Targeting Non-Exact Keywords
In any case, it loses some of that fine control. That's very frustrating for PPC folks, but it can also be frustrating for us SEO folks. Now, we honestly don't know. We don't have data. It'll be pretty interesting to see whether in September this changes. If you go to Google's Keyword Planner today inside of AdWords -- which is free by the way, you just need to sign in with a Google account -- you can do a search term like "fish sauce" and it'll return a bunch of things. We did a search for fish sauce, and it returned for me things like fish sauce, average monthly searches 22,200, competition low. This is not competition for SEO, by the way.
Potentially, it means more noise in these keyword research numbers. That noise could come from the inclusion of more close variance in the data. We'll see how that happens. That potentially muddies the research and prioritization process for us. It might be the case that this is already happening though.
Tips
There are a few things we can do. We're not powerless. We do have some ability to influence this. First off, any time you're doing keyword research we now suggest that you just can't rely on AdWords alone. It's not good enough. You've got to be using at the very least something like Google Suggest.
1. Google Suggest
These were not things that we got on our suggested list. Granted, we didn't go through all 800 or so suggested keywords, but a few of these were very different from what we saw over here. We think AdWords tends to be very focused on commercial intent terms, things that they know people are trying to buy or do some sort of commercial activity around. So it is valuable for advertisers. A lot of this is more informational searches, which is huge for content marketers, huge for bloggers, big for anyone who's doing SEO to try and attract awareness, brand attention, links to their site, those kinds of things. So you can't ignore these keywords.
It's not always perfect, by the way. Sometimes they over geo modify, or people in your search area are searching a little differently from how the rest of the world is searching, whatever the case may be. There are a lot of temporal factors going on here. So if all of a sudden there's a fish sauce food truck that opens up in Seattle, that might get super popular in the search terms even though it's not very popular anywhere else.
2. Google Analytics/Adwords
A second thing you can do is follow up directly inside of your Google Analytics or AdWords to see which specific, unique exact terms sent traffic and how that performed. Unlike organic search, where Google's taken away 95%, 97% of all keyword referral data, that referral data does still exist in GA and in AdWords. It doesn't appear that this change will mean that Google will take sauces for fish and report it as fish sauce in your campaign. It looks like they'll still be reporting the actual keyword that sent traffic, and so you can infer from that this prioritization importance process.
3. Search Engine Referrals
Approximately 5% of Google's keyword data is still being reported. You can use those referrals to help infer relative quantities and relative performance on a per keyword basis at least for your most important keywords. For stuff in the long tail and the chunky middle, it's going to be harder, maybe even impossible in the long tail. But at the head of the demand curve at least you can say, "Yes, Thai fish sauce doesn't perform quite as well as Vietnamese fish sauce for us. It turns out Vietnamese fish sauce really gets us the great quality traffic that we're looking for. We'll focus on that one first."
4. Keyword Targeting
We have to almost become more like Google Hummingbird, the update, around how we do keyword and intent matching, a little less towards the exact phrase, exact match keyword targeting, and a little more towards the intent of the searcher and all of their potential interests and intent around that. We need to serve a wider set of potential search visitors with the actual content on our pages.
That's going to be a challenge too. But basically we can say, "Hey, how can we group this stuff into content for SEO that's going to make for a meaningful, useful searcher experience and potentially has that ability to rank for all of these different combinations of terms that are closely aligned in intent?" That's kind of where we're going broadly with search, keywords, and keyword research and targeting.
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