The Best FREE SEO Research Tool - GTrends

What's the tool that the SEO experts turn to first before starting any SEO project? Gtrends!.

Why do I need Gtrends?

Your SEO efforts will be completely wasted unless you start with the right words to optimize for.

One of the biggest SEO mistakes I see from new clients is trying to optimize for keywords that have insignificant search volume. Most business owners know an awful lot about their business, but the "right" words to search for are not always the words people are actually searching. You must make sure that your SEO efforts are based off of keywords that have enough search volume to be worth it.

What can Gtrends tell me?

Search for a broad word of phrase that relates to your business. Gtrends will come up with the top search (by approximate average searches per day) and related searches. Be sure to also click the graph icon to the right. The popup will show you how many websites you'll be competing with on that keyword as well as how many clicks you can expect for being #1 in Google for that term.

I can't reiterate this enough. Your SEO efforts will be completely wasted if you're not choosing the right words to optimize for in the first place. Gtrends is the most important SEO researh tool on the net. And it's free!

UPDATE: Gtrends Temporarily Broken

Well it appears that Gtrends is a little under the weather. They've been having some problems on and off due to inconsistencies with Google's own Trending system. Gtrends is not giving an accurate reading for projected hits on #1 spot (highlighted in red).

Take a look at the screenshot below:



Hopefully it's back up soon! Read More...

The Ultimate Niche Research Data

Google is doing something awesome, again. Want to do historic research on product trends for your next product or niche campaign? How about for FREE?

Well Google has mashed a bunch of their technologies together to create Google Checkout Trends. It's still in its early stages of usefulness, but I forsee this as the go-to place for our initial nice research from now on.

It's always better to make decisions on good hard data. The data always seems to turn our hunches upside down. Take a look at the comparison in sales for Ipod vs Zune products for example. Thought ipod would be the clear leader didn't you?

If you're up on your Wall St tracking software and already use Google Finance, you'll notice the same technology implemented here. Hopefully that means Google will continue to use their innovative approches to matching and manipulating data to make it even more useful. Read More...

Google Checkout's Effect on Hits and Sales Part II

In April, I wrote an article on Google's push for Checkout adoption and it's impending effects on business. While we have noticed some increases in paid search hits on our campaigns with google checkout enable vs campaigns without, it was very difficult to measure any real results.

It seems that Google has done some of that work for me, as reported by Ina Steiner from Auctionbytes:

"Google's SVP of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg said many advertisers are reporting much higher click-through rates when using Google AdWords with Google Checkout, as much as 60% higher than without Checkout."

While "as much as 60%" doesn't really tell us anything useful, at least they are recording measured increases.

Also interesting was this statement, "Rosenberg said advertisers have decreased the cost-per-click by over 31% with Google AdWords and Google Checkout." It seems that you can be lower in the rankings for paid search, but still get the click since you have a huge 3d GC button under your ad.

Any sellers out there have any 1st hand counts of implementing google checkout? Read More...

Google Holds Party to Protest EBay's Ban on Google Checkout

Head over to cnet for an interesting article on google's latest action to protest eBay's ban of Google checkout; they're throwing a party!

Ebay still claims that a year of operation is not long enough to prove the payment service is trustworthy. For once, I actually see where eBay is coming from (a little). EBay has had an increasingly negative brand connotation with fraud. If they allowed sellers to use google checkout, and checkout screwed up a bunch of payments, it would reflect highly negatively to those many buyers. Many buyers would not understand that eBay really had nothing to do with it.

With all the bad press lately that Google Checkout is getting in the UK—decling credit cards, double charging, and not allowing withdrawls—there might be some validity to eBay's claims.

Eventually, I hope eBay caves. I'm not a huge fan of Google Checkout, but I do think it's going to be increasingly necessary. See my post on Google Checkout's Effect on Hits and Sales for more info. Read More...

What Everyone Ought to Know about Google Analytics

The new Google Analytics is out, and I must say, it's very nice. We can finally see the full referring url without having to apply some kind of hack to the tracker code!

Track everything about your visitors including location, browser, referrer, frequency, and a whole lot more. GA also has some pretty advanced paid search (a.k.a. SEM - Search Engine Marketing) conversion tracking and analysis. Unless you're running a million$/year paid search campaign, you've got all you need.

If you don't already have Google Analytics on your website, I suggest you set it up asap. Instead of reading me blab about how great it is, you should head over to google.com/analytics and check it out for yourself.

Note to our Laris Merchants: If you have not yet set up google analytics on your site, please give us a call for help getting started.

Side Note: I'm not sure when "SEM" (Search Engine Marketing) became a popular term, but I see many of the experts referring to it as such now. To relieve confusion, SEM, Paid Search, and PPC (in a search engine context) are all referring to the same thing. Read More...

Google Checkout's Effect on Hits and Sales

Over the next few weeks, I'll be looking more deeply at how Google checkout effects sales. There has been a ton of speculation lately, and, frankly, I thought Google checkout was a complete flop. However, it seems that they are growing slowly but surely, especially after they used some Microsoft-like tactics to force checkout upon us.

Below I've pasted in an image of Google's relatively recent promotions of their checkout. You'll see that the Google OneBox shows "results available through Google Checkout" rather than the "see more products" message it used to have. You'll also see to the right that some Paid Search Ads have a really eye catching icon underneath them.





I'm willing to bet that these changes to Google will be driving a significant amount of additional hits to Google Checkout sellers. Hopefully in the coming weeks my experiments will prove it! Read More...