Effective SEM - Keyword Evaluation

Cartoon credit Edouard Blais

In my last post before the summer hiatus :-) I talked about 7 steps for better search engine marketing. In this post I will talk in details about one of the tips mentioned in the post - continuing to use keywords effectively.

Keywords are undoubtably one of the most important artifacts for running effective SEM campaigns. It's, however, not sufficient to identify the right keywords and set them up in the campaigns as a one time deal. For your keywords to remain relevant, make sure that you evaluate the performance of your keywords on a regular basis and make adjustments as necessary. People might use new terms to search for your product over time - you need to potentially add those as keywords to your campaign. You want to revisit what search terms your competition might be using to drive traffic to their sites.

Here are some of the steps you want to consider taking to do periodic evaluations of your keywords (Note: my examples are based on Google Adwords):

Evaluate Key Metrics of the keywords
Some of the key metrics to look for: impressions, CTR, average CPC, average position, qualification score. For example, if you find your qualification score to be low, you want to investigate how you can make your ad texts to be more relevant.

Run Google Keyword Diagnostics
The diagnosis helps explain why your ad might not be running and what you can do to fix that. For example, it gives you key information on how relevant your keyword is, quality of your landing page, and the load time for your landing page.

Use Google Keyword Tool
Type in the keyword in the Google Keyword tool and it gives you information on search volume related to the keyword - both globally as well as locally. It also gives you an idea of how competitive the keyword is.

Use tools like Alexa to get search traffic
Another way to get some data on search traffic and competitive info on your keyword is using a third party tool like Alexa. Note that Alexa is a free tool. If you want to use a paid service instead, you can consider services like Comscore.

Make Adjustments 
Once you have collected the data about the search traffic and how your competition is using different keywords, you are in a position to evaluate individual keywords for their inclusion in the campaigns going forward. For example - Do you need to drop a keyword because of very low search volume? Should you increase the bid for a keyword because of it's very high competitive position? Do you need to temporally add a new keyword to a campaign because one of the competitors acquired a company recently and the name of the acquired company is driving traffic to the competitor's site?
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