Google Announces New Search-Based Keyword Tool

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Google announced yesterday the release of a new “search-based keyword tool", currently in beta. This new tool is designed to help advertisers find appropriate Google AdWords keywords that are relevant to a particular landing page they want to use, essentially taking the guesswork out of keyword selection. Just plug in your website and a list of terms is returned that will help you better understand what your “potential customers” are actually searching on to find your products or services.

The problem with this new approach, for service based businesses in particular, is that the site or pages the new tool will make keyword suggestions for are (or should be) already optimized for highly relevant terms based on search volume. These terms are found through traditional keyword research like using the keyword tool Google already offers. Just to test, I ran two different service-based sites through the new tool, one currently optimized for SEO, and one that is not. Naturally, the site optimized for SEO had many keyword suggestions that were highly relevant to the site, along with all the important information like monthly search volume, competition level, and suggested bid price. The site that is not currently optimized returned just one extraneous-for-paid-search keyword suggestion.

It appears that the new search-based tool is only significantly valuable if the site that it is analyzing is properly optimized or able to be crawled easily by Google. I can see this new tool being useful to help analyze current landing pages, or to possibly catch some keyword terms that advertisers may have missed during initial keyword development. Let us know your thoughts on Google's new search-based tool.

Google AdWords Quality Score Update

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Google announced Thursday through their blog a major update to how AdWords Quality Score is calculated. According to Google, here are the updates that advertisers can expect:

- Quality Score will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query

- Keywords will no longer be marked 'inactive for search'

- 'First page bid' will replace 'minimum bid' in your account

What does this update mean for advertisers? For starters, all keywords in campaigns that are currently inactive for search will suddenly be active. If bids on those terms are low enough then there should not be too much of an issue, however if bids are high enough for those terms to show ads, a large unexpected spike in spend for those campaigns could occur. AdWords users will also most likely see cost-per-clicks across their campaigns rise in the coming months, as more advertisers take advantage of the new fist page bid option.

These changes will roll out slowly over the next few days before they are fully implemented. Advertisers can also expect to see future updates to AdWords Editor and the AdWords API to reflect the new "first page bid" option.

Google Captures Mobile Search Majority in Q1

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Almost mirroring its traditional search presence, Google was able to capture 61% of the total mobile search market in the first quarter of 2008. According to a recently released report by Nielsen Mobile, Google ranked highest in mobile searches, with Yahoo and MSN following with 18% and 5% respectively.

According to Hitwise, Google captured 68.29% of all searches in May, 2008. Yahoo and MSN followed as usual with 19.95% and 5.89% respectively. Below is the Hitwise chart showing month-over-month and May 07 to 08 market shares for the big three:

PDF Optimization

Keith Vera
Account Manager

PDF downloads are a great way to publish content to your site and establish extra conversion points for any interactive marketing campaign. Optimizing those PDFs on your site however, is particularly important and often overlooked during the creation process. If PDFs are not created correctly search engines will not be able to index their content, and like all un-optimized content, that PDF will be a wasted opportunity to improve search engine rankings.

Galen De Young recently blogged about the different strategies marketers can use to optimize PDFs for the web, as a follow up to Marketing Sherpa’s article: How to Optimize Your PDFs to Increase Search Traffic: 10 Steps

Below are several key takeaways from both Galen’s blog and the article:

- Not all PDFs are created equal: PDFs that are picture based or are scans of original documents will not allow engines to index the text. Instead create PDFs straight from Microsoft Word documents

- Use the PDF properties to add an optimized title for the document

- Build links into all of your PDFs

- Make sure to use keyword-rich anchor tags to link to your PDFs

- Specify the reading order in the document so the engines know which text is the most important and will help you with the indexed description of the document