect to add geo-modifiers. Without geo-modifiers the website competes in a global web search when they are doing business in a limited geographic location. The core keywords alone can easily be used for advertising to a local audience using a PPC campaign that is geo-targeted. Geo-modified keywords also tend to have a high conversion rate. This makes sense since someone who is ready to purchase will specifically look for a provider near by.