Search Clinic Blog news stories about online marketing

Not all keywords are equal. The Dilbert principle states that roughly 80% of effects will come from 20% of the causes. Search is no exception to the rule.

In fact, search marketing efforts often exhibit an exaggeration of the principle because it’s very common to observe 1% of the keywords in a given account driving 50% of the cost and even more of the revenue.

So, what does this mean? Behavior is unique for these high volume/value keywords and as a result, steps need to be taken to make these terms more visible for daily account management and analysis. The first step is to identify and isolate these top terms to help prioritize where to focus.

Here’s a simple exercise to identify the top terms in an account:

1. Run a keyword report and sort the data by cost.
2. Filter out branded terms, as these terms should be isolated in a unique campaign.
3. Filter out terms that constitute the top 50% of the non-banded cost.

Typically this keyword set is very small, but accounts for the same cost as the remainder of the account. It’s important to note that the top terms as I have defined them only refer to top spending terms. If your SEM effort is ROI focused, at this point, take the opportunity to identify if there are terms that are in this keyword set that do not drive revenue.

Now we’ve got this keyword set comprised of the most significant keywords in an account. What to do with it? It has been rumored that isolating a keyword in a unique AdGroup will increase quality score. While this is not necessarily true, it highlights the reason why it’s important to have an organized account: control.

By placing each of these top terms in a unique AdGroup, you can create keyword/ad/landing page associations that are more relevant—effectively increasing Quality Score, clickthrough rates (CTR), and subsequently driving down cost per click (CPC). While it seems logical to do this for all terms in an account, it’s not a scalable solution for an account with thousands, if not tens of thousands or more terms.

Thus you have identified a small sub-section of terms, our “top terms,” that have a very significant effect on the account. Because this set of terms is a cross-section of the account, we can take successful elements, such as ad copy and landing page combinations, from the top terms and apply them to similar terms in the rest of the account to increase CTR and Quality Score.

As I mentioned before, another important set of terms to isolate and manage independently from the rest of the account is brand terms. Brand terms generally have very high Quality Scores, are cheap, have great CTRs, and observe the best conversion rates, often making them the most efficient terms in an account.

As a result, you can maximize the impact of brand terms by activating them on all match types: exact, phrase and broad. The same rules for optimization apply: isolate high volume terms into unique AdGroups within the brand terms campaign, create relevant ad copy, and make sure landing pages are as relevant as possible.

Have you ever considered how your website’s loading time might impact your search engine rankings?

It might be time to take a closer look at this as Google and Yahoo! have both brought some attention to the issue recently.

On Tues, May 26, 2009 we looked at the Recommended webpage file size
http://www.searchclinic.org/2009/05/recommended-webpage-file-size.html

Google’s stance on the issue has always been that page load times do not have an impact in their algorithm – until now. As part of their initiative to speed up the web, Google have said that page load times could become a consideration in the future.

Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that, “We want the web to be faster, we want sites to load quickly”, so it’s very possible that Google could be looking to encourage and reward this through their ranking of sites. You can have a listen to what Matt Cutts had to say about the topic below:



Another interesting development on this topic has been from Yahoo!, who recently filed a patent with regards to webpage loading time. Their patent abstract describes:

Methods and systems are provided that may be used to characterize in some manner the performance that a user may experience when accessing a web document.

The patent application goes on to discuss establishing some kind of “user experience information” which could be used to rank search results. Obviously webpage load time is going to play a big part in the user experience so this would be a contributing factor. From the patent:

For example, information relating to whether a user might abandon or wait for a web document to be displayed may be useful when establishing certain quality or relevance factors for the web document.

With both search engines placing increased importance on the issue of page load times, it could be a wise idea to optimize your load times now ahead of any future algorithm changes.

Aside from potentially helping with your SEO, it’s guaranteed to improve your sites appeal to users.