Multilingual SEO - #seopodcast 124

Episode37 min2011-11-22

Your Friendly Neighborhood Top Position Snatchers discuss International and Multilingual SEO. Specifically we discuss Spanish and SEO from Puerto Rico.

Cover art for Multilingual SEO - #seopodcast 124
Key takeaways
the low-quality score always equals a higher cost per click

About this episode

Your Friendly Neighborhood Top Position Snatchers discuss International and Multilingual SEO. Specifically we discuss Spanish and SEO from Puerto Rico. We also discuss the new value Google has placed on High Landing Page Quality for PPC campaigns. The most popular PPC Houston podcast on iTunes. E-Webstyle provides Houston SEO .

Questions this episode answers

How does Google AdWords quality score affect cost per click?

A low quality score always equals a higher cost per click. Google rewards ads whose landing pages are relevant to the search term with better placement and lower costs. Optimizing the landing page with matching content, URLs, images, and H1 tags improves quality score and brings cost per click down.

Should you bid on paid search keywords you already rank for organically?

The hosts debate this and lean toward keeping bids if the budget allows, reasoning that two positions on a page are better than one. If budget is tight, shift spend toward keywords where organic rankings are weak and pause bids on terms already ranking well organically.

How can site search data improve SEO and PPC keyword strategy?

E-commerce and other sites with internal site search can query that data from the back end to see exactly what visitors are searching for after landing on the site. Those real-user queries can then be used as keyword targets for both SEO optimization and paid search bidding.

How should a multilingual website decide which language versions to maintain?

Pull Google Analytics reports filtered by language folder, such as the AR folder for Arabic pages, to see page views and the countries generating that traffic. That data lets site owners make cost-based decisions about whether to continue paying for professional translation of each language.

In their words

the low-quality score always equals a higher cost per click. That's kind of how it works. And so, instead, if your phrase is water heater repair, your landing page, URL should be water heater repair. You should have water heater repair content on this page.

Host

if you're bidding on a phrase and it's working and it's converting into, you know, paid clients or leads or whatever your, whatever your, you know, action is, optimize for that phrase.

Guest

4,000 impressions is a better number to go with than your decision making over the 30,000 searches that seem to be available.

Guest
Terms defined in this episode
Quality Score
A Google AdWords metric that reflects the relevance of an ad, keyword, and landing page. A low quality score raises cost per click and can cause ads to rarely be shown.
Landing Page Quality
A measure Google uses in AdWords to assess whether a landing page is relevant to the keyword and ad. Higher quality earns a boost in the ad auction and lower cost per click.
Cannibalization
In paid search, bidding on keywords for which you already rank organically on the first page, raising the question of whether paid spend duplicates free organic traffic.
Content Gap Analysis
Matching PPC keyword data against targeted SEO keywords to find phrases that rank poorly or not at all organically, then focusing resources on closing that gap.
Read the full transcript (6,330 words · 32 min read)

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Yeah, my name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am a Charles Bushel Internet Marketing Specialist. Yes, we were listening to a podcast the other day, and he's like, I'm your internet marketing person. Insert generic term for human body. You are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. You may notice it if you're watching. We believe that the video quality should be significantly better, and the camera is significantly closer. It's basically in our face right now. So you may even get some spittle on the camera today. I don't know if that would be cool or gross. Yeah, somewhere in between. By the way, we usually don't do visual stuff on our podcast because this really does get turned into audio for iTunes. You will notice that there is a visual item. It's in reference to a big event this week, and anybody who gets the reference, hit us up on Facebook. Did I say Facebook? You did say Facebook. I did Facebook. You can hit our Facebook page, facebook.com slash eWebStyle. Twitter.com slash eWebStyle. YouTube.com slash eWebStyle. Podcast at e-webStyle.com. I'm too good. You didn't give me no more with that, Dad. Let's knock out my phone. I'm too good. It's a Friday. This is podcast number 124. As always, we like to mention a tip from the previous podcast. And really, last podcast was answering a really long email. Go back, and it had some great real-world answers to real-world SEO questions and problems. So, the tip was, for the keywords that you target and that receive the most traffic, you must know to which page Google sends that traffic. And then, we would say, go one step further and, you know, do Civo, potentially send it in for a Civo analysis. By the way, last night, I got our website, Civo Analysis Podcast. One of them is up and live. It's actually on iTunes. I have no idea how to find it. I was too late. I didn't even

see if I could find it on iTunes or anything. So, if you know how to get to it, go find it. You can actually go to our YouTube page, which we already mentioned, and there you can find a bunch of our website, Civo Analysis Analysis. Civo Analysis. Yeah. And if you know one, while we're on that subject, you know, you got a website, you're already watching this podcast because you probably need some help with it, feel free. You-WebStyle.com, right column, fill out the website analysis request, and I will personally, or Chris, do that analysis for you. Yeah. And then, you'll get it. If you don't want it posted live, then just let us know. We're happy to put it. And what we typically do is we put a private so anybody who has the link does have access to it. We've done that, actually, for one of our clients that we'll be mentioning today, I think. Yeah. Um, yeah. Product placement free? Yeah. Oh, here, you want to... Does that make you happy, too? Um... Chris got, like, three drinks. Coffee! Coffee back. Oh, well, two drinks. Today. Yeah. Sometimes it's three. Um, so, no review on iTunes. And you know what that normally means? The teardrop tattoo. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fortunately, for me, I'm excited because Stoked SEO... What's up, Stoked? I know you like it, man. You must look. Thank you so much. Punch in the face. And punch... We're going to take this hammer and punch you in the face. That's just off the charts, uh, Happy. Um, he was tweeting, like, every couple of hours about how many podcasts he had actually listened. He's been listening to our podcast for... It's like a marathon. He's like, uh, like, uh, like, you know, he's got three or four more, he'd be caught up. Totally caught up. Um, and it gave us an idea. We're going to actually start encouraging you. If you're watching this, hey, tweet. What are you learning now? Tweet that we're talking about Stoked SEO. Tweet something. Uh,

if you're sitting at your desk and listening to this, it's probably a couple weeks later. Uh, if you're at your desk, go ahead and pull up your Twitter account and tweet, uh, and use... What should we do? We should use, like... Pound SEO Podcast and the number that you're watching. There you go. For example, if you follow us on Twitter right now, you would have seen my latest tweet that said SEO Podcast 124, um, with the hashtag. So, yeah, show us that love. That'll be awesome. Um, and we also had, uh, an interaction on... That sounds so, like, eh. We had interaction on Facebook. Interaction number 195. Um, it's, uh, hey, guys, I love your podcast. Amazing. Currently in catching up on old podcasts. Currently am catching up on old podcasts. And learning more stuff to help me in running my business. Cheers. And keep up the good work. Now, I clicked through, and she's actually from Syria, from Damascus. And a good friend of mine, Sam, who was in yesterday, uh, is actually from Damascus originally as well. Uh, so, of course, you know, it's a big country. They probably don't know each other, but, you know, check it out. Uh, and we, I noticed that you used Cheers, so you probably, um, learned your English someplace other than the U.S. And he theorized that you learned it in Canada. So, uh, hit us up. Maybe you learned, um, your English in Canada. Yeah. Hit us up. Give us a link to your site. Let us check it out. I'll show you some links up. Let me not forget that we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, where our mantra is... Don't be a douche. Don't be a douche. They're going to get that position for you. Man, news. News. A lot of news. Yeah, there's news. Um, as we all know, Steve Jobs passed away. And, uh, that was sad. I actually tweeted, I retweeted somebody else's with, like, I don't know the dude, but I'm like, you know, getting a

little emotional reading about that, thinking about all the products he's come up with, thinking about what an amazing life he's lived. And, uh, you know, it's, uh, it's pretty, pretty amazing. Well, Nick was telling me about a video that he watched that Steve did in, like, the 80s where they were talking about, um, touchscreen technology. Well, and you know, he, I mean, people theorize that he stole it. From some Unix developers or some Unix packages. But, you know, the fact of using the mouse and, uh, the way we interact with computers was, at a minimum, spearheaded and brought to market by, by Steve Jobs. I mean, that's, and can you imagine if we were still all DOS code? You know when that nerdy geek guy comes in and starts typing stuff to make things happen on your computer? Imagine if you had to do that in order to create a Word document, in order to put a Facebook post. Um, you know, it just wouldn't be where it, where it is today. Yeah. That would suck. Is, uh, is the AC, could somebody turn the AC on? It's a little warm in here. Um, let's see, what else do I have here? I've got to, oh, iPhone is coming to Sprint. Yeah. We've been on Sprint for a while. And I still use Sprint, love Sprint, have no problems with Sprint. Man, I'm going to stick to Android. Yeah, I think I'm going to stick to Android as well. I'm still debating the iPad, like, um, back and forth. Um, I think I did try to pull up Ustream. So our Ustream podcast does not come up on, on, on, on, on iPad. Which is weird, because I, you know, I know people with the app who can use it fine. And, and there's a Sprint, I mean, there's a, an Android app, right, where you can actually broadcast directly from your 4G or 3G phone, whatever. Um, and, but that's like that one step, you know, I, I'll probably end up with an Android

tablet. Speaking of, how does a $35 Android tablet sound? Like trash. Useless. Um, and actually there's some debate because of the, uh, I think, uh, a conversion of rupees to dollars. One, uh, group reported it at 22 bucks, another at 35. What it is, is Android devices in India for Indian students. So, you know, let me buy a hundred thousand. They're heavily subsidized. They're actually $600. They would be, they would be $600 list price. Um, but they'll be selling them to schools, their own schools, uh, for like 22 or 35 bucks, depending on how you, depending on the rupee exchange rate that particular day. So, I think that's, I think that's pretty cool. One thing I did mention, you know, this is, I think some people forget, you know, they think Steve Jobs is Apple, Apple, Apple. And some of the other things he did were just phenomenal. I don't know if you remember Next Computer. Uh, I remember when I was in college, there was a Next Computer that had a very unique, it was a, a unique... Next Computer? Yeah. And it's capital N, lowercase e, capital XT. Uh, and I'm, I know those letters stand, stood for something, or stand for something. Um, that became Pixar. Hmm. Right? So, you think Steve Jobs' computer on the desktop, and then you're like, Pixar, wait, that's Toy Story. Like, so, intimately involved in, um, you know, the, the animation that we see today. It's, it's, it's, his impact is phenomenal. It's just crazy. Um, all right, news. Geno time limit up. We got an email, and this is going to be really interesting, I think. Um, but I really, in fact, we met. We met with, uh, a potential client, uh, called PlanetSeed.com. PlanetSeed, so it's Slumbergay. Yeah, PlanetSeed is, uh, a not-for-profit funded either entirely or mostly, at a minimum, mostly by Slumbergay. Uh, for those who don't know, Slumbergay is a huge oil field services company. Um, so they would, they would be a competitor to, like, KBR, as an example. Um,

and that website, so that, uh, PlanetSeed, really cool website. Their, their goal, and I gotta get that sentence, their goal is to actually take advantage of the Slumbergay scientific expertise around the world and put that to work in underprivileged or underserved educational communities. Yeah, with the focus on science. I mean, um, I, I think it stood for, um, Slumbergay Excellent, Education Excellence. Educational Economic Development. There we go. Yeah, and so, uh, basically, their whole concept is to, you know, take science and, and put it on the web in different forms and fashions for teachers, for volunteers, for students, and really spread this information globally. So, uh, focusing on children and students in, in very low economic areas, um, who, who maybe can't afford some of the stuff we have here in the states to, uh, improve their education. And so, it's a pretty cool company. They're doing some real nice things over there. And, um, shout out to them for, punch in the face to them for, for contacting us for some help. Yeah. And so, um. And actually, that came from Terry Crosby, one of our podcast listeners. So, Terry Crosby, punch in the face to you. Thank you very much. Punch in the face. In fact, we should, uh, we should talk about that particular client and see how that's going. It was just, we left with a really good, good feeling, right? Because, you know, we're applying our expertise to, uh, a company that's focused on really doing good. They'll actually, they'll, um, people can get, I guess, a good name for it would be like a scholarship where they'll go in and put in a whiteboard technology, pay for internet for two years, and, and actually have Schlumberger employee volunteers go and teach the teachers how to teach the science and, and all the things that are available. It's phenomenal, um, and, and frankly, they need a lot of work, and we're going to, we're excited to be, to be helping them. The reason I say all that is, it's, it's,

it's a global focus. So, they literally have seven languages, and it's not a, uh, aesthetics, oh, it'd be nice to have seven languages in case somebody from a particular language would rather work in their language. That's, that's, that's, that's what's typical. No, this is a necessity. They are actually working with seven different languages and serving, uh, countries where they're seven different languages are spoken. Probably more, uh, but those are kind of the foundation, foundational languages in those countries. Um, I, I say all that because this question is about Spanish. It's about, uh, the foreign language, which is Spanish. Uh, it's actually from, uh, a guy by the name Orlando Mergal. Uh, his website is accuratecommunications.com. He's from Puerto Rico. Um, and he says, as you, as you know, Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory in the Caribbean. And, uh, don't forget this is America. Some people probably don't know that because geography is not our forte. Um, uh, and, and his question is really interesting. He says, let's say that one of his keywords is, and it's, uh, servicios de comunicación relativa. Excuse my Spanish. Uh, and really it's communication services, corporate communication services is how you would translate that into English. Um, and his question is, there's actually an accent over the O in one of the words. And that's actually over, uh, communication has an accent over the last O. And he's, his question is, does he need to focus on the, the word with the accent and the word without the accent if you're searching? And, uh, and if he does, then, you know, does he need to have all three keywords and the keyword tag? And, uh, his final comment was, living in a place with two languages, two cultures, and two flags is hard enough. But having to use three times the amount of keywords is crazy. Um, and the three actually comes from the fact that he's talking, uh, UTF-8, which is an encoding, how you encode, um, some of those accents, standard, and then ISO-8859, which is another

way that you can encode those accents. And, so that's why he ends up with three. And, so I did a little research. You know, some of my, uh, let me, one of the first things that I noticed is actually your website's in English, which is kind of interesting, right? I mean, it's clear you're in Puerto Rico, you're serving, uh, a Spanish clientele, and your website's in English. Now, I mean, uh, we've got a couple of Spanish speakers here at our office, and we know that even though Spanish is their first language, they tend to search in English. Uh, and I think that's typical of, uh, of, of people, at least here in the United States. This is what I was going to say. And that's the key. In the States. Yeah, in the States. And, so, you know, and, you know, Puerto Rico, with a tie to the U.S., I think, uh, I think that's probably why your website's in English. I'm just surprised that you don't also have it in Spanish. Uh, because this question tells me that you're clearly targeting some Spanish, Spanish language. Well, it also indicates to me that, that he's probably have a Spanish version in, in the making process. Yeah, that's probably true. Um, my next comment was, you said, right now, for every keyword phrase that has, has a written access, accent in it, I'm including all three possible versions in my keyword tag. Now, um, I believe what you were saying there is, that's in your meta keyword tag. Yeah, because there isn't a, a, a keyword tag. Right. And, and, we would say in my targeted keyword, to mean on the page, you're saying keyword tag. I think you mean meta keyword tag. Remember, that's almost not important at all. Yeah, as a matter of fact, um, I was looking at Matt's cuts, um, the other day, just kind of, you know, I was actually looking for answers to that question, and, um, and I came across one of his older ones, and he was just

like, yeah, we don't value meta information whatsoever. The only critical piece of meta information we do look at is meta description, so we can pull a snippet from that to show in the search. Is, is title meta, I always get, I always get confused. Title's above meta. It's above meta, yeah. So the meta description is your opportunity in the search and result page to make a good impact. So, my first comment would be, so, so let's, so that's great, we'll address that in a second. So what I did is I actually, I went to Google and I searched your term, um, the whole thing. So again, it's, uh, Servicios de Comunicación Corporativa. I have a hard time with that word, obviously. Yeah, so I'll let you say it. I did that search with the accent over the O, and without the accent over the O, and compared both results. It's actually 40, there's four pages that do, that are not on both. So then I started visiting the pages to try and see, um, specifically, exactly, specifically the one without the accent, because that's actually the incorrect spelling from, I mean, it's incorrect in English and in Spanish, because in Spanish it's supposed to have the accent, and the only thing I really found, by the way, one of the things I found was, there's an all-flash website on the first page. Now, it does get forwarded, and I don't know if, if they're doing any spoof, well, no, this does, so the, the website is, um, arvizu.com.mx, and when you go there, it gets forwarded to, like, index2.html, which is all-flash. So, I didn't spend enough time, there may be an in-between page, they may be, uh, spoofing, uh, Google, actually, so, um, but if they're not, there's a, it's the first all-flash website I've seen on the first page of Google. Um, and, uh, so what I noticed, I actually went into the pages, and for the most part, I couldn't find comunicacion without the accent over the O. What I did find

was, uh, comunicaciones, now, I don't know for sure if that's supposed to have an accent over the O, uh, but I was able to find that word, so that might have been some of the situations why those pages were different. If they did, if it's not supposed to have the O, and people have written it properly, and comunicaciones, uh, Google's actually able to pull that word out of the plural version. And stick it up there. Right, um, and it's actually not just plural, but it's, it's, uh, communications versus, communicate. Um, so that was one. The other is that I went actually into the code and looked at comunicacion without the, without the, um, accent, and a lot of the URLs, so like pictures, were, uh, written without the accent. Without the accent. So, my guess is that all of the ones on, uh, on the page, on the first page with the accent when you do the search, uh, actually have, don't anywhere have either comunicaciones or they don't have comunicacion without the O as a URL for, say, an image or something. So, that's, that's my theory. I don't have enough time to go into it. What it does tell you, though, is there is a difference. Yeah. Google sees them differently. Yeah, so what you should probably do is do that search yourself. Look at the results for your industry and figure out which sets of results are more relevant to your business type and then probably go that route. Yeah. And, and as you compile information, it'd be very interesting to see what do people actually search. I mean, how many speechers, Spanish speakers actually search without the accent over the O. Um, that would be very interesting, uh, stuff. And then the last comment would be, as you're focusing on these, don't target the keyword meta tag, because that doesn't really matter. You actually want to target text on the page. So, you may even have a bottom section, which is keywords. Just type keywords and put comunicacion, um, put those

words that are not accented and should be, put them in just a list at the bottom. That often can make the difference. Um, if it's a high value Spanish word that, uh, the, the company who's kind of dominating has also realized that they need to dominate the improper spelling without the accent, then you may actually need to make a full page dedicated to, say, comunicacion. Without the, without the accent. Without the accent. Um, which has got to be totally weird, right? Because, like, let's just make a whole page dedicated to the wrong spelling of hammer. Three M's. Um, so I thought that was incredibly interesting and also very, uh, salient for what we've been doing. Let me make sure I covered everything I wanted, because I took a couple notes. Um, da, da, da, we're here. Yep. I got all of that. Chris can't read his own handwriting. Yeah. That's after I find it. First I got to find the notes. Then I got to find the notes, the note in the notes, and then I can't read it. Then we have to decipher it. Yeah. Um, you, I guess we'll go with this, right? Uh, this is a really interesting article that Chuck sent my direction. It's from Search Engine Land. Um, it's, it's published by Pamela Parker. The title is Google Tweaks AdWords to Give Landing Page Quality More Weight. And, uh, and frankly, this was, uh, I mean, it, when I first learned that Google for AdWords gave importance to relevancy is when I really kind of honed in on the phrase that we use regularly, which is, as long as you're providing a good experience to the Google user, then you're going to do well. Because, in some sense, Google should be motivated to say, look, if you're willing to give me 30 bucks, I don't care what the term is, I'll send them to your page. And Google doesn't operate that way. What they say is, if that page isn't relevant to the search term, then I'm probably not going

to send anybody there, no matter how much you give me. Um, and that's, you know, that's kudos to them for longevity, because if they end up with spammy results, they're, you know, it, it, it makes perfect sense. Yeah, you lose user quality and quantity. Um, but the thing about that article that got me was that, I guess, this is their first official, um, statement about it. Right. Because I've managed plenty AdWords campaigns. And, and while you're inside the campaign, you'll see quickly that your, your quality score will go low, um, or they'll even give you an indicator that, you know, this ad is rarely shown due to low quality score. You click on that and it'll tell you it's not relevant, needs more keywords, and, you know, some, three or four other deals. And so, um, I already knew that, you know, that there was some relevancy to the landing page and the ad and the keyword. And so, um, the fact that this article came out lets me know that they're probably about to place a lot more weight on that. Yeah, they're saying ads with high, high landing page quality will get a strong, and that's in quotes, boost, uh, upward in, in the auction, uh, according to Alfernes, um, who is, I'm assuming, with, uh, Google. It's interesting. They actually were doing this test in Brazil and Spanish-speaking Latin American countries before they brought it here. Yeah. So, um, and, and Jonathan Alfernes is the director of product management at Google's ad quality, uh, team. So, um, I, frankly, it's pretty exciting for us. What it really means is that the skill sets that we have as an SEO company are even more valuable to pay-per-click. So, you knew they were valuable before because you had these relevancy, relevancy issues, these low-quality, uh, warnings, and now they're just saying, you know, flat out, you've got to have a high-quality page, uh, inbound linking to it, it's going to matter. I mean, frankly. So, frankly, you have to optimize that landing page. No

more can you just put up a page, uh, using the example, uh, uh, uh, plumbing repair. You can't just put up a, a, a plumbing repair page with no text and big graphics and, um, and target all these plumbing repair phrases to that page and pay for it. Because, um, let's say your phrases is water heater repair and you're sending them to a plumbing repair page, then, then you lose relevancy. First off, it's going to cost more. It's going to cost more. If it works at all, it will cost more. Yeah, because the low-quality score always equals a higher cost per click. That's kind of how it works. And so, instead, if your phrase is water heater repair, your landing page, URL should be water heater repair. You should have water heater repair content on this page. You should have water heater repair images on this page. H1 tag. Yeah, I mean, this page has to be optimized for water heater repair. And, since it's your landing page, from a CVO perspective, um, it should be designed in a fashion to make it convert. And so, and they're looking at that. And if you do all those things, which is basically optimizing your landing page, um, then your quality score will get better. Your cost per click will go down. And according to the article, Google will rank you higher. Your CTR will go up. It will go up. Reminds me of a rap you did. CTR is a rap. Diving. Campaign barely surviving. And that was, that was awesome. It's not out of the air. Goal, man. You done crossed the line. All right. So, um, by the way, if you don't know, uh, Charles is also the SEO rapper and has a number of raps. Uh, you got your new site up, right? Yeah. New site is up. Go check that out. The SEOrapper.com or designed by my boy, Javier, man. So check it out. Hit me up. Facebook, Twitter. Tell me what you think about it. Cool. Do we have time for

that? Or, um, yeah, I'll brief through this real quick. I have no idea when this started. Okay. So we were talking about PPC and SEO. I came across this article here from Safe Engine Journal, um, which is pretty cool. Um, six actionable ways to use PPC and SEO to improve your results. And so I thought it was key because, um, we do a lot of pay-per-click and SEO here. And we're always looking at data from both sides to figure out how we can improve. You missed one word. So it's PPC and SEO. SEO data. Yeah. So that's, uh, that's important. Yeah, that's, that's the reporting. Yeah. And so, um, number one was refine your match types. So it's, uh, use your SEO data and match by keyword to your paid search data. Identify which paid search keywords are on broad match and review SEO performance. And so I thought that was awesome, which is something I kind of do indirectly. Right. But they're basically saying, you know, um, if you're doing pay-per-click for certain phrases and you have them on broad match, see how many impressions you're getting, how many clicks are those. If you're doing some sort of, uh, conversion tracking, which one of those broad match phrases are actually generating clicks and turning them into dollars. And if so, optimize for them. And that way you can, you know, stop bidding on them and get your placement up. Or, or even the number two says, uh, one will stick to number three because it kind of talks into that. It says limit, uh, cannibalization, not conical. Oh, cannibalization, cannibalization. Yeah. And so, um, and basically talking about, you know, it's a big debate. We have that debate plenty of times about people who top bid on key phrases, even though you're already ranking for being on the first page for those same phrases organically. And so my kind of logic is if I'm ranking for it first page organically and I have the budget to bid on it, roll my bid amount, two

spots is better than one. Yeah. Well, I'll roll the bid amount and come from the second page. Yeah, yeah. You know, so if you're clicking on the first page and you happen to go to the second page, I'll be there sponsored. Yeah. And so I think that kind of ties into the refined match types. Right. You know, if you're ranking well for it and it's working, it's worth keeping it in the sponsored effort. If you're really trying to stretch out that budget and you think there's terms that you're not organically placing well for and you are organically placing well for some other terms, you know, steer that budget to the terms, you're not placing well until you start placing well for them. That's a great idea. Another thing, which I'm going to do on our new e-com client, uncover new keywords. And so a lot of e-commerce sites have a site search. Right. Right. Who's looking at that? Yeah. So instead of only using the web tools, you know, Google Keyword Tools and Word Tracker and all these other keyword tools, if you have an e-com site or you're on a regular site with a site search on it, query that from the back end. Save the site search. Yeah. Save the site search so you can see what people who actually land on your site are searching for. Then optimize for those. I thought that was great. And I definitely bid on those. It's great advice on the email from our last podcast where, remember, he had the search and he's like, he didn't, how did he, were searching for the craziest things. And so, yeah. Yes. He called them stupid stuff, but. Yeah. Yeah. Another one he said on here, number four, was a content gap analysis. Use PPC data matched by keyword against your targeted SEO keywords. This will help you focus resources on the keyword phrases that either rank poorly in organic search or don't rank at all. And so I think what he was, what he was really, in NamUs

terms, was analyzing which phrases show organically that you're bidding on. Right. So let's say you're bidding on phrases and they're not generating a return, you know, maybe there's a low impressions, low CTR, you're not spending money on them, but you're ranking well for them. Then, you know, you should probably definitely stop bidding on it because it's not working anyway. Right. And then the page that are ranking for them, figure out what those pages are and kind of go in and then tweak your optimization. Maybe you can make that same page rank for a more qualified key phrase. Yep. Last one on here, rule number five, was estimate demand for keyword targets. Search volume estimate tools are good, but they're not always accurate. Use paid search data to get an idea of a potential top-ranking phrase based on impressions. We love it. That's perfect sense. We love it when a client comes and they've been doing pay-per-click for a while. Oh, man. And in fact, a poorly managed pay-per-click that comes to us has value because it's going to have broader terms. So, you know, typically it's like put it up there and bid anything related to plumbing. And we can actually see, of course, the first thing we do with that pay-per-click account is weed out negative words and all of those things. But it allows us, because we may have weeded out something that had value if we had managed it from the beginning. We tend not to, and we tend to believe we don't. But if it's wide open, then we've got access to all data related to plumbing for at least for them. And so we can see, you know, hey, maybe there's a couple phrases that we didn't think of that we need to incorporate into our SEO actual efforts. And basically, it just covers the inaccuracies. If you use the Google keyword tool, for example, and you're not signed in, it'll tell you, you know, 30,000 searches, local searches for this key phrase. Over the past month. But if you've

been bidding on that phrase in AdWords for, let's say, a few months, your AdWords data may say, it may show, you know, 4,000 impressions. And so 4,000 impressions is a better number to go with than your decision making over the 30,000 searches that seem to be available. Yeah. And so the last one was number 6, identify top converting paid keywords with low or no SEO visibility. That's rule number 1. That's something we've always done. If you're bidding on a phrase and it's working and it's converting into, you know, paid clients or leads or whatever your, whatever your, you know, action is, optimize for that phrase. You know, you definitely want to dedicate a page to it, especially based on that article, you see it anyway. Right. And really try to increase your SEO visibility for that particular phrase. So I think this is a good list. I'll post this article on Facebook so you guys can look at it a little bit deeper. Cool. One of the things that when we started talking about data is going back to Planet Seed, we did some interesting analysis for them this week. Again, they have seven languages and they were interested to know, you know, you have to make this debate. Yeah. As a not-for-profit, it costs me money to put these up. They're not just using Google Translate. They actually have translators and are translating it properly, which by the way is how I would recommend you do it. And so there's a cost associated with it. And as a not-for-profit, let's just say as an example, if Arabic language wasn't being used much, or if Arabic language was actually being used in the U.S. more than in Arab-speaking countries, you could make the case that you should stop spending money translating the site into Arabic. And so what we were able to do is pull together, because of the layout, it's the Drupal website, the layout of it is, and this is classic in a CMS, where everything that is in Arabic language page, almost

everything that's in Arabic language page, is in a folder called AR. So we were able to pull up a report of AR, the language folder, Arabic, and where people were actually clicking on those. In Google Analytics, by the way. Yeah, in Google Analytics. And it's 10,000, right? 10,000 page views in the last 30 days. And we were able to show which countries were actually looking at those Arabic pages the most. Saudi Arabia, the huge spike blew everything else away. And then there were other countries, Arab-speaking countries, and then, you know, there's some in America, there's some in Canada, actually. So it's an interesting report. It's interesting how powerful the Google Analytics are. And you can make business decisions based on Google Analytics. Send that report to him, like, yeah, you should definitely keep doing your Arabic, because people are, you know, if your target is underprivileged, and you believe that the people in these locations are actually underprivileged and are accessing it, then you certainly want to keep that language going. Let me get quick blinks there. Yeah. And that one was blank for a reason. I just want to take a quick moment of silence for Apple Founder Steve Jobs. Rest in peace, man. All right. Remember, for those of you who are just listening, right in front of the camera here, there is an orange sledgehammer. I will tell you that the orange probably isn't necessary. It is just a sledgehammer. Anyone who comes up with why that's there, what is our reference thought process for that orange sledgehammer, let us know. And let us know on our Facebook page, facebook.com slash eWebStyle. All right. You have listened to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you guys. We really appreciate you, and thank you. We hope you will do three things, actually four now. Go on to iTunes, create an account, write a review of us. We appreciate it. And then hit us up if you want, and we'll give you some on-air punch in the face. Also,

right now, right this minute, tweet and say that you just listened to SEO podcast 124. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now.

This episode answers

Matthew Bertram, host of The Best SEO Podcast
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint

Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG® (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.

Related episodes

Ep. 546 · 58s · Transcript

Welcome to the Best SEO Podcast! Ep. 546

The Best SEO Podcast by Bestseopodcast.com Having 1st aired in 2009, with over 3.6 million downloads in 100+ counties, “SEO Podcast, The Best SEO…

Paid Search & Ads

The show explains it. EWR Digital does it.

The Best SEO Podcast breaks down SEO and AI search; EWR Digital, the agency behind the show, implements it for operators. Start with a free, no-pitch audit of where you stand in Google and in AI answers.

Get a free AI visibility audit