I remember back in the day, stumbling upon a neat little tool called “Adwords Editor“.  And it was like the sky broke open, angels sang, and the gods smiled down on me. Once I used it, all I could say was: WHAT. A. FIND. Unfortunately I made this find after having a co-worker do a tremendous and tedious account overhaul manually is Adwords, but let’s not talk about that.

Anyway… we all know how Adwords Editor saves us time creating, managing, and editing PPC accounts. But there are even more features once you get into the nitty-gritty of Editor that are worth being aware of. And today I’d like to talk about the most simple of these: copy & paste.

The Copy and Paste in Adwords Editor

Yup. Good ol’ copy and paste. So, we all know you can export all or parts of an account using the “Export” feature under “File”. But what if you want to manipulate something super specific, like ad copy and keyword destination URLs? Exporting this is difficult and even impossible in some circumstances. Well,  copy and paste to the rescue!

How to Use Copy and Paste in Adwords Editor

Simply Control + C or Shift + C (depending on whether you’re selecting choice data or all data in a group) and Control + V into Excel. All data, including headings, will be pasted. Now do your thing with edits. Save as CSV, making sure your headings match, and import into Editor. Review and approve edits. Done! Now wasn’t that easy?

This method has served me particularly well in making large, sweeping changes to ad copy. Give it a try and check back again for more tips on our beloved Adwords Editor!

~Andrea

At this point, I have my keyword list. (See how to generate a keyword list.) Now I need to know how competitive the keywords are to determine which are worth targeting and in what order.

There are two methods I use to measure competition, one paid and one free.

Paid (Easy Way!)

The first is SEOMoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool. It’s quite complete, giving you a firm difficulty score that makes decision making and comparing words easy. However, the tool is only available with Pro Membership, which comes with a $79/mo price tag. Sounds hefty, but you get so much with Pro that it’s worth it. If you’re an SEO or firm, I highly recommend this option. It will save you time and money in the end.

Free (Manual)

BUT, if you don’t mind taking extra time in your research, you can do it yourself manually. A word of caution though… doing it manually requires many repeat Google searches back-to-back. Doing many searches back-to-back will get you temporarily blocked from the SERPs. It isn’t harmful in any way and it isn’t a penalty. It’s just Google’s way of protecting itself from automated requests. So if you have many keywords to check, be sure to spread them out over the course of a few hours or days. Another tip: Only worry about the difficulty for the highest volume keywords. This will save you time, especially if your list is long. More than likely, the lowest volume keywords are not as competitive or will not be the ones your target.

To do this manually, you need to find out how many pages are optimized for your keywords. I say “optimized” because (usually) pages that are optimized are harder to compete with than pages that are just there through circumstance.

To find out how many pages are optimized for a keyword, use the following search operators:

1. [intitle:"kw"]

2. [intitle:"kw" and inanchor:"kw"]

Plug your keyword in for “kw.” So, if my word was red shoes, the operator would look like this:

[intitle:"red shoes"]

Enter the above operators one at a time into the Google search bar and get your results.

Add columns to your keyword Master List and record the number of search results from your search operator search. You can get this number from the upper left side of the SERP page under the search bar. The lower the number, the better. Low numbers mean that there are not many optimized pages, so it will be easier to rank.

Now, take note of the page rank of your competition. (On-page data provided by the SEO Quake Firefox browser plug-in helps a ton!) Do a normal search with your word. Write down and average the top 10 results’ page rank to get an average overall page rank. Record the averaged number on your keyword master list as well.

Choosing the Best Keywords to Target

To me, the best keywords are words that are relevant (obviously), have healthy volume, and are low to moderately competitive. These are the keywords that you can get rankings for the fastest and where your efforts will yield the most results. You will, of course, have some keywords on your list that are high volume and very competitive, but knowing competition will help you know how to stack your keyword deck.

To make your choice, peruse your list. Find words that have good volume with low optimization and page rank competition. These are the words that are best to target. Done!

This may seem like a lot, but the extra time spent here will make all the difference. You will also be able to set accurate expectations as to the time it will take to rank. This will keep you from taking stabs in the dark when your client asks, “When will we see results?”

Good luck!

Andrea

For SEO, two criteria matter: volume and competitiveness. The goal is find keywords with high volume and low competition. And although this will not always happen, the method below will help you determine the keywords your site should be targeting. Below I explain how to find keywords with volume. In my next post, keyword competition, I will discuss how to figure out the competitiveness of each phrase.

Step 1: Adwords

My first step is to create a list of “seed” keywords that I can get search volume for later. To start off, I usually check my client’s Adwords account by running a query report, sorting, and copying the best words (i.e. volume, conversions, etc.) into an Excel spreadsheet, my “Seed List”. If your client does not have an Adwords account, you can skip this step.

Step 2: Reverse Rank Check & Keyword Density

Once I’m done with Adwords, I use a reverse rank checker and a keyword density checker. For density, I use a Firefox add-on called SEOpen. Using the reverse rank and keyword density checker, I enter my client’s domain and their competitors’ domains to see what keywords they rank and are targeted for. I will also pull any words the competitors bid on in Adwords (a list also provided by the reverse rank checker). I add all new keywords to the Seed List.

Step 3: Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool

Then I run each keyword through Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool, adding new suggested keywords with volume to the Seed. Keyword Suggestion has a handy exporting option that makes adding as simple as copying and pasting.

Step 4: Aaron Wall’s Keyword Tool

Using the current Seed List, I run each keyword through Aaron Wall’s Keyword Tool. You can use Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery, but I use this tool because it’s free. For each keyword, I export the results and then compile them into one spreadsheet. This single spreadsheet now becomes your Master Keyword List, since you now have keywords with actionable search volume to sort by.

Step 5: Google Sets

I then run the highest volume words through Google Sets, a Google Labs tool that will predict other words from the ones you enter. This is a good place to find keywords that are related, but that normal keyword suggestion tools miss or won’t give you. The ones I find through Google Sets then go through the Google Suggestion Tool, and the Aaron Wall tool if it has volume. As usual export, copy, & paste.

Step 6: Sorting Your Final List

I do some final tweaks to my list, like using the “Remove Duplicates” shortcut in Excel, removing low volume keywords, and heavy pruning of irrelevant keywords that might have snuck in. Sort and organize as you like. This is just what I do.

After all that work, you now have a nice keyword list to work with. Read on in Part 2 about how to determine which to target first based on competition.

One of the most common blunders of PPC is over management—making so many changes that you don’t give any change a chance to have an effect or making so many changes that it’s impossible to make definitive conclusions. Following the schedule below allows me to prevent myself from over-managing and ensures that I keep abreast of trends and regular maintenance. Change the schedule as you see fit but still make sure you run these reports. They’re important—for your sanity and the healthy of your account!

Weekly

Ad Copy: Check to make sure CTRs are healthy. Pause under-performers. Run new test in their place. Have no more than 3 ads running per ad group. If it’s a busy week, I will leave ad groups with healthy CTR alone—no testing; if I have time, I will try to improve on them. I don’t make any decisions on results until there are at least 500 impressions on an ad. The impressions your account receives will determine if this will be a weekly or bi-weekly task.

Monthly (Beginning of Month)

Reduce Keyword Bloat: (Done before adding any new KWs for the month) Import previous month’s data into Editor. View all keywords at the account level. Sort by impressions. Delete low impression keywords. What “low impression” means depends on your industry’s volume. I usually start with keywords with less than 30 impressions a month since it means that that keyword gets less than one search a day. Lower search volume accounts will have a lower threshold. I leave low volume keywords with clicks >1 alone.

I do a similar exercise for high volume keywords with no clicks, since these words decrease overall CTR and thus, quality score.

NOTE: It is important to understand the order in which you do this work. If you remove bad volume keywords AFTER adding new ones through the search query report (below) you will have a hard time sorting and figuring out which words are bad in volume versus just recently added. For simplicity’s sake, always reduce keyword bloat first!

Search Query Report: Automatically schedule to run the first day of each month for the previous month’s search queries. I use this report to add keywords, upgrade match types to phrase and/or exact, and add negative keywords.

Day Parting/ “Ad Scheduling” Report: If I use day parting in an account, I will check the previous months day part trends to the previous 3 month’s average to see if there are any shifts in CTR, CPC, CPA, or Conversion Rate. I do this for both Day of Week and Hour of Day. I take this information into consideration for the coming month’s management. Rarely will I make a change unless there is a serious shift or a shift trend I have noticed month-over-month.  I try not to make changes until I see data from the Quarterly Day Part Report.

Impression Share Report: More informational than anything, I use this to see what the search volume of the market was like for the previous month and what slice we got. If slice was low/high, I investigate why.

Quarterly (Beginning of Month)

Day Parting/ “Ad Scheduling” Report: If I use day parting in an account, I will check the previous 3 month’s averages to see if my current day part scenario is the best. If hourly or daily trends have changed, I adjust the account accordingly. When this report is scheduled, it trumps the Monthly Day Part Report.

Ad Group Report: (For accounts that max out on budget each month, I do this monthly. On accounts with unlimited budget, I do this quarterly.) Import previous 3 months worth of data into Editor. At the campaign level, sort ad groups by cost/conversion. Ad groups with no conversions or high CPA get paused or noted as areas of needed work. Repeat offender ad groups get paused indefinitely. Sometimes if I feel an ad group might be getting a bad rap, I go deeper into the ad group’s keywords to see if I can find specific offenders that are bringing the whole ad group down. I either delete or pause. If I delete, this keywords becomes an ad group negative.


Overall this should keep your PPC account trim and healthy, worthy of high impressions and quality score. I schedule these in Outlook so that getting them done is a no-brainer. I suggest you do the same.

Good luck!

Andrea

What is “day parting” and “ad scheduling”?
Whether you call it “day parting” (as I do) or “ad scheduling” (as Google does), the meaning is the same—scheduling your campaigns and ads to run only during certain hours and days at a certain CPC.

Why Should I Day Part or Ad Schedule?
If you’ve been managing PPC campaigns for a bit, you know that the more control you have over your ads, the better, which is why pulling day part data is so important. By pulling a quick and simple report, you can determine which days you convert best on or have the best CPA and bid up. Additionally, you can also bid down or completely turn off campaigns on days that your ads perform poorly. By doing this, you spend your budget in the most efficient way and maximize conversions without increasing cost—and who doesn’t want that?!

How do I pull an Ad Scheduling report?
Since Google changed how you pull certain reports, getting day part data is much easier and quicker than it once was. Using a previous post of mine as a guide, set your time frame in the Adwords dashboard in the upper right and access the “Dimensions” tab. Now select how you would like to sort your data by using the drop-down under “View.” As you can see, you can easily sort by Day of Week, Hour of Day, Month, and even Quarter.

How do I interpret my Ad Scheduling data?
Once I select how I’d like to view my data, I sort by Conversion Rate and/or Cost Per Conversion to detect trends in time of day and/or day of week. With this, I then go to the “Settings“ tab, “Advanced Settings”, and then edit “Ad Scheduling.” I select the “Bid Adjustment” mode and adjust my campaign to run only on certain days or certain hours of the day and adjust my bid for the whole day or certain parts of the day (see below).

In Summary…
By doing this, you are controlling when and how your budget is spent. Even if you’re on an unlimited PPC budget, scheduling campaigns as described above will allow you to better control your cost and ultimately deliver a better cost per acquisition. And even if your research yields no trend, you’ve learned something new about your customers. Pulling this report really is a win-win.

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of discovering (on my own, mind you) that Google had changed how you pull Account, Campaign, and Ad group reports. After some time with the Adwords support team, I was able to figure out where to pull them and how the new reports work. To save you the time and frustration I experienced, see below.


Creating a Report

Going forward, Account, Campaign, and Ad group reports are created from the main Campaigns (#1) tab. Once there, you can access each report type from its respective sub-tab:

• “Campaigns” tab (#2) for Campaign reports
• “Ad groups” tab (#3) for Ad group reports
• “Dimensions” tab (#4) for Account reports (If you do not have a “Dimensions” tab, click the down arrow at the end of your sub-tab list (#5) and select the “Dimensions” button.)

Choosing Your Criteria

To create a report, set the date range you’d like to see (#6). Then access the correct tab for your report type. Selecting “Columns” in the sub-menu (#7) allows you to choose the information you’d like to see, like CTR, CPC, Conversion Rate, and Cost/Conversion. The “Segment” button (#8), also in the sub-menu, allows you to select content or search network, day, week, month, etc.  Then use the optional “Filter” sub-menu tab (#9) to create your own filter, like display data for only specific campaigns or average CPC. You can even save your filter for future use. Click the downward arrow (#10) to create the report. You can also schedule reports here as well.

Once you press the “create” button, you will be prompted to either open or save your report to your computer. Make your choice and you have your report at your fingertips. If you’d like to access previously create or scheduled reports, simply click on “Control panel and library” to the left under the “All online campaigns” quick access box.


Thoughts on the New Adwords Report Access

Being a long time Adwords user, I’m not entirely happy with this change. Although it does create reports MUCH quicker and allows you to do so without leaving campaign management, I don’t agree with removing access to these report from the “Reports” tab. Doing so seems counter-intuitive and creates a real possibility that new users, never having run these reports, could easily overlook their existence. Perhaps in the future Google will make this new integration more seamless and intuitive. For now, it’s just a change that seems like it was not entirely thought through.

One of the greatest resources I believe in for local SEO is the online directory. Local search testing has been done and it supports the fact that the more geo citations you have, the more trust search engines will have in your site for local search results.

But with so many local directories and search engines, where do you start? And how do you prevent yourself from becoming spammy? Well, fortunately these directories, from Google Places (formerly Google Local) to Super Pages, all pull their data from a few business listing databases. Now, don’t get confused. The bigger sites like Google and Yahoo still maintain their own database, but they also utilize the sites below to round out their index. And luckily for all of us, the big databases like Super Media and Express Update USA allow you to update and add your submission FOR FREE. Can’t beat that.

Now, I’ve taken the liberty of doing all the research and condensing the data of “who shares what with whom” into the flowchart below.  Take a gander and save yourself some time!

And to make things even easier, here are links to the “Add Listing” pages for the above directories:

• Super Media
• Express Update USA
• Bing
• Dex
• Google
• City Grid Media
• Localeze
• Acxiom

Special thanks to localtype.com and Bruce Clay in creating this post.

Nowadays you can’t read a search marketing blog without seeing a post on SEO tools. There are so many out there that it’s overwhelming. My bookmarks are overflowing with them… saved by the dozens to never be visited and used. The truth? You really only need a couple good tools to do your SEM job well. And luckily, I’ve found a couple tools that accomplish many tasks, thereby further decreasing the Firefox add-ons and bookmarks I must keep up with. Below, my list of top tools I go to again and again.

1. Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Firefox Toolbar Add-on. This little gem does a lot. A LOT. This is my all-in-one SEO toolbar add-on of choice. Features of interest include:
   • Web stats you need, from Page Rank to indexed pages.
   • Easy access to keyword research with the option to have many research tools power the results, like Aaron’s Keyword Suggestion tool, Google, Wordtracker, and Keyword Discovery.
   • Rank Checker button to check organic rankings.
   • NoFollow button to visually see the NoFollowed links on a page.
   • SEO X-ray feature to gives a snapshot of on-page keyword density, internal and external links, and meta data.
   • Competitor SEO KPI side-by-side comparison tool.
   • Hot buttons to Alexa, Whois, SEMRush, Compete, and more!
2. Link Sleuth. Although cumbersome at times, Link Sleuth crawls sites thoroughly and produces an easily sorted broken link list when copied into Excel.
3. AuditMyPC.com. Producing HTML and XML sitemaps can be a pain in the butt. Both because it’s time consuming and there always seems to be that one page that shouldn’t be in a sitemap that sneaks in. With easy exclusion and filtering options, AuditMyPC.com’s version is the best I’ve played with yet.
4. SEO Browser. Sometimes the easiest way to understand how Google crawls your site is to see what Google sees. And that is exactly what SEO Browser provides. Although I know there are more “techy” text viewers out there, this one serves my purpose well by giving me the site, live links and all, in a text only format.
5. Copyscape. Duplicate content has become a scary word in SEM. This little tool helps ID the offending pages perfectly.
6. Link Diagnosis. We all know anchor text and site authority are important metrics to research when link building. This tool gives you that, and then some, without having to manually research, click, or visit the pages in question.
7. Google Webmaster Tools. The cornerstone of all SEM work. Use it to find crawling errors (especially 404s), indexation errors, assess inbound links, or the newest feature that I love, organic click through rates!

Good luck!

Ok, so, that title may be a little misleading. The actual Seth Godin, author of some of the most popular marketing books around like Purple Cow and Small is the New Big, is not physically coming here. But his ideas and tips are in a new unofficial Seth Godin Linchpin Meetup through Meetup.com.

Although obviously a marketing ploy to promote his new book slyly called, you guessed it, Linchpin, Meetups are happening worldwide on Monday, June 14^th to discuss his new book. How this Meetup is being described:

“A completely non-commercial chance to find and connect with other members of Seth’s tribe; an opportunity to talk, challenge, and inspire your fellow travelers around his new best seller – Linchpin.”

You may be wondering what exactly a “Linchpin” is. Well, if you’re a search marketer, you will probably understand the definition well.

Definition of linchpin:

An artist, who is not just some person who messes around with paint and brushes, but somebody who does (and I LOVE this term) “emotional work.” Work that you put your heart and soul into. Work that matters. Work that you gladly sacrifice all other alternatives for.

Being an SEM, we spend hours playing with code, doing keyword research for sometimes ridiculous terms, and get excited at the mere thought of moving up 2 spots in Google or going from PR4 to PR5. We do “emotional” work; work that other people and even clients sometimes think is either menial, frivolous, or both. We are obsessive but we do it because we love it and we know it will make a difference to our clients’ bottom line. We are artists.

So come out to meet some fellow artists in our area and share the evening discussing the job we love while thousands of people and Meetup groups around the world do the same. Kind of a cool unity, huh? Oh Seth, you sneaky marketer you.

Seth Godin Linchpin Meetup Group- Greensboro

Seth Godin Linchpin Meetup Group- High Point

Seth Godin Linchpin Meetup Group- Winston Salem

Linchpin Greensboro Facebook Page

If you are an SEO or are familiar with search engine optimization, the terms “Robots.txt” and “No Index” are somewhere in your vocabulary. If not, the explanation of these is fairly simple: both Robots.txt files and “No Index” meta tags are ways to keep search engines from reading and saving content to their database, known as their “index.” Why would you want to exclude pages from a search engine’s index? Another simple answer: To keep the engines from giving priority to unimportant pages at the cost of the good (i.e. converting) ones. So, let’s get into how the Robots.txt file and “No Index” meta tag operate.

The Robots.txt “Disallow”

Robots.txt is a file that you upload to your site’s root directory. Is it located at http://www.YourSite.com/robots.txt. In this file there are directions for search engines. When the file has a directive that says “Disallow” relating to a certain page, the search engine knows not to read that page. By telling a search engine not to read a page, you are giving it a signal that the page is not important and they will skip it. And for the most part, this will ensure that disallowed pages do not show up in search results.

However, “Disallow” means “do not read”, not “do not see.” Disallowing does not make pages invisible; it makes them not crawlable. If inbound links or citations exist to a disallowed page, search engines will still be aware of the disallowed page’s existence. It will simply be unaware of the content of the page. And, in the rare case someone does a search and there are no better results, a search engine will serve up a link to a disallowed page. The link will just be presented without a description.

(Also, as a side note, some smaller search engines don’t use the Robots.txt file. Therefore, disallowed pages will be crawled and indexed by them. )

The “No Index” Meta Tag

The “No Index” meta tag is piece of code that you put in the head section of your website. Unlike a “Disallow”, the “No Index” tag allows a search engine to read and see the page, but states explicitly that an engine should forget it ever saw the page once it is left. This instruction then also applies to any links and citations pointing to a “No Index” page: forget they exist.  Thus, the “No Index” meta tag prevents any occurrence of the page from being present in all indices in any form. Additionally, all search engines follow the “No Index” meta tag.

When to Use Robots.txt “Disallow” and When to Use Meta “No Index” Tag

In my opinion, the “No Index” tag is a more secure way of keeping pages out of an index. However, this method can also be harder to manage and keep track of since it’s applied on a page-per-page basis. The Robot.txt “Disallow,” on the other hand, is simpler to manage since it is one single file.

Every business should assess its own web needs, but for simplicity’s sake, the “No Index” meta is best used on pages you need 100% no index security on or are creating in secret from your competition. In all other cases, Robots.txt “Disallow” will do.

Does Robots.txt “Disallow” and “No Index” Meta Tag Consume Page Rank?

There has been much discussion over whether and how disallowed and “No Index’ed” pages consume Page Rank (“PR”). Here is the answer:  if you disallow a page but leave the incoming links to a disallowed page “do follow”, the disallowed page will still consume rank. And, because the page is disallowed and its outbound links are not read by engines, PR is wasted since it cannot be passed on. However, “No Index” can pass PR on if the links on the page are “do follow,” since an engine reads a “No Index” page but simply does not index it.

To learn more about Page Rank and controlling it, read my post on sculpting Page Rank.