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Archive: January 2014

Unusual Keyword Research Tools That Work

Google’s recent move to restrict access to keyword information was blow to many online advertisers and marketers. For many people, Google’s keyword suggestion tool was the main way that they researched potential keywords to use in SEO and PPC campaigns. But savvy advertising and marketing experts were already using other keyword tools to augment their research. Here are 11 tools to consider when looking for a keyword suggestion tool.

Wikipedia: Going to Wikipedia pages related to topics that are related to your business is already a great way to discover keyword phrases. When you use the SEOQuake Toolbar while on Wikipedia, you can quickly see the words and phrases most commonly used on these pages.

Amazon.com: Amazon has provided users with free access to a wonderful SEO resource: books related to their subject. Search for books and look for “Look Inside” books with free previews. Many keywords can be found in the chapter or section titles. Another way to use Amazon for SEO purposes is to just start a search on products related to your category. Amazon’s Auto Correct feature will suggest lots of related phrases and versions of your keyword.

Press Release Sites: Visit press release distribution sites like PR.com or Yahoo News to get a sense of what companies in your space are saying about themselves. Browse through industry categories and search press releases to find frequently used words and phrases by your competitors.

Soovle and Ubersuggest: Soovle will help you by automatically creating lists of keyword suggestions across multiple search engines (such as Bing, Amazon, Yahoo and YouTube). Ubersuggest takes a longtail approach by getting keywords from regular searches along with specific searches like News, Shopping or Videos.

eVisible’s Keyword Suggestion Tool: Our own free tool gives you a large list of potential keywords based on words or phrases that you provide. It’s fast, easy to use and gives you plenty of great keywords to use. You can find the Keyword Suggestion Tool at https://www.evisible.co/tools/keyword-suggestion/.

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Followerwonk: Using Followerwonk to determine the influential social media experts in your space gives you several avenues of keyword research. You can scrape these people’s Tweets using a service like AllMyTweets and then feed the content into a word cloud generator like Wordle to find frequently-mentioned terms. You can also export title tags using Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider into Wordle.

Prismatic: When you are searching for SEO keywords specifically for social media, Prismatic is a great tool. You can follow topics by category and browse social media updates to find frequently-used keywords.

Google Correlate: Google hasn’t completely dried up as a source of keyword research. You can use its Google Correlate product to search for the most frequently searched for terms within a given time frame. You can compare search rates on a weekly or monthly basis or across different time frames to see when the right time to use a keyword might be.

Create Catchy Email Headlines…or Else

Before you send out a promotional or educational email to your customers, how much time do you spend on the headline? It’s probably not enough, as one recent email marketing survey showed that every word in the headline of your email can have a significant impact on if the recipient opens it. A leading email marketing company analyzed 24 billion emails delivered with 22,000 distinct words in the headline. The results showed that:

Personalization Is Important. Using a template or macro to automatically include the name of the recipient meant that it was far more likely that they would open the email. This was true for just using the first name or the last name, but the open rates were two to four times higher if both the first and last names were used.

Time Sensitivity Drives Open Rates. When emails used terms like “urgent,” “breaking” or “important” that implied a time sensitivity, open rates increased significantly.

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Free Isn’t the Perfect Solution. Many email marketing experts assume that including the word “free” in any email will entice people to open. While it’s true to a small degree overall, in some industries such as travel and transportation, real estate and medical, using “free” actually reduced open rates. Interestingly, the word “freebie” appeared to be much more powerful than “free.”

Donation Requests Get Ignored. Words directly associated with charity such as “donation” or “fundraiser” caused open rates to fall dramatically. More ambiguous words such as “helping” also reduced open rates but only by a minor amount.

Announce Things to People But Don’t Remind People. When a headline “announced” something or “invited” someone to do something, open rates were high. They fell when the email “reminded” a person of something. It was even worse if the email threatened the reader with “cancellation.”

Word Pairs Matter. Some combinations of phrases, such as “Thank You,” made open rates go up. Other word pairs weren’t so powerful. Phrases such as “sign up” and “last chance” made open rates plummet.

Capitalization Can Help. One of the quirkiest findings of the research was that the capitalization of the email headline appears to have a correlation with open rates. Specifically, people were slightly more likely to open an email if all of the words in the headline were capitalized, but were slightly less likely to open an email if just one of the words was capitalized.