Posts

Competitive & Marketing Intelligence

Do you really know your competitors? What are their keywords? Where are their customers coming from?

There are a growing number of great tools which can help you discover a lot of useful information about your competitors.

It is essential that you comprehend and evaluate your company competition. So how great is your website compared to some of your competitors?

So now we can use all the data from the internet in a brand new intelligent way.

So grab your cup of coffee and let me show a few of all your possibilities with KeywordSpy

 

Spy on your competitor

keywordsspyfront

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KeywordSpy is a keyword intelligent research tool. It will tell you which keywords that are being used by your competitor. Both organic and paid. It’s checking Google Adwords, Bing/Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing.

 

Check out the organic and paid competitors

The picture below is showing the results from the keyword “SEO” in Denmark – both organic and paid.

 

seoDK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With this tool you can pick out the most profitable keywords from your competitors and then tailor the traffic to your website.

 

 

Who are the competitors for the keywords?

The next screen picture is showing the PPC ads for SEO in Denmark.

 

seoCompetitors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here are the organic competitors.

seoOrganicDK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Check out and get ideas from the ads

And why not check all the ads about SEO in Denmark.

seoAdsDK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can easily uncover the competition landscape by knowing your competitors’ PPC and organic campaign strategies in just a few seconds.

 

Check out the competitor’s website

Now you can try to search a domain instead – and check out a specific website. And get all the organic keywords it’s ranking for and how they use the paid keywords. Awesome.

Here is an example of www.apple.com.


applecom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here are the competitors for Apple – for both the organic and the paid keywords.

applecompetitors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can build a profitable list of keywords using your competitors’ keywords.

Pick out the precisely the profitable keywords and ad-copy combination of your competitors with the ROI indicator.

Search the data by domain, keywords, destination URL and ad copy content. You can also search locally (I can use Denmark).

You have a free trial. It’s really awesome.

 

GuideTotal eMarketing Giveaway

As always if you haven’t got it already – come and grab the free SEO guides from SeoCustomer. You can now get both the Complete SeoCustomer 2011 and 2012 Q1. Over 180+ pages full of tips and tricks about SEO, SEM, Social Media Traffic and Link Building.

 

Time for my coffee – take care out there..

Henrik

 

 

monkeyWhen I am talking to people about SEO, many people don’t really know what to do to find the right keywords for their page. How do we find them? What do we do?

So I have been telling them about this method here. It’s a quick and easy – step by step.

So are you ready? Coffee in your cup? Let’s start.

 

1. Find the most relevant keywords for your business

‘First you will have to write down your ideas. This should be a brainstorming.

Forget about how much traffic theses keywords are getting. Just focus on the words.

If you are selling cars – a relevant keyword is “cars” or “used cars”, “blue cars”, “old cars”, “new cars”. This is a very qualitative process. So write all your ideas on a piece of paper.

You can also get ideas from Google Trend  or Google Insight.

Another great tool is the Google Keywords Tool. Type in the words “used cars” and see a lot of suggestions. Google Keywords Tool doesn’t know everything – so you might have to take away some of the words it is suggesting.

So now you have a list with a lot of words right?

 

2. Now check out the traffic

You might be able get the rank position 1 on Google with the phrase “old blue beautiful cars from New York”, but if there is only 10 people looking for that word phrase, it’s not going to help you to drive traffic to your site right?

So – go to Google Keywords Tool and write in the words from your list.

Now you can check how much traffic there is on the internet from your suggested words.

Well this was step number 2. Still easy right?

 

3. How much competition

Now step 3 is about competition. If there is a lot of competition for a keyword, it will get very difficult for you to rank number 1 or number 10.

You might have found that the word “used cars” is a very relevant word for you, and it gets tons of traffic. But but but (there is always a but right?) – when you are checking the competition for this word, you will find that the top 10 companies on Google all have over 50.000 backlinks and a lot of traffic to their site. So no matter how much you are trying, you might never get enough link-juice or traffic to get into the top 10.

You can check the competition in different programs. I am using Market Samurai for this. Its not a free program, but it saves me a lot of time.

Another program is the SEO Power Suite. And I am sure there are a lot of other great programs out there.

In Google Keyword Tool you can see if a competition is high, medium or low. But remember the competition in Google Keyword Tool is for the PPC keywords.

Okay I know this step wasn’t so easy – but it’s still very important.

Now we are almost done here.

 

4. Optimization

Now you have your keyword for a page. Pick out a main keyword or keyword phrase to a page. And you can also pick out a second keyword or keyword phrase – but no more for a page.

And now start your writing and on-page optimization. You can read much more about on page optimization here.

 

Free SeoCusotmer Guide 2011 and 2012 Q1

Remember to grab your free guide and get weekly updates from this blog. Get it here.

 

Best regards, Henrik

 

 

 

 

icon googlesearchHow you ever wondered what to do to get on the first page on Google. Well you don’t really have to wonder anymore. I will tell you what to do.

SEO is all relative right? You can be very bad at it – but if your competitors are worse – then all is good. So for a start you have to check out the top 10 list. How many times do they write your keyword, how many times do they use the keyword in the headlines, how many inbound links do they have with the keyword in the anchor text and so on … pyha.

It’s all about being on the first page. Make more text with your keywords? More headlines with your keywords? Hmm… Or maybe you have enough text. You have to compare your site to the first 10 web pages on the top 10 in Google (or another search engine).

There are a lot of free tools around – but it will take you so much time to check it all out. So I will tell you my secret. I am cheating. I am using a program from Internet Business Promoter. The program is not free – and I know you can find free programs on the Internet to tell you the same things. But this one will put it all together for you – make the analyzing – write a report – and tell you exactly what you have to do.

IBP

I will compare your site to the top 10 on the list. It will tell you what are the important things to change, where you don’t have to do anything and so on. You will be amazed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

IBPscreen

Report overview

The program will analyze all this for you. But of course you can get most of it free on the internet too. But use this list as a checklist for yourself too when you do SEO for your website. With or without this program.

  • Keyword use in document title
  • Global link popularity of web site
  • Link texts of inbound links
  • Keyword use in body text
  • Age of web site
  • Keyword use in H1 headline texts
  • Keyword use in domain name
  • Keyword use in page URL
  • Links from social networks
  • Server speed
  • Keyword use in H2-H6 headline texts
  • Keyword use in IMG ALT attributes
  • Top level domain of website
  • Keyword use in bold body text
  • Number of visitors to the site
  • Keyword use in same domain link texts
  • Keyword use in outbound link texts
  • Keyword use in same domain link URLs
  • Keyword use in outbound link URLs
  • Keyword use in meta description
  • Number of trailing slashes in URL
  • HTML validation of web page to W3C standards
  • Readability level of web page
  • Keyword use in meta keywords
  • Keyword use in the first sentence of the body text
  • Keyword use in HTML comments
  • Search engine compatibility
  • Factors that could prevent your top ranking
  • Table: Number of keywords
  • Table: Keyword density
  • Table: Keyword position
  • Table: Number of words
  • Table: Number of characters
  • Table: Ranking factors digest

 

Here’s what you do

You have to tell the program what the keyword you want to analyze. Let’s take “used cars”. Then you will have to tell what search engine you want to optimize for. Let’s take “Google.com”.

Then you run the report – yes … I know … too easy. But that’s all.

Of course it sometimes can be a little difficult to get on top 10 still. What if the other websites have 200.000 backlinks each.. Hmm…. But with this tool you know what you are up against 🙂

The result is that you will be on the first page on google 🙂

Get the program here IBP and get a good start with your SEO. It’s really worth it 🙂

 


x banner

 

 

landingOkay this time I will tell you something really awesome. I will show you have you can boost your conversion rate using dynamic keywords insertion. Hope you have a cup of coffee – cause you have to read this really carefully.

If you are doing pay per click like Google Adwords. You are maybe aware that you can use keyword insertion in your ad. You can read more about it in this article here. Keyword insertion in a Google AdWords has really helped me when I do AdWords. It will boost your click through rate on your ads.

 

Let me give you an example of a Google AdWords with dynamic keywords insertion.

Here is how your ad could look like

  • Headline:   {Keyword: Used cars} – Quality
  • Description line 1:  Buy our super {keyword: Used cars}
  • Description line 2:  5 free car checks
  • www.UsedCars.com

Notice that use of the {KeyWord: Default} in the Headline and Description line 1. So the user who are searching for used cars will see the headline exactly matching his or her search. In the second line he will see the search term in bold. He will think that this ad will get him to the page he is looking for. This is why it works.

So if somebody is searching for “used cars” the ad will look like this:

  • Used cars – Quality
  • Buy our super Used cars
  • 5 free car checks
  • www.UsedCars.com

If somebody is searching for “used blue cars” the ad will look like this (you have different keywords for the same ad)

  • Used blue cars – Quality
  • Buy our super Used blue cars
  • 5 Free car checks
  • www.UsedCars.com

This is the best kept secret of Google AdWords.

 


Now we will go a step further

Take the dynamic keyword insertion beyond the ad.

Now this is what this article here is all about. Use your dynamic keyword insertion on your landing page too.

So if your customer is searching for “used cars” he will see “Used Cars” as the headline on your landing page. If your customer is searching for “used blue cars” he will see used blue cars as the headline.

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Well I know you could create a different landing page for each keyword you have, as well as a separate ad and ad group. But if I have 100 keywords I think I will use this technique.

 

The Benefits with this technique

You will have more benefits using dynamic keywords insertion on your landing pages.

First of all it will make your page much more compelling. Your customer will see your page customized just for him. So if you want a quicker conversion rate improvement – dynamic keyword insertion is one way to get it.

The second benefit is that it will improve your quality score. When you have the same keyword as the headline on the landing page as in the Google Adwords your quality score will improve. I have seen examples where the quality score jumped from 5 to 7 on every keyword in their ad group.

 

So how do you do it

In order to use dynamic keyword insertion on your landing page, you will just need to make one change on your Google Adwords text ad.

The change is made in your destination URL. If your display URL is:
YourSite.com/{KeyWord:Blue-Car}

And your destination URL is:
YourSite.com/landingpage.php

Now change the destination URL to
YourSite.com/landingpage.php?kw={keyword}

This “?kw={keyword}” code passes whatever search keyword was used to enter your landing page.

Now on your landing page, simply place “<? echo $_GET[‘kw’] ?>” wherever you want to keyword to be placed.

There is more than one way to do all this. And your landing page would need to allow PHP. So check out how you can make it work. It’s really worth checking out.

Play around with this until it works for you. You will be amazed with the result.

 

Wishing you all a great day out there. And remember to get the free Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011.

Henrik

 

Keyword Research OriginalWell…. So many potential keywords. Where to start… Well if I was Columbus (do you know that TV show?) I would follow the money.

Let me go step by step in showing you what to do in getting the right keywords for your website. Okay did you get your coffee? If yes.. Let’s start…

 

1. First of all find the most relevant keywords for your business. If you are in the business of selling cars. Your relevant keyword is a car. But if you can make it more clear – it will work much better for you. Maybe your real business is Used Cars. So be as precise as possible.

One way to to find keywords and get ideas is to go to the Google Keywords Tool. Try it now. Type in the words Used Cars – and suddenly you will get over 100 new ideas. Easy right?

Now take away all the keywords that is not relevant for your business. Google doesn’t know everything (wow did I  write that – lol).

 

2. Second be sure that your SEO keywords get enough traffic. Maybe you have found your perfect SEO keyword but nobody is really looking for that. You could have found “Used hybrid cars for families with dogs” (yes I know its long – but I had to come up with something).

The traffic for that phase is just to small. So how do you check the traffic? Well the Google Keywords Tool is helping you here too. You can check how much traffic there is on the internet.

 

3. Competition is important. Many you have found that the best keyword is “Used Cars” – very very relevant and tons of traffic. But I am afraid you will get a problem. There are a lot of companies selling used cars – and a lot of them already have a lot of traffic, backlinks and so on. So it will be very hard for you to get on the first page when people are searching for used cars. So you will have to check out the top 10 companies using that word phrase.

There are different programs on the internet that can tell you about the competition. I use a program called Market Samurai. Here you can quickly check out if there are companies on the market that are relative new, who has few backlinks, low page rank and so on. In other words – can you make it to the first page on Google (or other search engines).

Another could be SEO Power Suite. (Please write back to me if you know other programs and the best are FREE programs of course).

How to check competition in Market Samurai

Check competition, market samurai

 

Try the Market Samurai for free by clicking on the banner below here 🙂

x v

 

 

Now we are almost there. We only need to check one more thing. Do you still have coffee in the cup?

 

4. The last good thing to check is Commerciality. And why? Well maybe you have found a perfect relevant keyword with a ton of traffic and you can see that you can make it to the first page – BUT … (Yes yes I know there’s always a BUT also in this world lol).

Is the word worth anything. What are companies paying to get high on Google Adwords. If you have found a word that people would pay a lot of money for you have found you Gold. And why is this important. Because companies will never pay for a word then they can sell and make money for. So if people are buying a word for … Hmm…. 10 dollars (yes I know that was high) they must make more money then 10 dollars for a click right?

I wasn’t going to write this much… I hope I didn’t lose you … Lol….. Yes yes I know your coffee is cold – sorry for that.

Yours
Henrik

 

 

 

secretSo you wonder how Google calculates its ranking right?

Well here it is – it’s for you – and the best part is that it’s FREE.

Well I have to be honest to you – I don’t have it from Google. The percent is taken from a 72 SEOs surveyed for SEO moz’s biennial search ranking factors. But it’s getting very close to the real thing.

So lets run through the algorithm because it’s so very important to everything we are going to do with SEO.

First of all did you see that “Link Popularity of the specific page” and “Anchor Text of External Links to the Page” together makes up for around 42 percent of the ranking. Yes you read it right. That’s why link building is so important.

That’s why all the SEO people keep running around shouting about getting links to your page. And that’s why we will pay high attention on links and getting those backlinks. I will tell you much more about what to do later on.

Google Algorithme, Google Ranking

How Google calculates the ranking of websites

And did you also see the growing importance of social media. The links coming from social media are very important for the ranking. Here its over 5 percent. And that is also links. So over half of the ranking on Google is about links

 

On page keywords usages

Another interesting thing is the onpage keywords usages are only 15 percent of the ranking. So no matter how much effort you are doing to write your keywords into the text, make the picture tag making extra pages with the keyword – it only counts for 15 percent.

Of course 15 percent is a lot too – and if your keywords is not on the page you will have a problem. So we still have to work with the on page keywords.

 

Traffic and CTR data

And yes – traffic is important. Websites with a lot of traffic must be more important than websites without or with less traffic.

And the CTR (click through rate) it’s important. How many times are your website shown in searches compared to how many time people are clicking on your link.

That’s why you have to work with the meta description even though its not really important in the ranking – but make people curious so they just have to click on your link.

Well.. Now its time for some coffee..

 

twitterWell I will tell you about a strategy that works. A strategy that will give you traffic.

This is all about how to get Twitter followers and targeted traffic from Twitter.

It’s no good just to have a Twitter account and maybe post something from time to time. You will need this – A Twitter Strategy.

Okay …. I will stop writing about what I am going to write about … and get to the point…. Are you ready? Okay here we go…

 

First of all.. Why do you need Twitter?

First of all it can give you maybe the largest referral traffic source.

Your competitors – I am sure – are already using it. So if you are not using it you are behind already.

But it can also potentially help you to get higher ranking in Google and Bing for the regular organic searches – yes its true 🙂

 

First thing first… How to get followers

You will need to get not only traffic – but you also need to get the right kind of traffic. Relevant traffic.

The best way to get followers is to follow the same kind of people. So type in your keywords and check out the people and start to follow them.

Take another keyword and do the same again.

After you have done this with some of your interest and keywords – check out your competitors. Who do they follow? Then start to follow your competitors followers too.

Very easy right?

 

But but but but ….

There’s always a but – lol. The maximum amount of followers you can follow is 2000.When you get to 2000. You will have to wait until your followers also reaches 2000.

After that you can get 10 percent higher . That’s it 2200 – and then wait again until your followers reach 2200.

There is no limit of maximum number of Twitter followers, who can follow you.

So when you reach 2000 you will have to unfollow the people that don’t follow you back !! This way you get the relevant traffic.

 

So here is a working plan for you

One of the most important things in the Twitter strategy is to do it the professional way. So… The first week you will add about 300-400 every day. But in the weekend you will remove those people that don’t follow you back.

Just to add people is easy – but it’s important you remove the people that don’t follow you back.

There are some tools you can use – check out TweetAdder. With this program you can use to unfollow, but you can also use to schedule your tweets, search for potential followers and a lot more. Try it 🙂

 

Next step in your Twitter strategy is to get more accounts

This way you can get 5 times as many followers then just with one account. So do it.

If you are selling used cars – you can have an account about used cars, one about cars, one about ford cars, one about Toyota etc..

Now its time to tweet

If you have been on Twitter you know the problem – how to get noticed. There are so so so many tweets out there right?

Okay a good strategy is to tweet in blocks. So every time you are going to tweet make 4 tweets. Your first 3 tweets can be quotes from experts, ideas, news – but in the last of the 4 tweets you make a link to your own blog.

Because its the last one – its the one that people will see first.

Do yourself a favour – dont just do a tweet – have a twitter strategy – and you will get your traffic.

 

 

toolsHere I will collect the most awesome tools you can use to optimize your webesite.

So PLEASE HELP.. tell about the tools in your comments and I will slowly build this page better and better.

Yours
Henrik

 

 

 

 

 

Page checker

www.seocentro.com (Free) – Search engine optimization tool for checking the current PageRank from (multiple) sites.

www.prchecker.info (Free) – also a PageRank checker, fast and easy

Do you wanna check if Google has indexed your pages – well here is the tool www.1pagedesign.com/google_page_index_checker

 

Keywords
www.webconfs.com (Free) Keyword Density Checker – really awesome tool

Google Keywords Tools (Free )If you only wanna use one tool. Then its this one. Write a keyword, get ideas, check traffic estimates. There are 2 kind of people in this world – those who love Google Keywords Tools and those who are lying.

www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html (Free) Really cool site with an awesome Keyword Density analyzer. Great tool. Try it….

http://www.getrank.org/tools/keyword-extractor/ (Free) Extract keywords from any website and create a list of single, double, and triple word keyphrases.

http://www.getrank.org/tools/multiple-keyword-se-position/ (Free) Check a website’s search engine position for multiple keywords.

 

Links

www.backlinkcheck.com (Free) Wanna check your backlinks, their PR, the score.Great tool

www.seocentro.com (Free) How popular are your site and you can also compare it with 2 other sites.

 

Social Media

www.urlmetrix.com (Free) Amazingly fast tool. Analyzes everything from Alexa to Technorati to Compete.

http://backtweets.com (Free) This tool finds you all the backlinks from Twitter to your site. Amazingly quick.

www.sitemention.com (Free) Where are your site mentioned in the social media. Information is gathered from Google blog search, Twitter, Friend Feed, Youtube, Myspace, Flickr, Yahoo Answers, Digg, Delicious, Furl and Reddit.

 

SEO reports

www.ibusinesspromoter.com/ – this program will give tell you excatly what to do to get on the first page on a seach engine. Awesome report (but not free).

 

Okay guys – I know you will hate me after this article. And why? Because I am going to give you some homework lol. Ready – you have your coffee? Okay…
I have done a lot of Google AdWords and I have done all the usual stuff. A/B testing, different headlines, different text, putting the keyword in the URL… And some of that was working. (You do A/B testing by the way? If not remember always to do that). But I must admit that my CTR didn’t change that much. But there is something that really can make a big change in the CTR. The trick is called Dynamic Keyword Insertion.