Thesaurus tools

Keywords I can add to my AdWords campaigns.

Remember the frantic high-school-essay writer’s best friend, Roget’s Thesaurus? It got us through some pretty rough papers by giving us 12 ways to say accomplish and 19 ways to say want. (Although my history teacher thought hanker too colloquial and prefer too wishy-washy.) Well, the old thesaurus is now online, in two free incarnations, and can lead you to keywords you would otherwise miss.

Online Thesaurus

Go to http://thesaurus.reference.com to access the online version of Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus. Type your keyword (one word, generally) into the text box near the top of the page and click the Search Button.

LexFN.com

The Lexical FreeNet connected thesaurus, located at www.lexfn.com, can perform several cool tricks. Type a keyword into the Word 1 box, select the Show related radio button, and click the Submit Query button. You will find synonyms, words that are triggered by your word, more specific and more general categories related to your word, and words that are part of your keyword and words that your keyword is a part of. If you sell stage makeup for theatrical performers, several of the results of this LexFN search will point you in promising directions (greasepaint, for example), while others will help you brainstorm negative keywords (see the later section, “Deploying Negative Keywords”).

KeyCompete.com

If you’re serious about using AdWords, KeyCompete.com is one of several paid tools I recommend highly. Go to www.keycompete.com and type a keyword in the search box; then click the Search button. Click any of the Web site links to see a long list of their other keywords. In other words, if your competitor has done a good job of researching keywords, you can use this sneaky tool to take advantage of all their hours of hard work. You can buy individual keyword results for $5, or purchase a single day’s access for $19. An annual subscription is $299. If you need to compete against established competitors in an Adwords market, this tool is a no-brainer.

Using your server log to get smarter

Quietly, uncomplainingly, your Web site has been storing a gold mine of visitor data, patiently waiting for you to realize its value. If your Web site has been welcoming visitors for any length of time and you haven’t perused your server log yet, you’re in for a treat. Among lots of other useful data, your server log will tell you exactly what search terms visitors typed to land on your site. All the tools I’ve talked about in this section are useful as idea generators but only your server log tells you exactly what keywords are already getting people to your site.

Because Web servers differ significantly, unfortunately I can’t tell you exactly how to find and read your own server logs. If you are technically savvy about your Web site, you already know where to find the server log. If you’re not sure how to view your server logs, contact your hosting provider. What you want to look for in your server logs are the key phrases and keywords that people typed into a search engine just before visiting your site. You want to select a reporting period that makes sense (last month, last year, and so on). Some of the keywords with very few clicks are potential long-tail keywords I can add to my AdWords campaigns. Long-tail keywords refer to phrases that are rarely typed, and will therefore bring you very few visitors, but collectively can generate many sales.

The concept of the long tail (the phrase itself refers to the shape of the graph of the statistical distribution of events) was popularized in the book The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, who argued that in a digital world with no production or shipping costs, the combined profits generated by long-tail products can be greater than the profits from the blockbuster bestsellers. Amazon.com, for example, can be more profitable than brick and mortar bookstores because such a large proportion of Amazon’s sales come from obscure books that physical stores wouldn’t be able to stock due to shelf space limits.

Similarly, long-tail keywords, as long as you don’t spend too much time generating or managing them, can give you the slight edge that leads to market domination over time. Here’s how: The long-tail keywords are very cheap, with almost no competition. This traffic stream lowers your average bid price, giving you more visitors for the same amount of money. Assuming you convert these visitors to sales at a rate equal to or higher than that of your other visitors (a pretty good assumption, since they’re coming in on very targeted and specific keywords), you make more money per visitor. You can afford to advertise more and to pay more for advertising compounding your slight edge into a real lead. Finally, the increased traffic means you can split-test and improve all the elements of your sales process more rapidly than your competition, leapfrogging you ever farther ahead over time.