The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Sometimes when you hit a wall optimizing your existing keyword terms, it is time to look for new advertising opportunities.  That is when I return to the drawing board and begin the search for new keywords and Web sites.  I will outline a few of the strategies I take, and resources I use, when on the hunt for keyword ideas.

One of the best resources for pulling new keywords is site search reports (in Google Analytics) or keyword reports.  Many clients I’ve worked with do not have an exact keyword filter set up in Google Analytics.  It is important to note that Google’s default report shows only broad match terms, and often truncates searches.  Luckily the team at ROI Revolution has developed a great way to track exact terms in Google Analytics through a filter and custom script.  Site search reports are a great way to look for new opportunities, lower costs, increase visibility, and help customers find what they are looking for.

Google continues to improve transparency and reporting for all of their products.  In May Google announced that AdWords' search query report would no longer lump terms that did not have much volume into "other unique queries".  Instead they now list every term that resulted in a click.  This is beneficial when looking for new negative keywords, and also when looking for new potential keyword ideas.

One of the most overlooked resources at companies are Customer Service Representatives.  They deal with customers every day, and often know the exact issues customers face on a regular basis.  And if customers are calling them and asking for help on a topic, there is a good chance that they are searching online for the same answer.  Are you advertising around your customer’s questions?  If not, take the time to draft a survey for your Customer Service team and find out what issues your customers are having. Try launching a campaign to answer the questions Customer Service deals with most frequently, and see if the call volume to your customer support team drops while your sales team gets a boost. 

Another cool resource I use is a tool called SEM Rush .  (It is a spinoff of SEODigger which was a great tool for tracking the organic visibility of your Web site.)  They offer competitive tracking data from Google’s Keyword Tool.  If you have ever run an AdWords campaign you are familiar with Google’s keyword tool. If not, it is a great utility for coming up with related terms, synonyms, and phrases from existing keyword lists.  The cool thing about SEM Rush is that it tracks data trends on 25 million keywords and gives you business intelligence on your competitors’ paid search campaigns.  The few times I have used this service, I have been pleasantly surprised at what they came up with.  For $50 it is worth taking a look at.

There is also an interesting data set in Google’s Webmaster Tools .  Once installed, there are some very interesting reports on what terms are driving traffic to your site, based on both time and location.  For the time it takes to do a two minute meta tag verification, you can get a lot of valuable information about your Web site, and you can also help improve your indexing and performance by monitoring what Google sees.
 
I am always looking for new ways to generate advertising ideas.  If you know of any utilities out there, please leave a comment and help a Guru out. 

Trace, Clickable SEM Guru
Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

Pingback from  AdsBidWorld » Site Search, Sales Reps, and other Resources to Find What You …