google

Google has come out with a new, beta version of their keyword research tool that allows users to do keyword research on mobile and local based searches.

To access the new tool, visit the old keyword research tool (located at https://adwords.google.ca/select/KeywordToolExternal) and click the link at the top of the page, shown here:

The new tool has a cleaner interface than the old keyword tool and comes with some added benefits:

1. You can now easily do research on mobile searches only. Before this option as a nicely kept “secret” only available with the internal Adwords keyword tool. This means you can tell what people are searching for using mobile phones in your area. As you may or may not be aware, the number of people on the planet who use mobile phones is in the range of 50% of the world’s population- far, far larger than the number of people who access the web right now from desktop computers. In time, mobile use of the web will likely dwarf all other forms of web access so getting a handle on what terms and phrases your customers are searching for on their mobiles is going to be a necessity as a web marketer/business owner.

To conduct a mobile keyword search only, click Advanced options and then check off the mobile box as seen below.

*click to enlarge

2. You can more accurately target your own country or a specific country from a list of countries Google provides data for. This is helpful for a number of reasons and the most obvious one to me is that using the old tool, Google told us the difference between local searches and global monthly searches but it never specified what local meant! It was impossible to tell if local meant Vancouver, or North America etc. Now, we can hone in on one of several different countries and get more targeted results. This is important for local and national advertisers alike.

Here’s a snapshot of the new tool’s interface with some keyword data populated:

*click to enlarge.

3. The final benefit I can see to this tool at first glance is your ability to add in useful metrics like approximate cost per click, competition levels, and your ad share or the percentage of time your ads are shown compared to total number of ads being shown (available if you’re logged into Adwords).

So all in all I like the new look.

There is one serious drawback that I didn’t see a resolution for at first glance, the old keyword tool separates keywords into groups for you which is very handy when setting up Adwords accounts or analyzing a site to see what Google understands it is all about. If that feature’s available in this version I missed it at first glance. If not, I’ll continue using the old tool for now.

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It’s been confirmed. Bing outdid Google today by updating it’s background to a shot of Science World in Vancouver and outplayed Google in the race to have the coolest Olympics Logo…..or so the chatter on Twitter suggested this morning.

What’s your pick?

Also: if you need a laugh, check out Arnold carrying the Olympic torch today in Stanley Park.

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As vast and far reaching as Google’s ad network is I’ve decided to commit more time and energy to learning the ins and outs of generating traffic beyond Google, and in large part beyond search engines in general.

Learning the ins and outs of Google’s content network and improving the results one can achieve with Adwords are still important. But my gut feeling is that advertisers and marketers who, in the coming years, learn to generate and profit from traffic outside of Google’s domain are going to be more successful than those who do not.

Just like Microsoft in its early days, Google has experienced tremendous growth over the past 10 years. However, there’s a growing discontent building, at least in the web marketing industry, with the power Google now wields and its ability to completely kill off, shut down and pretty much put out of business those marketers who it deems as not fitting its interests.

Any time a person, company or country rises to a place of dominance, detractors spring up; it’s a given. People have been crying foul for some time about Google’s business practices and its philosophy of doing no evil is admittedly suspect (I mean why not focus on “doing good” instead?). Detractors and the doubtful aside (of which I am one…I mean I use a lot of Google’s services and only recently realized that if they closed my account on a whim, it would be hugely detrimental to my business) it just makes sense to diversify your traffic sources if you have the means to do so.

So what does that look like?

For one, there are only three ways of getting traffic to a website that I know of:

1. Direct type ins, where people type in your domain name into their browsers. (Typically 10-15% of a sites traffic coming from direct type ins would not be uncommon. In special cases, where a marketer owns a domain such as fish.com or money.com, direct type ins might be the sole means of traffic. How powerful!)
2. Paid advertising: Pay-Per-Click is by and far the method of paid advertising most of us are familiar with. This includes banner advertising and the increasingly popular interactive ads we see on our favorite news sites.
3. Traffic from links: this includes links from Google. Yes, Google does link to your site remember? It links to you in its search results! We don’t tend to think of traffic from search engines like this, we tend to classify it as it’s own type of traffic: search traffic (and links from other websites are generally known as referrals). But really, traffic from search engines boils down to getting traffic from links.

To simplify things even further, I’ll go as far as saying there are only two ways to get people to a website:

You can pay for it or you can work (hard) for it. Plain and simple.

Search engines continue to play a major role in directing traffic to websites for the time being. Social media and social networks are also rapidly growing in their influence and ability to drive targeted traffic to sites. Then there’s the opportunity the mobile web presents.

For my purposes here though, my primary interest is in buying traffic.

Some things I will be looking at:

• Ad networks other than those offered by Google, Yahoo and Bing
• Link brokers
• Affiliate networks
• And others

Really I’m just getting started in my research and already I’ve been digging up all sorts of opportunities to drive traffic, leads and sales by other means than though Google.

The web is a big place. Moving ahead into 2010, keep your eyes open for new ways of bringing people to your site and generating the results you’re after. There’s a ton of opportunity out there.

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Google launched Google Social Search today as part of Google Labs.

Social search is an experiment whereby Google shows you relevant content from your social network(s) inside its search results. To sign up for this experiment, head over to Google Labs and click the “Join this experiment” button.

So what does this mean for you?

Well, for one, it’s another indication of the importance of real time search or our ability to do a search for something and come up with the latest, up to the second information on a given topic. No doubt services like Twitter and Facebook have convinced Google that more and more people want information that’s as timely as possible and this is an effort on their part to give this to people inside their search results.

The takeaway is that it’s going to become more and more important for your business to be active in social networks and in posting content to your company blog for example. The more content you produce, the more often you do it, the more likely your chances will be of showing up at the right time when someone’s looking for you.

Stay tuned for more updates on social search and real time search as this is a fascinating and relatively new area / concept that will likely have huge impacts on SEO and online marketing in general in the months to come.

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