Search Marketing

Search Marketing

The world of search is rich in data and its own many nuances. I’ll leave that discussion to the search experts. Here, I’ll try to gather some tools that might be useful if you’re beginning to dabble in the world of paid or organic search.

AdWords Learning Center

Google put together a variety of training videos to help you get up to speed on the basics of paid search.

Ad Preview Tool

Google free ad preview tool lets you see the competition for any given keyword.

Website Grader

This tool evaluates the SEO power of your site based on a small portion of the criteria. While I think it leaves a lot to be desired, it’s still a free option to help you see where you could have trouble spots.

Google’s Local Business Center

If you’re looking to get your business listed in location based searches in Google and on Google Maps, this is the place to start. iMedia has a good primer on local search right here.

SpyFu

This paid search intelligence tool helps you gauge the competitive landscape for PPC words, including lists of advertisers, cost-per-click and ad variation data.

Google Keyword Discovery

This is a basic, free keyword discovery tool you can use even if you don’t have an AdWords account. You might also want to give this one from Digital Point a shot.

Microsoft AdCenter Labs

The big M is brewing up some technologies to help search marketers and other advertisers. It just so happens to be intriguing to all web marketers and analysts. It’s a bit rough and tentative at the moment, but with a list of fascinating tools:
- Online commercial intention – determine what % of your audience is there to buy.
- Demographic prediction – to learn a bit about site visitors and users of keywords
- Keyword group detection – find similar words to your keyword
- Search results clustering -shows you search results grouped together into relevant segments
- Keyword mutation detection – it basically shows you the ways people could butcher a keyword
- Search volume seasonality forecast – are you selling more bikinis just because more people are searching?
- Search funnel – find out what people search for before and after a term
- Keyword volume prediction – how many people will search for this term?

Trellian

Your site will hug you for all the SEO love you give it when you try out Trellian.

Trademark Forms

If you’re brand campaigns are being swamped by competitors, you may have some recourse on trademarked terms. The rules vary by engine, so read the fine print. You’ll need to have your trademark information handy. Check out the forms: Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Search Rank Measurement

If you still believe in search engine results pages (SERPs) as a valid measurement, you can get some free results monitoring at SEOmoz and DigitalPoint.

SEO tools

Aaron Wall put together an SEO Firefox Extension to deliver some relevant info inside the browser. You can check some keyword/domain related SEO tools with this free analysis. Get some free data about backlinks.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker offers another keyword research tool

CTR Statistical Significance Verifier

Vertster offers this tool to make sure the results of your paid search creative testing have achieved statistical significance.

Google Trends

Trend the number of searches for keywords and phrases over time. The chart includes key news mentions where relevant. Unfortunately, Google never provides a scale on the axis, so it’s better to use the tool to see relative values instead of absolute ones.

Google’s Blogs

If you want to keep up with goings-on at Google, check out any of their many, many blogs:

Search Marketing

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