Google Spain recommends Marathonman!

When you type 'Stefaan' in Google Spain, you get this:


As you can see, the first 3 search-recommendatios are refering to 'Stefaan Engels'. Stefaan Engels is a friend of mine. Stefaan runs marathons. He runs a lot of marahtons: one marathon a day, to be precise. And he's doing this for a whole year. That is 1 marathon, just over 42km, every day during 365 days. I'm not kidding.
He likes to call himself 'Marathonman'.

Marathonman started with his effort at the beginning of 2010 and recently he reached his 200th Marathon in 200 days.

Congratulations and big cheers rise from the crowds!!

He tries to convince people to start exercising as well, and he invites everybody to join to run with him. You don't have to run the whole marathon, you can join for the distance that you like.

Stefaan Engels runs most of his time in Belgium, but every now and then he goes abroad. He's been in Portugal and Spain and has just taken of to Canada and Mexico.
He has been already quite a few times in Spain: each time he comes over, he runs a week of marathons. He was first in Barcelona, then Madrid and a bit later Valencia. When he's in Spain, his sponsor Pronokal tries to attract some attention in the press and that has had its repercussion on the on-line world in Spain, and specifically on the search-engines in Spain. I'll explain.

We all use Google's search engine. You type in what you search for (the keyword), and when you click 'search' you get a list of web pages which give you relevant results, based on your keyword.
To help you a bit with your search, Google reads the first word you've typed and gives you a list recommendations, like in the image above. A drop-down menu gives a list of what other people have searched for using the same first word as you just typed.
Say that you're looking for 'American Airlines': you type 'American' in the search bar, and by the time you've finished this first word, Google will give you a list of possible searches. In that list you'll find 'Amercian Airlines', but also 'American Express' and 'American pie'. You can directly select what you're looking for from the list, so you don't have to type the whole keyword and it will help you to search faster.
This is clever: a lot of people are searching constantly on Google, so it's pretty easy to use this 'wisdom of the crowds' and recommend popular searches. By doing this, your search has just gotten a bit easier: instead of typing the whole keyword, you just select it from the recommended list. And if your search isn't on the recommended list, you can still type your own particular search and don't bother with the recomendation.

These recommendations also tell us something about what people are mostly looking for. I've just had a search for the word 'free' and the first recommendations are: 'free hotmail', 'free rider 2' and 'free fonts'. This gives a nice idea of what people want for free when searching on Google. Using this tool gives us the opportunity to listen to our clientes and to read the puls of the 'searching masses': what is a popular search and what isn't. And you can find out (for free) if if your company is talking the same (search-)language as your searching customer. Say that your offering fonds on your site, you might want to talk about 'free fonds' instead of 'download great and unique fonds'.

It's also nice to see if a campaign has been picked up by the people. Stefaan Engels (pictured during his Marathon in Madrid 2010) has been running marathons in Spain this year. His story has been picked up by the media and it has been published in blogs and websites. On his trips all over the world, he invites local runners to join in and run with him. So people talk about this, and want more information about his adventure and where and when they can join him in runnnig. People start to search for 'Marathonman' on Google, Google picks this up as a popular search and uses it as a recomendation, 3 recomendations actually. So based on the 'recommendations' tool on Google España, like pictured above, you can say that his trips to Spain have been quite a success and that quite some people have been looking for him on search engines.

It's interesting to note that the recommendations don't have anything to do with the actual search result. Even if 'Stefaan Engels' is recommended, the first result when you actually search for 'Stefaan', is my profile on LinkedIn and MarathonMan only shows up on a blog entry which is listed as third on the result pages.
It's also good to note that when looking only for 'Stefaan', his own website isn't even listed on the first page. But 5 out of 10 of the results on the first page are blogs or sites telling hist story and dedicating a page to him. This is an example of good online press: Sometimes your goals are not the traffic to your own site, or the position that you are ranked in Google. Sometimes it's more important that people talk about you, or that your name/brand/product resonates on the webm independent of the site where you're mentioned. Like with Marathonman, the word-of-mouth works that good that Google recommends him in Search, even if the SEO doesn't rank his page on the first page.

Of course, 'Stefaan' isn't a vey typical name in Spain, and this makes it easier to be picked up as a recomendation. If Marathonman's name were 'José', he would have a lot of competition, for example by José Mourinho and José Saramago. But my name is Stefaan too, Google doesn't consider me as a recommendation when searching for 'Stefaan'. Maybe it's just that Google favours healthy lifestyle and maybe I should start running marathons as well, so my 'recomendable-factor' will increase for Google. I think I'm starting tomorrow.

SEM/SEO Strategy: Improve your SEO with SEM-data using Tag Clouds

Sometimes a great idea is just 2 good ideas meeting for the first time.

Avinash Kaushik on twitter, 2010

The idea for this post came when reading the following 2 posts:

In the first post, Gemma Muñoz focuses on the importance of the long tail for organic searches (or SEO): we have to look further then just the first 20 search-terms for our website. The main idea of the post is that beyond the first search-terms, there is still a pretty vast number of keywords directing traffic to your site, and hopefully converting, so this traffic deserves our attention.

The second post is by Avinash. What intereseted me for the post I'm writing is number 2: Use tag clouds, where he teaches us to use tag clouds for analysing our SEO or paid search (PPC) campaigns.

After reading these 2 posts, I did the following: I investigated the long tail of our search-engine traffic of our website. I plotted the SEO and SEM search-keywords seperately in a tag-cloud, and compared both.

It's something you want to do too!

Let's have a look at practical example. Let's say there is a zoo in Madrid, which is called 'Animal Zoo Madrid'. The Zoo also has a website: www.animalzoomadrid.com

The Marketing Department of the Zoo does paid search campaigns and organic search campaigns.

Let's first have a look at all the organic searches which drove traffic to our website. I took all the keywords driving traffic to the site, put all this data in a text file, and loaded this up on Wordle. This gave me something like this:

As you can see, 3 keywords stand out. These 3 words are actually the seperate words of the 'brand' which is the name of the zoo. There are no other words who stand out, and few even show up on the tag-cloud.

So, what does this tell us? At least we have our own keywords covered, you can say. It would be nice to have some reference to see if this cloud-tag tells something good or bad aboout our SEO.

So now have a look at the SEM keywords which generate traffic to the site.

Well, this is a whole new story, right?

We still have the 3 words from the brand name. But we have a whole range of words which are relevant for a website of a zoo. There are all the animals: bear, gorilla, koala and panda seem to be the most popular searches, but also elephant, parrot, zebra get quite some searches. Then there are the keywords related to the 'practical' issues of visiting a zoo: 'Entrance fee' is quite big, since people want to know the prices. We also see 'Buy' and 'Tickets', so most likely people want information on how to purchase tickets. We have 'Restaurant' and 'Maps', which tells us that people are looking online to plan their stay at the Zoo. There is also 'Parking' and 'Trains', so people can find out on the internet how to get there, where they can park the car, or if it's better to take the train.

This tag-cloud for SEM tells us where the SEO is going wrong: it doesn't work the long-tail. Our organic search is centered around the brandname, and we haven't taken care of all the other searches which can be a great source of (free) traffic to our site. Of course we want people who search 'See living gorilla' to come to our site www.animalzoomadrid.com. We understand that people who search this online, might want to see a living gorilla. And if our Zoo offers this, we should make sure our site ranks high on organic searches for this keyword.

So now we've got some work to do: fix your SEO. There are lots of better places to get up-to-date on how to work your SEO, but I'm sure you'll want to have a look at your meta-data, give your URLs a review and see if they've got the keywords in them, see if you're using h1, h2, … And probably you'll have to give your site-map an update. If your keyword-cloud looks like the SEO-cloud we've seen before, you might want to implement a few new pages for all animals, maybe something like this:

/animals/bears.php

/animals/panda.php

/animals/koala.php

Now, what if we swop these results? I mean – what if the SEM-cloud we've seen above was actually the SEO-cloud and vice-versa? In that case, you're SEM activities would be centered around the 3 brand-related keywords, and not much more.

Again, you'll have work to do, but now for your paid campaigns. I'd start by bidding on all these words like 'bears' or 'entrance fee'. I'd put a fairly low daily limit on the bidding, and you want to check after a few days what your cost per conversion is. Some words will convert, other might not. You'll be happy enough to find out.

You might find that these 'long tail' keywords can be a bit more expensive then your brand-related terms. But that's OK: people searching for 'Animal Zoo Madrid' are likely to be closer to purchasing a ticket then people looking for 'see living koala's'. But you surely want to open up your website for people who're a bit lower on the purchase funnel and who might not know that you're zoo has got some living koalas.

So what can we learn from this

1. Work together SEM and SEO

Like the example shows, paid and organic searches are very closely related and you need to work them together. You can (and should) learn a lot by crossing te data of both activities.

SEM and SEO require different ways of working. I know a lot of companies where SEM and SEO are the responsabililties of different agencies or of different departments. If this is the case for your company then you're probably missing a great opportunity. Start working these 2 together now! Don't forget that taking care of your SEO will help you to better your quality-score, which will bring down your Cost Per Click (CPC) for SEM.

2. Be self-critical

I've heard quite some companies say: 'Our brand-related search terms come up pretty good in SEO, but not the more generic keywords'. I think this reasoning shows a lack knowledge of what SEO actually is. If you search Nike and it comes up as first in the organic results, then this is because the search robot is doing it's work, not because Nike is doing good SEO-work. The job of seach engines like Google, is to show the most relevant results of a search. Your job for SEO is to work beyond your own brand-related keywords and make an impact there.

3. Be ambitious

Some keywords can give you a hint to something bigger, to go the extra mile. In the example, we've seen that 'Buy' and 'Tickets' are giving quite some visits. So you try to position your site for these keywords.

But when there are some many people typing 'Buy Ticket for the Zoo', then this means more. Don't forget, that's your customer talking to you. That's your client saying that he wants to buy tickets. So why not start thinking of an on-line ticketing service? The keywords show the personal needs and desires of your customers, so we better start listening to what they want.

4. Go beyond visits

In this example, we've just talked about traffic coming from search engines.

But of course, you could plot your SEM and SEO campaigns seperately, but segmented not by visits but by conversions. Now that might give you even more actionable insights. Anybody wants to have a go and share the results?