I was given a review license of a new keyword research tool, Keyword Examiner, last week and thought I’d give it a spin. It claims to save hours on keyword research by automating the process of competition analysis.

Rather than just evaluating how many people search for a particular phrase, it also helps you to understand how many other websites are competing for that phrase.  Finding phrases with a high number of searches combined with relatively little competition is your keyword research goal.

Keyword Examiner runs an analysis of some typical search engine optimisation signals that is evidence of levels of competition for your phrases:

• The text of a page, known as phrase match (searching with “inverted commas”).
• The Title Tag of a page (using the intitle: command when searching).
• Anchor text linking to a page (using the inanchor: command when searching).

Clearly these are all important factors used by Google to determine where a web page appears in the search results. The idea of Keyword Examiner is that you can see how many people are searching for a collection of keywords (it uses the AdWords Keyword Tool for this), then run searches on Google for those keywords to see how much competition there is. The big sell is that if you did this manually, it would take hours putting together a spreadsheet of the results.

Hopefully, what you will get from the data are a few choice keywords with sufficient volume (the number of times a phrase is used each month) but not too much competition, making them good targets for SEO.

So, I tried it out with the topic of “cooking utensils”. You simply enter your topic as you would with the AdWords Keyword Tool, and the list of keywords with search volumes comes back. I then chose the ones I was interested in from the list and made my choices on competition – I went for the full house of all three types of competition (phrase, in title & in anchor), searching “pages from the web” on Google UK (I could have chosen any country in the world or “only pages from the UK” if I’d wanted).

A few minutes passed while Keyword Examiner ran the searches, as it pauses between each one to emulate human activity (Google looks out for automated searching to prevent overloading its servers). Here’s a screenshot of what I ended up with:

As you can see, there are quite a few choice looking targets in that list. Take “Indian cooking utensils” for example – a search volume of 390 per month in the UK, but only 184 pages with that phrase in the title tag and only 8 pages with that phrase in anchor text linking to them. That’s pretty low in terms of competition and, were I in that market, a good phrase to target. “Cooking utensils UK” looks quite tasty, too.

I can export that list to a spreadsheet to save it for future reference or add extra data that I might want, such as the relevant page on my website for a keyword. If you want even more data, you can also import WordTracker keywords if you’re a subscriber.

Overall, although Keyword Examiner is relatively simple compared to some SEO software, it does its job very well and keeps things simple. £19.98 per month is not a huge price to pay for the time (and tedium!) it saves and there’s no tie-in period, so you could just use it for one month if you needed to.

4Q is a free survey tool that gives you feedback direct from your website visitors.

Why did they come to your website (their intention) and how satisfied they are with their experience of your site?

When you came to the website today, you may have been presented with an invitation to participate in a 4Q survey after your visit.

4Q stands for “four questions” that will help you to better understand their user experience, and most importantly task completion: did the visitor manage to complete what they intended to do?  And as a result, how satisfied were they?

The four questions:

1. On a scale of 0 to 10, how satisfied are you with my website?
2. What is the purpose of your visit?
3. Did you manage to achieve the purpose of the visit?
4. What do you like the most about the website?

It is all about conversion based on the tasks your visitors want to complete, and how to improve your website for a better user experience.

Setting up the survey is simple, and it designed to work straight “out of the tin.”  You can change the wording of some of the 4 questions, and upload your company logo.  You then need to upload the tracking code to your website, in much the same way that you installed Google Analytics tracking code.

iPerceptions have shared the typical survey response rate as 2-4%, although my response rate is significantly lower.  As a result, small businesses might want to set the survey invitation rate (the proportion of visitors invited to take the survey) to 40% or even higher so that you get sufficient visitor data.

And the system uses cookies so that, in principle, a visitor should only get invited to participate in the survey once.

Looking at the Survey Results

The data is presented in your 4Q dashboard, and you can also download the findings straight into a spreadsheet.

Why are visitors coming to my website?

And what do they value most on the site?

4Q shares the daily overall satisfaction measures of all the companies using the service, so that you can benchmark your own satisfaction results:

Great Ideas to Take Away From the Survey

The most valuable part of the 4Q process is discovering actionable ideas that your business can take away and work on.

For example, I discovered that a number visitors wanted to access the materials in the Client Area, but did not have a password to get in.  They took the time in the survey to write about their frustration.  I need make a way to provide delegates with a simple way to recover a lost password.

In terms of our course booking process, one visitor provided me with a detailed breakdown of how it didn’t work, and then asked me to give him a ring to discuss his requirements.  The survey provided another way for customers to get in touch with the business

And finally, I can see that that visitors value the free information, the impartial advice.

Conclusions

4Q is quick, it’s free, and it gathers valuable data for better understanding your visitors’ expectations of your website, and their experience engaging with your site.

Gathering the visitor data is only the start of the process;  the more difficult task is then making the changes to your website, and testing new assumptions for improving your visitor experience.

My main hesitation for recommending this service? I’m not keen on intrusive pop-up invitations, and have no way of knowing what the impact of that pop-up might be. Is there any chance a visitor would bounce as a result of the pop up?

http://www.4qsurvey.com/

Google has created an “Agency Toolkit” – a single point of acccess to free Google tools that can be used to Plan, Create, Place and Measure your online marketing activities.

Designed for Marketing Agencies, I think this is potentially more valuable resource for small businesses managing their own Internet Marketing campaigns.

Google Agency Tookit

SpyFu is a keyword research tool that let’s you discover your competitors’ keyword strategies for their pay per click advertising and organic search engine optimisation.

Larger organisations are using services like Experian’s Hitwise competitive intelligence tool, but at just £14.95 for a 3 day subscription, SypFu is  well suited for small businesses looking to sharpen up their search marketing activities.

The free version provides you with a websites top organic and paid key phrases.  In this example I’m researching the organic and paid key phrases being targeted by a local Nottingham web designer.

This data gives not only a better understanding of key phrases, but also provides competive information on your competitors’ product offerings, target markets, and how they are positioning themselves in the market place:

You can research by your competitor’s domain name, by selected key phrases, or by industry sectors.

With the paid-for version, I can then see a comprehensive list of phrases that I can download to a spreadsheet including  Ad copy, landing page URLs and bid estimates.

You can also see changes in key phrases usage, changes in budgets.  You can get a glimpse of what is working well for your competitors, and what they have decided is not working well:

I decided to test the accuracy of SpyFu to “spy” on some of my own client’s Pay Per Click Advertising.  On the one hand, some of the data is highly revealing, but there was alot of inaccuracies in the results SpyFu reported.  In some examples the budgets were widely inaccurate, and the price per click not representative.

This is because of the way SpyFu gathers competitor data, and the way it then calculates some of the results.

Nevertheless, the information it provides is very useful, and I would suggest using Spyfu to:

• get an overview of the phrases your  competitors are bidding for
• identify new competitors who are bidding in your market space
• discover the organic keywords driving traffic to your competitors’ websites.
• Download this data to a spreadsheet and use it in your own PPC strategy, or to guide your own SEO
• analyse the overlap in PPC advertising key phrases between your own and your competitor’s campaigns
• see all the copy of the adverts a competitior is running, including their landing page addresses

Ann Smarty has produced an inspired article of the  Ultimate Collection of Online SEO Tools. All the resources she mentions are useful for search engine optimisation, are free, and are web based.

I think one of the best SEO books on the market is Planet Ocean’s Unfair Advantage Book on Winning the Search Engine Wars. The site is a bit hard sell, a bit cheap and nasty looking, but the materials are excellent quality, and I’m sure to review their monthly update.

There are many collections of tools on the web, but you might also want to take a look at, and it is worth evaluating to see which ones you feel suit your requirements best:

http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html

http://tools.seobook.com/

http://www.seomoz.org/tools

Probably best to open the blog to comments, and see what other recommendations you all come up with…

Your business leaves “footprints” all over the Internet.  Some of these footprints are your own which you can control, like your business website.  But many footprints are generated by other people who are commenting, reviewing, complimenting or complaining about your business.

A simple search on Google will uncover references to your business, but it isn’t terribly efficient at searching user generated content that forms the social Internet.

You might want to keep an eye on your company name, your products, your main employees, and indeed you might want to keep an eye on the competition.

SocialMention is a social media search engine, gathering information from a wide range of user generated content sites.  It will let you know if you’ve been mentioned on Twitter, or if people have bookmarked you on Delicious or Digg, whether they’ve written about you in their blog or written blog comments about you, published photos , report back on news stories, and will even let you know about YouTube videos or podcasts that mention you.

But I have to say it does not provide a comprehensive service:  for example it didn’t find me on Twitter or LinkedIn or Twitter, nor did it find my news or search Flickr images.

Social Media Firehose: This is a another social media search service using Yahoo Pipes. It taps into a range of social media search APIs directly, so it’s much more immediate and comprehensive than say, Google alerts. Available from @ http://tinyurl.com/firehose

But if you want a comprehensive overview then you should snoop around then you still need to use a number of additional sources:

• Serph.com is another social search aggregator
• Blogpulse is proivded by Nielsen BuzzMetrics and searches the blogosphere
• Trackur.com are offering a free 14 day trial

Google Alerts is a free alerting service that will email you when it discovers your key phrase being mentioned on the wider Google search network including blogs, news, videos.

And you might want to go straight to the horses’ mouth and use the search facilities on each service, for example search.twitter.com or blogsearch.google.com

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I am trying out a new free customer feedback service that provides an independent, unedited source of evaluations from my customers.  I can display this feedback on my website, helping to build business trust and credibility as part of my marketing strategy. And of course it provides a valuable feedback loop as part of my process of continuous improvement of the business.

Feefo is a  customer feedback tool being used by household names like the BBC and Charles Tyrwhitt, as well as number of small businesses ranging from retailers to service providers.

The customer review process is quite simple:  I provide Feefo with all the email addresses of my customers and details of what they bought.  Feefo invites them to provide comments that will be published, unedited, on the Internet.  I have undertaken to give Feefo all my customer addresses (not just those who I think will say nice things!) and also understand that whatever the customer says, good or bad, will appear in my reviews. And finally, I do have the ability to reply to comments as appropriate.

Best of all, Feefo keeps the evaluation process short and sweet, with just two questions:  provide a rating of your product and give a comment.  Keeping it simple seems to work well.

It is a British company, and they have been very helpful in providing support when it was needed.  I think there are some areas that still need refining, for instance the icons aren’t particularly intuitive, and the reporting is a bit ropey, but I have the impression they are open to suggestions and constructive feedback.

The first question is an open ended box to write in comments. I have used Feefo’s very simple editor to write the introductory text:

Feefo can take automatic notifications of the details of your sales direct from your website, in much the same way you send details of your sales to your credit card payment processing provider.  Alternatively, you an upload the details of your sales by creating a simple file using a spreadsheet.

It is a free service, provided you only need 100 feedbacks per month. If you require more feedbacks, or want to customise the service, then they provide the Pro version.

Be sure to take a look at my article discussing the value of customer reviews as part of your Internet marketing strategy.

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Microsoft make a number of interesting tools available that are well worth exploring as part of your search engine optimisation activities.

Microsoft are offering more than 20 different tools, broadly grouped into Keyword Research Tools, Audience Demographic Tools, Content Analysis tools, and a few Social and Video tools.

I would recommend starting with the Demographic Prediction tool which gives a breakdown of a user’s gender and age based on Microsoft’s Passport data gathered as users search and browse the Internet.

You can use this tool to view demographic breakdown by key phrase or by visits to a particular web address.

Taking cars as an example, we an see that older men are searching for Jaguar XK8, whereas it is younger women looking for Mini Coopers.

Starting first with the Jaguar searchers, we see a 58:42 split men to women, with disproportionate number of searchers in the 35-49 age group as compared to the general search population.

As for Mini Cooper, we see a majority of younger women, aged 25-34:

You can use this data to better understand your user base, and ensure that your web design is suited to the characteristics of the visitors to your website.  It could also be used to help to shape your keyword strategy;  if it is mainly 18-24 year old men searching for what you think is your keyphrase, but you know your market is mainly 34-50 year old women, then it might be time to rethink your keyphrases you’re using on your site.

The Content Categorisation Engine tells you how how the search engines are interpreting your website, and the broad categories into which your website falls.

Looking at this website, the tool shows a strong level of confidence that this site is about Business, The Internet, People, and Small Business:

The Content Categoristion tool was designed to place appropriate advertising on a particular website, but it can give you a better understanding as to how the search engines are interpreting your website.

The Detecting Online Commercial Intention tool assesses whether key phrases indicate an intention to purchase products, or are simply seeking information about the product.  You can use this tool both to research keyphrases, but also to analyse your own website.

And finally, try out the AdText Writer tool, which generates small adverts for use as Pay Per Click advertising.  The tool analyses your webpages, and comes up with a range of 3 line ads to use in Google AdWords, oops, Microsoft AdCenter.

Google are at it again: they’ve gone ahead and designed their own web browser.

Google Chrome has just been released in beta format.

Google have added a very useful piece of information to their free Keyword Research Tool: it now displays an approximate number of searches for each phrase from the previous month search data.

Google’s official announcement confirms that it displays the approximate number of searches taking place Google and the wider search network during the previous month, as well as an average monthly search volume of the last 12 months.

Looking carefully at these numbers, they do look very approximate, but it is certainly better than those silly little green fuel gauge icons that they used to display.

Google delivers keyword results and statistics based on your IP address, which means that for most of my readers the numbers are going to be for searching activity in the UK.

Be sure to use the “Show/Hide Columns” option to suppress the Adwords advertising figures if they are not of interest.