Ultimate Marketing Strategies Blog

I was recently doing some keyword research when I thought I’d come across a really good keyword for a new Amazon store that I’d been planning on building.

However, after checking the search trends (in particular the regional differences), I quickly realized that the keyword was nowhere as good as I initially thought it was.

Given that keyword research is the foundation for any site, I think trend and regional data are often overlooked in the whole keyword research process.

In this article, I’ll go through why analysing trend and regional data is a very important part of keyword research and why you shouldn’t ignore it.

Fiverr has been around for a while now and I’ve used it since it was launched, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit my experiences with Fiverr.

Firstly, my experiences on Fiverr are only as a buyer.  I have never listed a gig, but have occasionally thought about it but the actually commission you receive has put me off (although there are quite a few tricks you can you to increase your profits from Fiverr, which I might cover in another article).

The other things I should point out is all the Fiverr gigs I’ve tried are related to SEO and graphics, so I can’t comment on the quality of gigs in the other categories.

 

 

It’s a Jungle In There

With so many people offerings gigs on Fiverr, it really is like a jungle in there.  You never know if you are going to come across a beautiful butterfly or get bitten by a snake.

The Fiverr rating system can give you a general idea as to the  quality of the gig, but it’s not a completely reliable or foolproof system.   I’ve ordered some gigs that had rave reviews, but found the results were were mediocre.

As with a lot products or services, the best recommendations come from your friends as they are the people you trust the most.

 

Bad Fiverr Experiences

Luckily I’ve never had a completely negative experience with Fiverr.  Perhaps if I had ordered a greater variety of gigs, the odds of getting a really bad one would increase.

Of all the gigs I order, I’ve only had to get one refund due to the gig not being completed.   I have to say that I don’t find the refund process on Fiverr to be entirely obvious, but once you’ve worked out where to flag the information, it generally doesn’t take very long for a Fiverr staff member to review the details and issue a refund (if appropriate).

For me, the type of gigs I was most disappointed with the results (with the exception of one person) were the ones related to creating graphics, ie: banners, headers, logos etc.   I’m no graphic designer, but honestly, some of the work I received was very basic or just looked plain amateurish.   I know you can’t generally expect a highly professionally designed graphic for only $5, but I was expecting a little more.

In most cases, I ended up doing the graphics myself and personally thought I did a much better job.

The other types of gigs I usually avoid are anything to do with SEO.   You can do some real damage to your rankings with some of the backlinking gigs on offer.   Most of these use automated software to blast out spam comments or pretty much useless profile links.  I can understand why some of these gigs do well, as there are a lot of people who don’t know much about SEO that read the gig descriptions and get sucked in.

 

Good Fiverr Experiences

Like I already mentioned, Fiverr really is a jungle, but there are some great services on offer that are high quality and an absolute bargain.

In regards to graphics and logos, I’ve ordered three gigs from a user called creative1desing

The particular gig I ordered was:

Create 3 Different Logos For Your Website or Blog

You’ll probably see some negative comments as graphic design is a very subjective and personal opinion.   Obviously for $5 you can’t expect the world, but I was happy with each of the results.

The seller states that if you aren’t happy with any of the designs, they will redo them.   I got them to make some minor modifications to one set of graphics I ordered, which was done very promptly.

 

Now, I know I said there are a lot of SEO gigs on Fiverr that you should not touch.  I did try some recently and while I was initially impressed, I later worked out they were using greyhat methods.

In particular, there are a lot of Fiverr gigs that offer services that provide you with unique articles that are guaranteed to pass Copyscape, but in actual fact just steal unauthorized content from many sources and run it through some software to make it appear “unique”.

My next post will be covering this in more detail.

 

 

If you know of any other great Fiverr gigs you’ve come across or ones to definitely avoid, please leave a comment below.

 

Cheers

 

 

As a marketer, I always take note of how effective an online store is.

There are obviously huge sites like Amazon that spend a lot of money into market research and website design and most people would agree that Amazon is highly effective from both the view of an Amazon affiliate and as a buyer.

As I live in New Zealand, I can’t always buy the items I’m after locally.  Additionally, if they are available locally, they are generally much more expensive than buying them from overseas.

Therefore, I tend to purchase quite a few products from various sites.

One thing you quickly realise when you live outside the US or UK is that many sites don’t ship internationally.   This is where my biggest gripe on website/shopping cart design lies.

 

 

Essential Information That Should Be Available

Shipping Details

I can’t remember the number of times I’ve found a product that I’m after on a particular website and then I have to hunt around all over the place to eventually find that they don’t ship overseas.

Then on the sites that do offer international shipping, they often make the shipping costs very inaccessible.   Sometimes, I have to add the items to the shopping cart, then register a user account, add all my address details and then, and only then, is the shipping costs displayed.  Quite often, the shipping costs are so expensive that it would more than double the cost of the item, so it really annoys me when I can’t find that information up front.

Now don’t get me started on sites that offer international shipping and assumes the rest of the world uses the same address formats as the US.   New Zealand does not use zip codes (we have postcodes) and we don’t have states.

Payment Options

My next gripe is sites that don’t clearly state what forms of payment they use.   I like using Paypal for most of my online purchases and generally favour a site that has a Paypal payment option.  However, it isn’t always easy or obvious to find whether a site has a Paypal option or not.

The same applies to credit cards.  Not everyone has a Visa or Mastercard, so it’s good to know what other forms of payment are accepted.

I have come across a few sites where this type of information is cleared displayed on their homepage and it certainly saves time knowing if you have a valid method for purchasing items on the site.

 

Applying This To Your Own Sites

Browsing various shopping sites is a good way of doing market research into the aspects of the site or shopping process that you like or dislike.

If you have your own site selling physical products, please ensure you have clear information as to your shipping and payment methods on the home page (or at the very least, prominent links to appropriate pages that contain all the details).

Even if you don’t directly sell physical products, but are an affiliate for physical products, you should still have the shipping and payment details available.

On one of my Amazon affiliate stores, I used to get a lot of queries from people outside the US asking if shipping to their country was available.  After replying to quite a few emails, I made sure I updated the shipping information on my site to state that shipping was only within the US.

This hasn’t entirely stopped all the queries about shipping, but it has certainly reduced the number of them.

 

Cheers

 

Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) was finally closed in November 2011.

YSE was without a doubt, the most popular tool and source of information for seeing what backlinks a site has.   Many tools and plugins used YSE to get their backlink data, so they all have been affected as well and have had to move to a new backlinking data source.

So now Yahoo Site Explorer is dead, what are the alternatives?

In this article, I will be taking a look at four alternatives for YSE.

Note that the services some of the serviced I’ve reviewed have paid subscriptions, I am only looking at the features/reports that you get with their free offerings.

 

Backlink Reporting Sites Reviewed

The four sites I’m be taking a look at are:

1. Open Site Explorer – Operated by SEOMoz.
2. Majestic SEO Site Explorer – Operated by Majestic SEO
3. Ahrefs Site Explorer – Operated by Ahrefs
4. Blekko – Search engine with SEO reporting facilities

 

One thing to note is that all of the four sites will give you different data and different results.  Unfortunately when it comes to backlink data, there just isn’t any resource that can give you 100% accurate results.

 

Videos of Yahoo Site Explorer Alternatives

For those who prefer the visual medium, I’ve created the following two videos to give you an overview of what each of the sites offers in terms of backlinking data and other SEO data.

 

This video covers Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO Site Explorer and Blekko.

 

This video covers Ahrefs.

 

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer (OSE) is operated by SEOMoz, who are a highly respected SEO organization.

OSE has free and Pro membership levels, with the paid membership getting you access to additional reports and services.

The reports you get in the free version of OSE include:

• Inbound Links
• Top Pages
• Linking Domains
• Anchor Text
• Ability to compare backlink metrics between up to 5 sites

The following OSE screenshot shows the default Inbound Links report.

 Open Site Explorer Summary

While there is some very useful data returned by OSE, probably the biggest issue is the freshness of the index.  Even though the index is large, it is only contains about 25% of all sites on the web.  That’s one of the reasons why the total number of backlinks reported is substantially fewer than what the other sites report.

Additionally, the data is only refreshed every 30 days or so, which means there is always a lag between new backlinks and when they are reported.

 

 Click here to try out Open Site Explorer

 

 

Majestic SEO Site Explorer

Majestic SEO currently would rank as the most popular Yahoo Site Explorer alternative.

Just about every piece of software like Traffic Travis, Market Samurai etc, all changed their backlinking data source from Yahoo to Majestic SEO.

Like OSE, Majestic SEO Site Explorer comes in free and paid subscription versions, where the paid subscription gets you access to more data.

Majestic Site Explorer reports include:

• Top Backlinks
• Referring Domains
• Top Pages
• Backlink History

Majestic SEO also have a few additional SEO tools that you can access.

The following Majestic Site Explorer screenshot shows the default summary returned for a site.

Majestic Site Explorer Summary

There’s a good reason why Majestic Site Explorer is popular, and that’s due to the size of the data and more importantly the freshness of the data.

Since March 2011, SEO Majestic update their index daily.  In the backlink history reports, you can use the “Fresh Index”, which shows you backlink data from the last 30 days, or you can use the “Historic Index” which shows you all available backlink data that Majestic SEO have for a particular site.

 

Click here to try out Majestic Site Explorer

 

 

Ahrefs Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer isn’t as well known as Open Site Explorer and Majestic Site Explorer, but it does have some very useful data that the other sites don’t.

Ahrefs is another free/paid subscription service.   If you don’t register, you are limited to 10 queries per day, if you register for a free account, you are limited to 20 queries per day.

Ahrefs Site Explorer reports include:

• Top Pages
• Backlinks
• Anchor Text
• Referring Domains
• Referring Subnets

There is also a SERPs Analysis function that is really handy as it will show you what keywords a site is ranking for and their position and movement in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The following Ahrefs Site Explorer Screenshot shows you the default information returned.

 

Ahrefs Site Explorer Summary

Even though the free version of Ahrefs is more limited than the other sites, the information it returns is very useful.   In particular, the ability to see what keywords and what rankings a particular site has is great when you are doing competition analysis.

 

Click here to try out Ahrefs Site Explorer

 

 

Blekko

Blekko is different to the previous sites as it is primarily a search engine.   However, it is a very flexible search engine that gives you very useful SEO data.

Blekko uses special filters/modifers that they call slashtags.  One of these slash tags is /seo, so when you do a query like:

somedomain.com /seo

You will get all the SEO data for that particular domain.

 

Blekko SEO Reports include:

• Inbound links and their location
• Outbound links
• Internal Links
• Crawled pages and their rank
• Domains that contain duplicate content

 

The following Blekko screenshot shows the default SEO information returned.

Blekko Summary

Of all the newer search engines that have been created, I’ve found Blekko to be the most interesting and most useful.

While it’s backlink data isn’t as detailed as the other sites, it is free, fast and easy to use.

 

Click here to try out Blekko

 

 

Recommendations

A lot of the time, the type of information and style you like to see it in comes down to personal preference, so my main recommendation is to try out all four sites and see which you like best.

That said, my two favourite sites are:

1.  Majestic Site Explorer – This is mostly due to it having the most comprehensive and accurate backlink data of the four and the freshness of the index.

2. Ahrefs Site Explorer – I like to use this site to get SEO data that the other sites don’t provide, eg: keyword/ranking data.

 

If you know of any other similar sites (that are free to use), please leave a comment below.

 

Cheers

 

There are so many different WordPress Themes in existence and people spend a lot of time hunting down the “right” theme to use.

Typically a person will come across  a WordPress site that they really like and are interested in using the same theme, but find there is no information or links in the footer as to what WordPress theme has been used.

If you know what to do, you can look in the HTML source for the site you are interested in, but I decided that I would create a free tool to make this process super simple.

What WordPress Theme Is That?

So I created the site  called What WordPress Theme Is That?

It’s very easy to use.  All you do is enter a domain or URL and click on the “Check Site” button.

Here is a screenshot showing you the type of results you’ll get.

 

There will be a minority of WordPress sites that have their theme obscured, so the tool won’t get all the details for those sites, but for the vast majority of sites, it should correctly detect all the details.

Below is a short video showing you how it works.

 

Hope you find it to be a useful tool when building your WordPress Sites.

 

Cheers

 

 

If you haven’t heard of QR Codes or don’t know much about them, then I urge you to find out more about their power when it comes to marketing.

QR Codes are an equivalent of a barcode for mobile phones.  The QR Code can contain up to 4296 characters of information.

The type of information they can contain are:

• Website URL
• Email address
• Telephone number
• Contact Details (VCARD)
• Google Places information
• Social Media, eg: Facebook, Twitter etc.

QR Codes have been very popular in countries like Japan and Korea and are gaining a lot more popularity in Europe and the US.

The Real Estate industry has adopted QR Codes very quickly as it’s easy to see the benefit of being able to quickly view the details of a house by simply scanning a QR Code.

To really get a good idea of the power of QR Codes, then I think the video below illustrates this very well, with Tesco using them to great affect in Korea.

 

 

Now is the great time to jump on the QR Code marketing bandwagon while there are still plenty of opportunities available.

 

Cheers

Keyword Research can be a bit like trying to put a puzzle together.   However if you are missing a piece of the puzzle or have some wrong pieces, then you can never successfully complete it.

Time and time again when I’m reading posts on Internet Marketing forums like the Warrior Forum, I see the same keyword research mistakes come up.

Keyword research is your foundation of SEO and without proper keyword research, the rest of your efforts are most likely to be a waste of time.

 

So what are the biggest keyword research mistakes?

 

1) Search Volume

By far the biggest mistake people make with their keyword research is using the wrong monthly search volume figures.

We all know that a good keyword should have good monthly search volume and low competition.   Typically “good search volume” is defined as 3000+ searches a month (this is not a figure set in stone though as it depends on the type of keyword).

Typically what happens is that someone who is doing their keyword research will go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool (GAKT), specify their keyword and see what the monthly search volume is.

Correct?

NO!

The problem is that by default, GAKT returns broad match search results when you really want to look at the exact match search results.

OK, so let’s use an example to explain what the difference is between broad and exact match search results and why it is so important.

For the rest of this article, I’m going to be using the example keyword phrase:

antique coffee table

So if we login to our Google account and go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool,  put in our keyword phrase, we can see the following results:

That’s 12,100 searches a month!  Happy days!

Not so fast.

Click on the checkbox next to [Exact] under the Match Types in the left column and let’s see what results we get:

The exact match search volume is shown for the keyword phrase in square brackets, ie: [antique coffee table]

The global monthly searches for the exact match result is a only 1000, which isn’t too bad, but certainly way less than the 12,100 results for the broad match.   I’ve seen some keyword phrases where the difference is huge; for example the broad match results over 100,000 and the exact match results less than 100.

Just imagine if you built a website and optimized around a keyword that you thought got a lot of searches, only to find that even though your site is ranked at the top of Google, you are getting a  very tiny trickle of traffic.

It can be very disheartening.

 

Match Types

Alright, I’ve told you that you should always be using the exact match figures, but I have explained why…..yet.

Let’s look at the three different match types and what they mean.

 

Broad Match

A broad match is where your keywords can appear in any order and don’t have to be next to each other.

The following are all broad match results:

• antique table with coffee grinder
• a coffee table looks great with antique features
• sit at a table sipping coffee and reading books about antique furniture
• give your table and antique look by staining it with coffee

 

A broad match search is the default search type when you do a Google search (that is, without quotes).

So a broad match search for our example keyword phrase, gives us:

That’s over 9 million results.

The first page of the results will have pages directly related to antique coffee tables, but let’s have a look at some of the results returned further down the search results:

 

This particular page isn’t specifically about antique coffee tables, but mentions a coffee table and an antique drafting table as it is still a broad match result.

This particular result was buried quite a long way down the search results, so someone searching for antique coffee table would almost certainly never even see it.

The point being, is that if you relied on the broad match search volume in GAKT, that will include all sorts of vaguely related searches that you won’t be optimizing your site for.

 

Phrase Match

A phrase match result is where your keywords appear in the exact order, but can be surrounded by other words or punctuation.

The following are all phrase matches:

• Why antique?  Coffee table for sale.
• antique coffee-table
• antique coffee, table free.

When you do a Google search in quotes, you performing a phrase match search.

So using our keyword phrase, the phrase match search gives us 123,000 results compared to just over 9 million results for the broad match search.

All of the search results will contain the phrase antique coffee table.

Here is one of the results on the very last page:

Notice that there is punctuation in the keywords, but the word order is the same.

Exact Match

The first and most important thing to point out is that exact match only relates to GAKT.

There is no direct way to use exact match in a Google search.

Exact match is pretty self explanatory.  It includes searches for that exact phrase.

As we’ve seen, the broad match search figures can be much, much larger as they include so many other vaguely related searches.  By using exact match search figures, you get a much more accurate idea of the actual search traffic you are going to be targeting and optimizing for.

 

2)  Competition

Once you’ve found a good keyword, you need to know what sort of competition you are up against to get ranked on page 1 (and there’s no point in aiming for page 2 or lower).

The two main mistakes I’ve seen with gauging competition are:

i) Number of Search Results

This advice goes along the lines of put your keywords in quotes and check the number of results returned, if they are less than [insert some random number here], then it is a low competition keyword.

Now there is some element of truth in this method.  If a keyword search in quotes (phrase match) returns 10 million results and another returns a few hundred results, it’s reasonable to assume the keyword with 10 million results will be harder to rank for.

However, that is a very poor way of judging the competition.

As you are obviously trying to rank on page 1, the sites on page 1 are really your only competition.  You need to look at various factors such as on-page and off-page SEO for the top 10 results to gauge how difficult it would be to beat them.

It doesn’t really matter if there are a million results. If most of them are poorly optimized, then you have a very good chance of outranking them.

 

ii) GAKT Competition Bar

Quite a number of people don’t understand what the competition bar in the GAKT results actually means.

Let’s look at the results for our example keyword again.

You can see the competition bar for the exact search is almost 100%.

Some people incorrectly interpret this as the competition strength for trying to rank for the particular keyword.

What it really means is the Adwords competition for that particular keyword, ie: the number of people trying to bid on that particular keyword for their adwords campaign.

While it can be a useful metric to look at if you are building Adsense sites, it has very little to do with the competition strength of sites for that keyword.

 

3) Commercial Intent

Assuming you find a good keyword with low competition and a good number of exact match search results, there is one more piece of the keyword research puzzle that you can get wrong.

This is where commercial intent (“buying keywords”) comes in.

If you have a site ranked on page 1 and are getting lots of traffic but little to no sales, it could be down to the keywords you original chose didn’t have a very high commercial intent.

By commercial intent, I mean how likely is the person searching for that term looking to purchase something.

People may be just searching for advice, information or free products, in which case, there’s not much point in creating a website targeting their searches.

So what are some of the ways of determining commercial intent?

1. Put yourself in the mind of the person doing the search.  If you were doing a search for a particular keyword, are you looking for something to buy (or potentially purchase if you came across something that looked really good)?
2. Keywords targeting specific models.  For example, if someone searches for “LED TV’s”, they are most likely in a research phase to find out more about LED TVs.  However, if someone searches for a specific model of LED TV, they are generally looking for a place to confirm their decision and hopefully purchase from.
3. Look at the CPC and Competition columns in the GAKT.  Generally if a keyword has a good CPC (say, more than $2) and high Adwords competition, it’s generally a good indication that the keyword phrase has a high commercial intent, otherwise people wouldn’t be bidding on it.

 

Video Summary

For those of you who prefer viewing videos rather than reading articles, the following video gives a summary of what I’ve written in this article.

 

 

Getting Keyword Research Right

While keyword research is always going to be an inexact science, by avoiding the common mistakes I’ve listed above, hopefully it will increase your chances of creating a successful site that gets good conversions.

 

Cheers