This is Part 1 of a series (probably 4 or 5 posts total). I hate fluff, so I'll get straight to the point: doing SEO on keywords you've never tested is an unnecessary risk, pure and simple. A solid SEO strategy looks like this:
- Keyword Research
- Keyword Testing (PPC Campaign)
- Competition Analysis
- Keyword Selection
- SEO on-page
- SEO off-page
This is especially important for B2B, which is all about long-tail searches. Why? Because before you test the keywords you have no idea how well they're going to convert (ie. how likely the visitors from a particular keyword are to become leads). And honestly, you also have no idea how much traffic they'll bring you if they're long tails: all of the keyword research tools out there are terrible when it comes to estimating long-tail search volume, but a well structured PPC campaign will give you a much better idea how much traffic is available. The second part of testing is a solid analysis of the competition. After you've selected high performing keywords, you need to figure out how hard it will be to rank for them. So, today I'm going to talk about Steps 1 and 2. Together, they form the foundation of a successful SEO campaign.
Keyword Research
Before we setup any ads, we have to get a feel for what people are searching for and how they fit into broad thematic categories. For the sake of this article, let's say that I'm running a gourmet food ecommerce store, and I want to sell caviar online. So the first thing we're going to do is pop "caviar" into the AdWords keyword planner, and our dear frenemy Google is going to spit out a ton of keyword suggestions. Along with those suggestions come traffic estimates, approximate search bid amounts, and some other data we don't really care about right now. Google will suggest AdGroups to put the keywords into as well, but it usually does a poor job. Even though the traffic estimates aren't 100% accurate, they still give us a starting point. We're going to click on the traffic column, so it sorts by volume, and then we're going to go through the list, adding keywords that 1) have a good volume of searches per month and 2) seem like they have decent consumer intent. For instance, the keyword "caviar" gets a nice volume of exact matches per month, but how many of these searches are actually people interested in buying caviar? Not many. Most of them are people who want to learn more about what caviar is, some of them might be school kids doing research for a report on endangered fish, and a very few are going to be people interested in buying caviar, and of those even fewer will be people willing to buy caviar online. Now, as we keep looking through our list, what we notice is that there are some thematic groups emerging. For instance, there are specific types of caviar: osetra, beluga, & sevruga. We also see that there are people looking for "caviar price," "caviar cost," and "best caviar." These people are likely to be buyers. Then we've got "buy caviar online" and "caviar online." Those two are pure gold. People looking for exactly what we sell. The volume isn't great, but they're likely to convert at a VERY high rate. They deserve their own AdGroup without a doubt.
B2B Keyword Research Tip
Now, let's go a little deeper with this, and here's where this post is especially relevant for B2B. Because if you dig deeper into that list of terms Google suggested, you'll find some other very low volume keywords, keywords you might not even catch your eye if you didn't know what you were looking for. Terms like "caviar supplier" and "caviar distributor." What if, in addition to running your caviar ecommerce store, you were also a caviar supplier and/or distributor? These keywords, even though they are very low volume, would be worth much, much more in revenue. While people searching for "buy caviar" and "buy caviar online" may just be looking for a gift basket or a one-off purchase, people searching for suppliers and distributors are looking to develop a relationship, and buy several ounces of the czar's delight every month. That's some serious lifetime customer value. And the interesting thing about these incredibly high ROI keyword is that they're often not competitive at all when it comes to SEO. Very few people are targeting these keywords, because very few people have the means to profit from them.
Running the Campaign
We're ready to run the campaign right? WRONG! Do you have goal tracking setup? Will your tracking capture EVERY lead? B2B leads come in mostly by phone, especially for the high ROI keywords. Are you going to submit a contact form to ask about buying a forklift? Probably not. That's why you need to make sure you have air-tight conversion tracking. Every lead must be counted, or you might not even know you have a successful campaign on your hands. Here's a post by Anna about
call tracking options. Use it, or you're leaving money on the table. Once you have your conversion tracking setup, it's time to start running that campaign. Here's a little trick: make sure you have first page bids for all of your keywords, because this will be the way you get traffic numbers for the keywords you've selected. If you let yourself fall to the 2nd page that impression data won't mean anything. As a bonus, running the bids high will help you develop a better quality score early in the campaign, which will ultimately lower the bid required for a high position. Now you can start running your campaign. Maybe you're already wondering: how do I know when to stop? When is the test over? And this is where some statistics come in. This is also where good PPC Managers are separated from mediocre PPC managers, because the manager has to understand the business to answer this question effectively, and mediocre PPC managers are content to just throw up some campaigns and run traffic for as long as their clients will sign the check without ever wondering if the campaign is profitable.
How to Test a PPC Campaign: Some Crucial Statistics
If you plan on continuing the campaign (which you should, because why wouldn't you if it becomes profitable), then the criterion you need to satisfy is proof of ROI, either positive or negative. You need to figure out how much a lead/sale is worth to you, that is, what the value of the conversion is. For a product, this is the margin, for a lead, it's your lifetime customer/client value multilied by the likelihood that sales will be able to close the lead. Once you have this, you know how much you can pay per sale/lead and still be in the black. Now here's where the statistics come in. You need to calculate the lower bound on your conversion rate so you can calculate the upper bound on the cost per lead. When I say upper bound, what I really mean is the upper bound of the 95% confidence interval around your observed cost per lead. In plain english: you can be 95% sure that your true cost per lead is less than this number. How do you calculate that? There's a nice overview
right here. Maybe I'll get around to writing my own guide at some point. Now, what you want is an observed conversion rate that gets you a profitable cost/lead along with an upper bound on the cost/lead with which you can still be profitable. At this point, you can stop testing and know that you have a winning campaign: dial up the ad spend and laugh all the way to the bank. On the other hand, maybe you have a cost per conversion above your threshold, and a lower bound that's also above your threshold: time to hit pause on your campaign and see if you can do some conversion rate optimization (CRO), or maybe just scrap the keyword altogether if the situation looks bad enough. After running dozens of campaigns, one develops a sense for what will convert, but the results can still be quite surprising. In any case, the point is that without the PPC campaign, you might look at those initial keywords, get all excited about ranking for "osetra caviar," and spend five figures getting to the front page over the course of a year, only to discover that it really doesn't result in much of a revenue increase. However, if you had run a campaign, you would have figured out within a month that "osetra caviar" was probably waste of your time. What you really want to be ranking for is "buy caviar" and "buy caviar online." You'd also have figured out that "beluga caviar" converts pretty darn well. Why does "beluga caviar" convert so much better than "osetra caviar?" That requires more digging than my superficial example will allow: you might discover that "osetra caviar" queries are largely informational, or that there was a super popular novel recently released in which someone named "osetra caviar" was a central character. It's anyone's guess. The important thing is that you KNOW which one converts better, and you can target the winning keyword with your SEO campaign instead of wasting your money on a query that won't generate sales. So to conclude, now that you have some great data about how well your keywords are converting, you can move forward with an informed SEO Campaign. Of course, to figure out what it will take to rank for those keywords, you'll have to research the competition, which is what I'll be talking about next time. Meanwhile, let me know if you have any questions. I'd love to hear from you in the comments below, or
via email.
