SEO Question:

Are you aware of a tool or a service that can provide reliable search volume history for certain keywords? Like how many searches there were for "keyword phrase" in each month of 2005.

SEO Answer:

Keyword Intelligence and Keyword Discovery (in depth review of many keyword research tools) both offer seasonal data to some extent, but both are limited in their database depth. Search traffic falls off sharply when you leave Google and Yahoo!. Unless you are Google or Yahoo! it is just plain tough to gather exceptionally useful and meaningful data (unless you are in a non English market with other major players).

With Google and Yahoo! their own commercial motivations are to show increased volume on core terms to create artificially competitive markets. Google and Yahoo! don't make tons of money when advertisers buy a bucket full of long tail 10 cent clicks instead of bidding up the core heavily searched industry terms. They don't mind if you find some long tail terms, but they want everyone bidding up the core terms.

Due to the engines recommending the most obvious terms and some advertisers feeling they NEED to advertise on those terms some keywords get so competitive that the margins are negative. This slim or negative margin environment spurs on rank checkers, click fraud, and other market manipulating activities which drive up the core search volume numbers provided by the major engines on the most common terms.

Yahoo!'s keyword research tool (my cooler version tool is available here) will show you the raw number of searches for the prior month. For example, last month they stated that SEO had 51,787 searches on Yahoo!.

Since that is a short term in a hyper saturated market you shouldn't be surprised if 90% of that search volume is junky automated traffic or ego searching. I usually rank in the top 10 in Google and Yahoo! for SEO and it typically sends me about 5 visitors a day. While Yahoo! only shows "SEO Book" as getting about 5% of the search volume as the term SEO I get way more traffic for SEO Book.

Yahoo! has recently started mailing out keyword promos reminding people to bid up the most competitive holiday related terms. Those are probably good words to steer clear of paying for. Many ignorant bidders jumping into the market at the same time creates an ugly overpriced playing field, although if you can sell them their PPC traffic the overpriced bidding may be a beautiful thing. Keyword terms with a large standard deviation may create good arbitrage opportunities.

Google recently started offering 12 months seasonal search data with their keyword tool. Unlike Overture, they only show graphical estimates and trends instead of exact search volume numbers. But I think it is only important to get a glance at trends since exact numbers usually do not matter much (due to automated traffic etc). They also provide quick snapshots of ad market competition and estimated bids. Both of which may be useful in deciding which markets are valuable to enter prior to investing into content creation.

In many markets the breadth of the keyword space matters much more than just the volume of the top few keywords. Some markets which are driven around a well known brand with few well known product names may have 90% of the search volume come in under the brand name or a couple slight variations of it. Most markets have much more traffic at the other end of the keyword spectrum though. Keyword phrase modifiers and alternate phrases may be huge. For example, yesterday over 75% of the search queries referring visitors to this site were unique.

You can also learn about many of the odd search patterns, consistent seasonal trends, and how search relates to society by reading the Hitwise blog. While they do not have anywhere near the amount of data Google or Yahoo! do, the Hitwise blog is always an interesting read, and does a great job of marketing their services.

Mind-share leads to more mind-share. And mind-share leads to expression. If the search volume trends are going up then likely the number of people talking about the topic will go up as well. If you are looking for what is hot right now there are numerous buzz trackers.

When thinking about keyword data remember:

• the biases of the providers (wanting to sell expensive clicks or having small a keyword database size)

• the numbers provided by any tools are just estimates
• consider how spread out the search terms likely are in your industry.

If you are new to an industry, have limited capital, limited brand equity built up, and your market is hyper-saturated it may be far more profitable to go for niche long tail search phrases, since those will be easier to compete for and they typically have more implied value / targeting / demand.

I just watched Boiler Room, a flick about shady stock market dealings from a chop shop, with people selling shit they don't believe in themselves.

The movie serves as a solid reminder why I generally have such a distaste for bogus push hype telemarketing in the SEO / SEM community.

One of my fundamental theories of marketing (and I - the marketer - view employment opportunities and social relationships as a subset of marketing) is that the harder something is sold to you the less value it must have. Granted I always think you should sell yourself first, but on the web pull marketing is much more efficient than push marketing, especially since it is so easy to hyper-target your messages and find and create niches.

If you ever go to New York City and look around at all the different niche businesses or read various types of spam (email, blog, etc etc etc) it is easy to see the core human emotions people are trying to profit from and just how much you can hyper-target a market and still be profitable.

As the web evolves and more of our lives and knowledge are integrated into the web it will only become easier for pull marketing to work well.

Recently a reader asked me why I didn't have other ads on my blog. My response was:

As a business model most quality SEO services do not scale. Those who really want to provide consumer level services have more referrals than they know what to do with.

Most of the ads in the SEO industry are for scam crap that people do not need. Why diminish my own credibility by plastering them all over my site?

All content, is in some way an advertisement. For example, good comments help add value to content and help the original author learn.

Plus I already sell my ebook on this site. When Threadwatch had AdSense ads front and center (to the point of being somewhat spammy about them) this site was still making way more than that one.

The viability of a business model or publishing model not only is reliant on the quantity of ads but the quality and relevancy of ads.

Giving people other options for other products would likely only hurt my conversion rate and credibility.

Recently I have been getting too much email to keep up with, so I took the send me an email part off of my site. I need to catch up. It may go back up sometime down the road, but if I ask for people to contact me and don't quickly respond then I am just going to piss a lot of people off (thanks to Andrew for the link).

If you are feeling stressed out, sometimes making yourself less accessible will help you build your brand and improve your customer service because you will be able to focus more on each person who contacts you.

I am sure some sociologists have studied the value of strong and weak relationships, but the mind is limited in how many relationships you can keep. If you got more weak ones than you know what to do with and are finding that you have not put as much effort as you would like toward growing some of your stronger relationships maybe it makes sense to try to build a few stronger ones, or to try to hit a different market segment.

As a test, when I pulled down the contact me note I put up a new sticky thingie on the side selling 1 hour of consulting services for $500. In the last 3 days that sticky note has made far more money than I made in ebook sales, and I haven't even marketed it other than putting that note on the right side of the site.

Not surprisingly, a couple of the people who purchased the service were people I remembered emailing back and forth with in the past.

The value in ads is in the targeting. How much more targeted of a prospect can you get than a person who regularly reads and like your stuff? If someone else can get more value out of that ad space then perhaps it is a hint that the business model might be worth changing.

A few big goals most consultants should really want to achieve:

• automated passive income streams

• diverse revenue sources
• creating and/or packaging information in chunks that either need rarely updated or can be sold on a subscription basis (I am screwing up with that idea at this point)
• packaging similar content in different formats
• make sure that if you create good stuff that many people see it (I screwed up so much in the past by answering tons of questions via email and just throwing away boatloads of content by not formatting any of them into articles or blog posts)
• getting so much demand that they can't keep up with the market, to where they can afford to raise their rates and control their ease of accessibility or price point to keep up with market demand
• using price as a filtering mechanism to filter out bad leads

Even though I sent out thousands of emails helping people the free help I gave over the past couple years was a form of selling myself (even if I didn't really know it when I started doing it).

Always sell yourself first. That is especially important if you are trying to break into a crowded marketplace. After you start doing well you need to keep selling yourself, but if you can't keep up with the market demand intentionally filtering some of your relationships (even if only temporary) is much better than doing a poor job of communicating with almost everyone who tries to contact you.

You also have to leave room to invest in yourself. If you stop learning then eventually you are going to be trading on outdated reputation, which may eventually hurt people. Its a hard balance to strike with SEO stuff because you don't know who will read what you write or when they will read it...and the market is growing increasingly competitive and what provides the quickest best ROI today may be a sure ban tomorrow.

SEO by the Sea has a great post about spam analysis done at MSN. While MSN's credibility on finding web spam might be a bit questionable (since they rank it so well), but the research ran through a variety of factors associated with web spam. Most were related to temporal page variance and running things like inlinks and outlinks through power laws. If you hate to read research pages Bill also mentioned this 36 minute video.

Power laws are probably not something that many low level search spammers look at, but if you are going to do well at it, then it helps to see where you fit in the big picture and how it affects you. Although I have noticed some sites (particularly old, well-established ones) that have done pretty stupid things that should flag penalties that do not. The biggest thing that makes spamming easier than it should be is the number of badly coded sites with good content, but if you have the same number of links on every page, the same page size on every page, and the same link profiles as many spam sites you can expect that your site stands a good chance to get penalized.

Comparative Advertising Through Obscure Naming:

If I soft launch something sometimes I give it a name that is kinda keyword rich and spammy, to inspire a few descriptive links. After I lock in a few of those I may change the name to something that sounds more brand friendly.

When I launched my keyword research tool initially I wrote the page title as something weird like Yahoo & Google Keyword Suggestion Tool. At the same time I made the page heading something like Free Google and Overture Search Term Keyword Suggestion Tool

By giving it various long obscure names like that it did the following:

• allowed me to get a few natural citations with great anchor text

• ensured other people who linked at the tool mixed up their anchor text, since it was sorta like a tool without a name (I have lots of links with words like Google, Yahoo!, Overture, free, keyword, research, suggestion, analysis, tool)
• that wide array of anchor text makes it easy for that page to be relevant for many search queries
• by making it hard to reference by any sort of official name it probably made some word of mouth mentions include my traditional site brand name, which is what I eventually changed the tool name to, but only after it got a few mentions

Please note that the semi official naming idea works best if you:

• have something that is exceptional viral (good enough to spread in spite of the bad name); or

• have a large readership and/or great brand equity (have a general brand name that people can fall back on and use to reference)

How you name things greatly determines how people will link at it.

BTW, I recently created a search box you can put on your site if you want to use the SEO Book Keyword Research Tool from your site. Here is an example search box:

and the code is here.

Comparative Advertising in Linking:

I do not think there have been any legal cases involving using someone else's brand as anchor text to market your own site, but I wonder if one day there will be.

Also if a competing product or service has negative reviews you could help do a bit of behind the scenes link building for their negative reviews. If they place too much focus on trying to wipe away the negative reviews on their core brand terms odds are pretty good that they may short sell some of their other marketing opportunities.

Comparative Advertising in Layout:

My site content hopefully is of quality and informative, but the layout is also designed to show my relevant mini ad for just about any visitor who finds my site.

Comparison Advertising on Pay Per Click Search Engines:

Perhaps illegal in some areas or disallowed on certain engines you have to consider the potential down sides and up sides of bidding against competing brands.

Comparative Advertising in Tagging:

If your site is new it may be hard to rank for someone else's brand, but if you can spin a story against an established brand sometimes ranking is easier than you might expect. It may look tacky to tag your own posts, so have a friend submit your post to Digg with a "Better than competing brand!!!" in the page title. When Performancing stats launched someone did that.

Now when anyone searches for Google Analytics on Google you find that Performancing marketing did a damn near perfect job.