Wordtracker have launched a free version of their keyword tool.

Thanks to Aaron Wall for pointing it out.

If you’ve never subscribed to a website before there’s some really good information on what it’s all about in this post by web strategist, Jeremiah Owyang.

The post is also useful if you have a company website that may benefit from offering feeds such as RSS.

You can start by subscribing to my blog if you’ve never been through the process before. You need a feedreader. I like netvibes and it’s quick, easy and free to set up an account with them. Then all you do is click the subscribe link on the left, or above, and select netvibes or any other reader. When you look at your netvibes page my blog feed will be there.

If you prefer, subscribe and opt to have new posts delivered to your email address.

If you read a number of blogs, articles or other Internet content on a regular basis, then I recommend Netvibes if you haven’t already come across it. It’s a way of managing content so links to the content you look at are on one page. You can also see preview snippets and know what’s been updated.

Today Netvibes announced an Australian version which will make it easier to browse Australian websites of general interest such as news, sport, music etc.

Google is developing a tool that lets you test different versions of your website content. The tool determines which versions customers respond to so that you convert more of your website traffic into sales.

It’s in beta test at the moment and I’ve just been accepted as a tester. I’ll use my own website for the testing at first. Early feedback from other participants has been very positive so I’m keen to see it in action for myself.

It made me think about a hierarchy of levels particularly in relation to pay-per-click campaigns.

1. Getting traffic to the website
2. Targeting potential customers and getting them to the website
3. Avoiding unwanted traffic
4. Converting website visitors into customers
5. Continuously improving the return on investment
6. Integrating results with other marketing efforts and focusing on the lifetime value of the customer

This is a big topic so I’ll cover each level in more detail over the next couple of weeks. All pay-per-click managers will get traffic to the website but a campaign will only be successful for the business if:

• It is targeted effectively which means separate ad groups for each target group, targeted ad copy, targeted keywords for each group rather than relying on a few broad matches.
• Unwanted traffic is avoided wherever possible by using negative keywords (eg eliminating searches that contain “free” or “cheap” if this isn’t appropriate for your product or services) and qualifying people wherever possible in the ad copy.
• Landing pages convert into sales. At the very least each ad must link to the most appropriate page on the website depending on the person’s search query. This isn’t usually the website home page.
• Every aspect of the campaign is tested on an ongoing basis and the results used to improve the return on investment. This can include reorganising ad groups, removing unprofitable keywords, removing low performing ads and testing different landing pages. This is where the new website optimiser will come in.

Here’s more information about the website optimiser.

I check whether anyone is copying my website content, and that of my clients, using copyscape.

Apart from the fact that it takes a lot of time and hard work to write good quality content, and it’s unacceptable for anyone to reproduce it, Google has a duplicate content filter so you need to make sure your content is unique.

Google aims to provide a good experience for searchers. Clearly this doesn’t mean a list of websites that all have the same content which is why Google filters out duplicate results and presents just one of them to the searcher.

So, if your website is nowhere to be found for a search phrase that you’d like to be found for, it’s worth checking whether duplicate content is an issue.

Want to read more about search marketing? Here’s a list of must read blogs compiled by Lee Odden

Marketwatch.com wrote about a couple of businesses advertising in the US who claim that Google adWords campaigns are becoming prohibitively expensive. These companies are planning on reducing their online advertising budget this year.

One of the companies is ebags.com. They sell suitcases and handbags online and last year spent somewhere between $5 and $8 million dollars on advertising of which 75% went to Google. The “soaring cost of Google adWords” was attributed to increased competition driving up the price of keywords. Google displays paid ads in an order determined by how much each advertiser has bid for a keyword in conjunction with a quality score given to the advertiser by Google. Ebags.com say that for each keyword they now pay roughly 45% of the cost of the product. This is eating into their profit margins and becoming too costly.

So, the news doesn’t appear to be good and marketwatch.com, a stock market site, covered the story believing that if more advertisers follow suit then Google’s share price will suffer.

But is it true? Not in Australia it isn’t, in my experience.

• I’m often surprised at the lack of competition for targeted keywords in what are considered to be competitive online industries. I recently set up a campaign for an online fashion business and the cost per click averaged 16 cents in the first month. It’s nowhere near the 45% of the product cost claims featured in the article.
• The travel industry is one of the most competitive online and keywords are more expensive but still averaging well under $1 for the campaigns I run.
• The most expensive keywords I buy are those for my own search engine marketing business. These are search terms such as “online advertising” or “pay per click”. (edit: no longer true)
  
• There are some absolute bargains to be found all the time. I don’t want to give current examples but I’ll give one from a month ago. A major golf tournament (PGA) took place last month at the Hyatt Coolum. I was the only advertiser bidding on search terms such as PGA and PGA golf. There were 16,000 searches for the PGA tournament in one month and this phrase was extremely relevant for one of my clients who had tournament packages and accommodation on his website. The cost per click was 7 cents.

I suspect the marketwatch article is anecdotal rather than based on any meaningful stats. In any case if advertisers drop out of the market for particular keywords in particular regions then the price gets cheaper for those remaining until it’s cheap enough to lure back previous advertisers. And so it goes. We’re nowhere near this situation in Australia though.

I analyse a large number of accommodation websites due to the fact that:

• I live and work in a popular tourist area on the Sunshine Coast. Property managers regularly tell me about their website problems

• I monitor the web stats for the local chamber of commerce using Google Analytics. This gives me an insight into cases where people end up on the general tourism site when really I would have expected them to go straight to a hotel’s own website. For example when someone has searched for a hotel by name. When I investigate it’s invariably because the hotel’s own website is difficult or impossible to find.

Here are some common reasons that account for the low visibility of a website in the search engine pages:

1. The website can’t be indexed so the search engines are unaware of it. I’ve come across several instances lately where a metatag has been added to the website excluding visits from the search engines. I did some work for a holiday resort recently that has had a robots noindex tag for the last 3 years ever since the website was developed. That’s 3 years where they’ve had absolutely no presence at all when someone searches for them or their product.
2. There are other technical problems preventing indexing such as flash entry screens or javascript menus. The search engines are getting better at indexing pages such as these but there are still many cases where it causes a problem.
3. Websites have had dodgy seo work done on them in the past. The most common one I see is multiple domains all containing duplicate copies of the website.
4. The website content is pulled from other sources that already rank well for the major keywords. This is very common in the tourist industry as the easiest option is to grab a piece of promotional blurb that already exists elsewhere. However Google will only show one occurrence of content so don’t expect your website to show for those keywords if you don’t have original content.
5. The essential basics for search engine optimisation haven’t been covered. Relevant, well thought out page titles make the biggest difference to ranking well.
6. The website isn’t old enough to rank for any competitive phrases. It takes about 9-12 months for this to happen so patience is required combined with other marketing initiatives such as Google adWords.

If you have a website and can’t understand why it is hard to find through Google or other search engines contact me and I’ll take a look. Any other comments on common problems will be very welcome here as well.

A US based company has lost a court case against their main competitor regarding the use of keywords in an adWords campaign.

J G Wentworth, the market leader in buying settlement funding, claimed that their competitor’s purchase of the keyword “j g wentworth” violated the law on trademark use.

However, the court determined that as the trademark use was behind the scenes and not seen by the customer, it was acceptable usage.

There have been several similar court cases and the outcomes have been fairly evenly split so it isn’t clear cut by any means.

Google’s policy in Australia is to allow trademarks as keywords but not as ad text. The onus is on the advertiser to comply with the law.

The case was written about in this technology and marketing law blog.