First Steps.

For many marketers, especially in B2B, the process of website optimization remains a bit mysterious due to lack of familiarity, although most people are familiar with the value of paid search advertising vehicles like Google AdWords.

Website optimization has become very mainstream. The New York Times is doing it. So is Home Depot and Acme Markets. Local restaurants are doing it. It has become one of the main marketing tools for many large B2C corporations and in a smaller percentage of B2B companies, depending on their markets and how/what they sell, and to an extent how their customers buy. But many other smaller companies especially in B2B and retail stores often wonder what value they can achieve via website optimization. Here are a few quick steps for making that determination.

Step 1: How Frequently Are People Searching For Your Products?

Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and enter your main product term, just one term for now. Say it is "widgets" (yes, there are really widgets).



Insider Tip #1: Only half the searches turn into click, so divide the results by two.

Insider Tip #2: A top ranking may only get 20% of the clickthroughs.

So here are the "widget" traffic results:


You can see how often people are searching for your search term or phrase in the two columns of numbers at the bottom of the screen. The Local search Column will generally come up with data for the US (The US setting can be changed to another country in the top red box I added to highlight it), and the Global Search Volume will present data for the rest of the world. These results show a "broad match" how often people search using the words in your search term, in any order and in any combination with other words. To get more specific, Select the drop down from the bottom red box and you can select "Phrase" (how often the terms show up with the words in the same exact order, but possibly in combination with other words) or "Exact" How often people used that exact term in the order entered without any other words.

Now select Choose Column to Display (the third red box), select "Show All", and you will see data for monthly frequency of usage and some information related to running paid listings on Google, which is irrelevant for our purposes.

If your search term in related to two industries, it is possible to eliminate some of the overlap using the second red box, filter my results to eliminate some of the terms. So take a look at the data that matches your market area. Look at the broad match or phrase match for your main term and how it compares to the exact match. If the exact match is much lower, then there must be lots of traffic to subcategory terms.

Remember a top listing may get 20% of the traffic and only half the searches become clicks, so a top ranking may only get a total of 10% of the clicks. On the plus side, a sizeable percentage of the searches Google gets, they have never gotten before. If all widget-type searches are valid in your industry, then the broad match for the main term shows the overall potential in the market.

Note: a volume result of "-1" means either that the data frequency is lower than 12 or that Google has not collected/sorted all the data. Oftentimes they are slower at collecting the local (US) volume so it shows up as "-1" so you can get a better feel using the global volume and figuring that the local is some amount lower.

Note: No internet data is carved in stone. If some datapoint looks funny, there is a good chance that it is funny. Go to Yahoo or Bing to see the data. Show more columns to see the history. Compare exact and broad match.

Note: Google does not like to give up all the data in the world to every passerby. If there is a subcategory term you don't see, search for it specifically. Take lower level terms and enter them into Google. Search for terms both with the "Use synonym" box checked and unchecked and download them both and sort. You will see more terms appear, sometimes the most popular subcategories don't show right away since Google is trying to drive traffic to all categories and does not want everyone competing for the same terms.

Next month: Step 2: Competition for your search terms.