Are You Optimising for Optimization? Google Spells Drive SEOs Crazy

Category Google | 21 comments »

Last week, Google caused quite an uproar in the SEO community when it decided to tweak its engine’s spelling. In fact, several big SEO bloggers made mention about Google’s spelling and the Americanizing of search results.

(Tracy)

Now, as a copywriter, these results were almost as good as sending me a bouquet of flowers. Almost. I love mysteries, I switch between UK, US, Canadian, and Australian spellings frequently, and combining them with search just made the phenomenon that much more fun.

So, after a pretty heavy-duty chat with some smart people and a bit of digging, I’ve come up with some interesting explanations. (It’s my understanding that Google has changed its mind on some of these, but I thought it was worth a look regardless.)

Optimizing for Optimisation

The initial word pair to cause a ruckus was ‘search engine optimisation‘, which brings up ‘search engine optimization‘ results. Hmmm! Knowing full well that Google is moving towards producing more relevant and local results, this was completely puzzling.

I initially thought the switch was due to Adwords revenue. I mean, there’s bound to be more people including ‘optimization’ in their PPC campaigns than ‘optimisation’ right? And more competition means the CPC would be higher right?

Well, after a short discussion with a few SEOs including David Harry, I took off the tin foil and discovered it was pretty easy to see why. Google Trends and Insights both show Britons are searching for ‘optimization’ more frequently and UK SEOs are targeting the ‘z’ when optimizing their sites, so Google is giving people what they want.

Don’t Forget About the User

Malcolm Coles dug up a number of other good examples. He noticed that, when searching for ‘whether’, ‘weather’ results were shown with the definition of ‘whether’ in #1 and BBC weather being second. I don’t know about you, but this looks right to me as a user, an SEO, and as a writer. Here’s why:

If I were searching for ‘whether’ without any additional words in the query, chances are I would be looking for what part of speech it is, what synonyms are available, how it’s used and other word mechanics. Otherwise, what would the intent be?

In Malcolm’s screen cap, you can clearly see the first result (Dictionary.com’s definition) would satisfy this need nicely. If I wasn’t looking for the word’s mechanics and had meant to look for ‘weather’, this need is satisfied with the BBC weather result in second place. I have the same opinion of ’stationary vs stationery’ and ‘license vs. licence’ and think the spelling causes confusion among regular users more than some people think.

Could A Combination of Signals Trigger Different Results?

(Alexbrn)

The results Malcolm got for ‘colouring vs coloring’ were quite fascinating. Google Insights and Google Trends both show UK users search for ‘colouring’ more than ‘coloring’, but they also show the u-less form is gaining slightly in popularity while the ‘u’ form of the word is decreasing.

When I did a search for ‘colouring’ and ‘coloring’ through .co.uk, I noticed only the ‘u’ page was affected, and in fact, 6/10 results were optimized for the ‘u’ form or both. I’m sure this will vary for everyone, but still, we can see the results are mixed.

This leaves me with user data. I know my son is a huge fan of Disney, Pixar, and other popular cartoon-like movies, so I can’t see UK children being much different. I wonder if a higher number of clicks on some of that content have something to do with it? I’d say so.

Lastly, we know Google is starting to recognize relative terms. After all, some pages I’ve optimized for ‘copywriting’ on my site rank better for ‘copywriter’ and vice versa. In the end, if I were searching for ‘coloring’, or ‘colouring’ for that matter, what exactly would I be looking for? And don’t the results satisfy that request? Not saying the big G is perfect, but it doesn’t seem to be as horrible as some would like to think.

What Does This Mean?

After looking at the various SERPs, I can’t help but think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this very soon. And, if SEOs want to compete, they may want to include these ideas in the planning of their future optimization projects. I also think SEOs will need to spend more time considering the user and what they might be doing rather than focusing on numbers alone (this is not to say that some don’t already do so).

As much as I will likely get roasted for this, I have to say that I think these changes are a good thing for the user and will force webmasters and SEOs to put a lot more thought into the sites they work on. That’s never a bad thing.

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Keyword Research is not about tools

Category Keyword Research | Comments Off

It is about ones ability to craft a program. It seems more often than not I come across people that are looking for the ultimate tool that is going to tell them exactly which terms they should be targeting and what kind of traffic they can expect. This is simply not going to happen, (except maybe for Google’s SEO company – snitter).

There is simply no reliable tool nor set of tools that can tell us exactly what we need to know. Here are a few problems with conventional tools;

Traffic Data – at this point and time, none of the existing search engines are giving out the search data estimates for a given term, not to mention individual SERP placement traffic estimates. Most tools are using network activity or 3rd party data from ISPs and other locales (meta-search engines etc..). While there is some data, how reliable the estimates are is usually suspect in my experience.

Competitor Data – depending which tools you use for keyword research, a different figure is often used in calculations. Often it is simply the total results (instances) of a given search query. This is not really a tightly targeted approach as it is mere instances of the terms for that query. Such as this;

Latest travel news – Results; 28 200,000  

Now what if we tighten this up? Let’s look at a few other potential comparative data sources that will tighen up the competition numbers

With Quotations “” – Results; 121 000

With All Terms In Title – Results; 5 460

With All Terms in URL – Results 746

 As you can see, with each refinement we gain new insights when compared to other terms in your research set. I personally feel that KW research tools that are using mere instances as we’d find in a straight, non-modified search, they are flawed. If we look at concepts surrounding KEI (keyword effectiveness index) that the data used for the ‘competition’ factor, can have a huge effect on the over-all viability of a given term – thus flawed results can be had. Regardless of which metrics one uses, there is no definitive answer that works.

In the end the two main data sets that can tell us the all important golden goose are not available or definable. This means there is going to be some deeper research into the actual search results and even an intuitive factor involved in targeting the right keywords and phrases.

So what is it all about?

The first part is easy and anyone can do it; roll up your sleeves and dig in. You will have to take the potential terms for targeting and actually start digging into the Top 10-20 competitors to see how well entrenched they are and look for opportunities in there for you to gain a foothold. There really is no other way to truly gauge the competitiveness of a given prospect. We can combine that with query tightening (as explained above) and even some PPC data (money terms tend to also cost more for PPC) and you will start to see a pattern across all of your data and the money terms should emerge.

The second part is not so easy; experience. All search terms were not created equal and often a term with less total results (say 120 00 total instances) will out perform seemingly more popular terms with higher total results ( of maybe 1 200 000). This is not an uncommon occurrence and you really cannot use that as a guide. It takes many years of looking at data, targeting terms and ultimately tracking the results. You need to get a good feel for a given market and watch what terms seem to hold the most value – this is where the art form comes into play.

Keyword research tools are great for collecting data to further the research process – they are not a means to an end…

Resources;

Keyword Research and Targeting – Reliable SEO

Keyword resarch for Bloggers – Copyblogger 

 Extended list of Keyword Research Tools – Ann Smarty 

 Beginners Guide to Keyword Research – SEOmoz

 Keyword resarch and analysis – SEM Basics

 Advanced Keyword research – Hamlet Batista

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