There is more to keyword research than just search volume and researching competitors. It is key to understand your customer base and their search behavior.  For example, there are many tools such as Google Insights and Google Trends that can help you better understand what’s trending and how searchers find your product or service. It may also be beneficial to conduct a survey to gain insight into how your customer makes a purchase decision.

As you are conducting keyword research and trying to find the best opportunities, there are some factors to consider when planning for long term success.  A search marketing strategy, like any business strategy should have both long and short term goals.  While every search marketing strategy should focus on profitability, there are other factors that help build the credibility of your brand. These factors are difficult to measure; however, if you consider the principles I’ve outlined below and take some time to better understand your consumer; it will greatly affect the results of your search marketing efforts.

Outlined here are the stages of the consumer research process when making a purchase decision.  The time from beginning to end of the cycle can vary greatly depending on the price and technicality of the product or service.

Awareness of a Need

This is the beginning of every purchase decision and can be stimulated by a need or want.  It could be as basic as being hungry and recognizing the need for food or could be created by an advertisement for the iPhone 4s.

Information Search

In this stage of the buyer decision process, it’s vital that your brand is at the forefront of your consumer’s minds, or at the forefront of where they will seek information (search engines).  This is the stage where consumers are doing the majority of their research. For example, if you are in the market to buy a point and shoot camera, you may conduct a general search for point and shoot cameras.  Conducting this search will help you in the information search phase and allow you to determine which brand of camera and what features are available.

Depending on your business and the resources available to you, you will want to develop a strategy to be visible for relevant search terms. This may include targeting keywords that will not generate a sale on the first visit.  Not only is it important to be visible for the keyword but it’s also important to understand where your customers go for information through searching Google or visiting review sites.

Evaluating Alternatives

At this stage your consumers are finished feeling out the market and have developed a consideration set.  Depending on the product and the industry, most consumers have a consideration set of about 3-5 different brands or products.

Purchase Decision 

Most SEO strategies try to catch consumers at this stage of the purchase process, as this represents the lowest hanging fruit.  However, if your business has not done due diligence up to this point, your brand or product will not be in the consideration set, therefore potentially ruining your chances of making a sale. To this point, if your brand has reached your consumer at each stage of the decision process your chances of making a sale are much higher.

Post Purchase 

At this stage of the decision process, you have the opportunity to continue your relationship with your customer. This is where your customers determine their satisfaction level of your product or service.  Here you have the opportunity to encourage your customers to write reviews on your business and turn them into repeat customers.  It is much easier to keep a customer than acquire a new one.

Once you’ve thought through the consumer research process for your business, it will help you better conduct keyword research, and help you determine the strategic moves you need to make to be visible to your consumer.  All stages of the purchase decision process are important, and it’s vital to have a strategy surrounding each stage of the process.  The majority of SEO strategies focus on the purchase decision phase, by the time the consumer is in that stage it may be too late. Your search marketing strategy can incorporate anything from retargeting, utilizing pay per click services, SEO or a combination.

As you can see, search marketing presents opportunities in all stages of the buying process. To have the most effective search marketing strategy that will lead to increased brand awareness and long term success of your business, it is advantageous to incorporate a wide range of keywords as well as other elements of search marketing that work best for your business.

"What's the best WordPress SEO plugin?"

I'm asked that question all the time, and recently took part in a debate discussing which plugin is best. I decided to draft a features list comparing the top three most downloaded SEO plugins to get a better picture of what each plugin has to offer, et voilà!

I'll be comparing and contrasting features of the All in one SEO Pack, vs WordPress SEO by Yoast, vs Platinum SEO. To be fair, there is no loser among the three because each plugin is impressive and will make your WordPress site much more search engine friendly. I'll talk about which plugin is my favorite in the conclusion, so you can review the features bias-free, and implement whichever plugin matches your specific set of needs.

If you know a developer – or anyone that would like their WordPress site to rank well in search engines – please help them out by sharing this review so that these plugins don't go unused. 

The plugins:

All in One SEO Pack
Downloads: 9,570,544
Author: Michael Torbert
Plugin page

WordPress SEO by Yoast
Downloads: 761,035
Author: Joost de Valk
Plugin Page

Platinum SEO Pack
Downloads: 656,205
Author: Techblissonline Dot Com (Rajesh)
Plugin Page

Honorable mention plugin: I can't leave out the oldie-but-still-goodie, SEO Ultimate.

Table of Contents

1. Setup and First Appearances
2. Plugin Features
3. Migration/Import/Export
4. Page-Level SEO Controls
5. XML Sitemaps
6. Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and Open Graph Schema

1. Setup and First Appearances

2. Plugin Features

3. Migration/Import/Export

4. Page-Level SEO Controls

5. XML Sitemaps

6. Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and Open Graph Schema

There you have it! I'll repeat myself in saying that all three plugins are fantastic and one of these three plugins should be active on every WordPress installation (that is intended to appear in search engines). With that being said, I'm a huge fan of Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin. It is by far the most complete and has the best looking user interface. I'm certain that it's only in second place in terms of downloads because it hasn't been around as long — but just give it some time.

The web is comprised of information; or content. Every web page online is a living document of information that contains a specific piece of information with an intended purpose. Search engines crawl and index pages that are unique and provide value to their visitors. For example: a publisher writes content for a user (or audience) and users are often searching to solve a problem or answer a question.

Content comes in many forms including text, audio, video, images, and other formats. This is ever changing and requires a little initiative to produce content in the format users are expecting. Music videos are a perfect opportunity to reach your audience in video format because you’ve already produced that content. Detailed instruction manuals may be delivered via PDF or a web page with a Flash embed to interact with while building something.

Search engines have been providing multiple forms of content for the last few years (particularly Google) through universal search engine results pages (SERPs) that include links to other web pages, videos, news results, blog posts, PDF files, images, retail store information (Google Places), shopping for products online, etc.

Content is produced for many reasons including:

• Introducing concepts
• Providing messaging to engage customers
• Associating your content with other like content on the web

For example: a sporting goods store should write content that discusses sporting goods products (baseball bats & gloves) vs. information that discusses software (Windows/Mac & minimum computer requirements).

This is important to improve rankings and visibility online because you begin to look like other sporting goods stores online and the search engines use this information to segment what pages, blogs, news, videos, etc. to deliver to their users when they’re searching for answers or solutions to their problems.

The great thing about creating content is that it’s completely within your control. You know your products and audience, you have pictures or video, product information, marketing messaging, etc. that can be compiled into an informative piece of content. You can also create sales content, support and customer service content, knowledge bases, forums, blogs, etc. This is critical to engage further with your audience and create an active site that search engines will crawl and index for their users.

Take this opportunity to make yourself attractive for incoming links and increase the indexability of your pages. Search engines will crawl your site more frequently, your chances of ranking higher will increase, click-thru rates will improve, your audience will engage further with your brand, and you’ll be building a resource online that will drive additional visitors and potential customers.

A few examples of how to create content include:

• Writing content on your blog, product, or other web pages
• Publish white papers or ebooks for download
• Create videos or podcasts to engage your audience
• Publish slidedecks of higher level concepts
• Upload detailed schematics in PDF form or with a link to interactive portions of your site
• Launch a contest whereby the winner(s) receive free product

For more SEO tips, check out the SEO.com YouTube Channel

A 404 page shows on a user’s screen when they reach a page that doesn’t exist on the website. This can happen when they reach a page that was deleted, clicking a broken link, or typing the wrong URL.

More than likely you’ve encountered a few humerous 404 pages in your web surfing days, but did you know a good 404 page is much more than just a placeholder?

SEO best practices suggest your site’s 404 page should be a custom page to help visitors find the info they are looking for.

According to Google’s Webmaster Tools help section, the page should:

• Advise visitors that the page they were searching for isn’t found.
• Look the same as the rest of the site, and include a link to the home page.
• Include a search box to allow the visitor to narrow their search for the page they’re looking for.
• Show a list of recommended pages or posts.

Check with your hosting provider for recommendations on how to display the 404 page properly.

SEO and PPC should be considered children of the same parent: search marketing. Their strategies should be considered together for best results.

There is some debate in the industry if running PPC and SEO can cause cannibalization of traffic; and there have been studies suggest both a positive and a negative result. You should, therefore, monitor both initiatives closely to prevent cannibalization if present.

There are some great benefits however, including:

• Shared keyword data. Data from your PPC campaigns can help you identify your best converting keywords which can be applied to your overall strategy.
• Informed content strategy. As with keyword data, converting content from PPC may also convert well for your SEO campaign.
• More comprehensive ecommerce data. Ecommerce landing pages can also be used in your PPC campaign to move visitors directly the page where they can purchase a product.

Again, if you do run PPC and SEO programs together, monitor them closely to assure positive results from both. Using both programs can enable you to share data between campaigns making both more effective.

Hi SEO.com followers,  My name is Ty Kilgore and today I’m going to be answering the question;  How do I Rank in Local Search or how do I rank in maps? Local SEO is that something that has really taken off in the last year to year in a half.  The search engines are putting more emphasis on the users to fill out the information than ever before. So I am going to be talking about 5 different things that you can do to help you to rank in Local SEO.

1. First thing is that you want to make sure that if you want to show up for localized terms that you have a business address and phone number that is local. For instance if I wanted to show up for terms in Lawrenceville, Georgia I would need to make sure that my business was located in Lawrenceville, Georgia and that I also had a phone number that was local to the area.
2. Next, you will want to build out citations.  You can build these citations on the many different popular citations sites out there. For example:

• Yelp
• CitySearch
• Yellow Book
• Insider Pages
• Super Pages

And the list goes on. Essentially what you want to do is make sure that you have local citations built out and that you have all the correct information for your business listed there.

3. The third thing that you want to do is claim you local business on Google Places or Bing. An owner verified listing will rank higher than a non owner verified listing so it’s important that you claim that listing.  To verify the listing you will need to fill out the proper information on Google or Bing using information they will send you by phone or mail to confirm that you own that place.
4. The fourth bullet point that I’ll talk about is link building. You want to link build especially to the local listings on Google or Bing so that you have different things that are pointing back to that actual page.
5. The fifth thing that I’ll talk about is getting reviews. We live in an age where everybody wants to find out what everyone else thought about a product or service and nowhere is that more important than in local search.  If you have customers that are satisfied and enjoy your product encourage them to go online to fill out a review about their experience that will also help people that come to your site to learn more about what other people think.

Hopefully these five things will help you in your local SEO marketing campaign.

Bing Webmasters Tools are a set of tools made available to a site’s webmaster by Bing, allowing you to see how Bing sees your website.

Bing Webmaster Tools provides you access to the following data:

1. How often Bing has crawled your site
2. Problems Bing found while crawling your site such as
   1. Malware found on your site
   2. 404 errors
   3. How many 302 and 301 redirects are in place
3. How many pages on your site Bing has indexed
4. How many links Bing has found going to your site
5. How much traffic Bing is sending to your site
6. What keywords are bringing traffic to your site from the search engines.

Bing Webmaster Tools also allows you to submit your xml sitemap so Bing can crawl your site more efficiently and effectively.

A deep link is when you link to a page on the site other than the site’s home page. For example, Google.com is the homepage of Google. Linking to Google.com/trends would be a deep link. If you see text after a / on a website, like in the case of Google.com/trends, you are looking at a deep link. For more SEO tips, check out SEO.com’s YouTube channel.

How do I write SEO Friendly Content?

1. The first step is to use a catchy title and use the keyword in the title. Make someone want to read the article.
2. The second thing is use subheadings in your articles. Include relevant keywords in the subheadings, also known as an H2 or H3 tag.
3. The third thing is that you want a minimum of 300 words of content on the page or article that you are working on.
4. The fourth thing is to include the keyword a few times in the beginning of the article. Don’t keyword stuff or create spammy content.
5. The very last thing is to use synonyms or related phrases in your content. For example, if you are a photographer, use synonyms such as family pictures or family portraits to change up the keywords on your page.

These five tips are a great way to get started with your web content strategy. Improved content on your site can help you improve your rankings.

Google loves original content.  Original content is something that you wrote that you did not pull from any other source.  There are a number of places where good content can be added to a site.  Some options include:

• Blog posts
• Reviews
• Content on site
• Text on pages of site

What kinds of content do not provide value?

Doorway pages are pages that are created specifically for the search engines in order to get rankings.  Once the user has clicked through the search results, they are brought to a different page on the site.

Auto-generated content is content that has been created automatically and stuffed with keywords.  This content is generally useless to readers and discounted by the search engines.

Content scraping, or taking content from another source and pasting it on your site, does not qualify as original content.  Developing quality, user friendly content is the only way to achieve original content.