Keyword Research - SES Travel Conference

Mary Bowling | 8 August 2007 |

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Research for the Travel Sector

This valuable session solidified my belief that everything SEO and SEM is founded on excellent keyword research - design, URLs, optimization, ppc’s, content, press releases, articles, etc. The takeaway was: Do not skimp on keyword research and do not just do it once and think you’re finished. It’s an ongoing process that should be continually refined.

Tips from the panelists, Christine Churchill of Key Relevance, Jorie Hutchins of ICrossing and moderator Carrie Hill of Blizzard:

Finding Keywords

Look at your tracker and log files to see which terms are really getting people to your pages. Then, figure out how to leverage these.
Place an on-site search box on your site. Then look at your log files to see what people are looking for once they land on your site. This will clue you in as to what kind of content you should create to capture these searchers.
Check out your competitors and learn from what they are doing. What are they optimizing for? What ppc terms are they bidding on? What is their link reputation?

Tools

The Yahoo keyword tool has not been updated since January 2007.
Keyword Discovery shows seasonal search volume.
Vivisimo is a clustering search engine where you can keep drilling down to find more and more terms.
Check out cool MSN tools, like Keyword Group Detection and Seasonal Keyword Forecast, in beta at adCenter Labs.

Stats

In travel, consumers average 10 queries before buying.
Half of these queries occur 30-90 days before booking, so you need to know which keywords are important in all stages of the buying cycle.
Good organic ranking coupled with a ppc presence results in more clicks, more time spent on the site, and more conversions.
Test data reveals that you should NOT lower your ppc bids if you rank well organically for the same terms.
Testing also shows that when you have a good ppc and organic appearance for the same term, about two out of every three searchers will click on the organic listing.

The CEO List

We’ve all had clients who believe marketing efforts should be directed at a list of keywords that are not arrived at through research, but rather through some other means, usually with an emotional basis. Hutchins brought knowing chuckles from nearly everyone in the audience when she tagged this as the “CEO List”.

Hutchins recommends placing these terms in their own campaigns, so that their effectiveness - or lack of effectiveness - can be tracked and measured separately. Great tip!