First we go in and look at your Yahoo! logs and pull out your very most important keywords, as well as a bulk list of everything ever searched for to reach your site for the past 6 months. This helps you optimize your Yahoo! Shopping listing as well as give you a leg up on the OVERTURE.COM keyword buys.
From this we compile two lists:
(1) A list of keywords and phrases that actually produced revenue, and (2)
a VERY LONG list of unique phrases that produced traffic. >From these two lists you
can decide what words to buy on OVERTURE.
The last client we did this for got a list of 3,000 unique words and phrases used to
search for his store. His sales have really jumped in the past 60 days, and so much of
his traffic is from OVERTURE and their affiliated partners Yahoo, MSN, ALTA VISTA, NETSCAPE SEARCH, etc.
Example of datamining results
Just did some "keyword mining" on one of our Yahoo! Stores. There were
some very interesting results.
From roughly 215,000 visitors you can see exactly what 60,000+ folks typed in
various search engines and directories to find our Yahoo! Store. This data came
from 50 different sources with roughly 30,000 different search terms. The rest of the
traffic came from directly typing in the URL, "unknown search terms," banner ads,
and links to the site.
Filter the data into two groups: (1) Revenue Producing Keyword Phrases -
(keywords that produced online sales) and (2) Traffic Generating Keyword Phrases
(keywords that generated traffic, but no "trackable" sales.)
Only about 15% of my online sales are traceable to the exact keyword phrase, so we just have to weight the known data to reflect this.
REVENUE KEYS -- The first group of keywords are now prioritized by sales
dollars to go after the most profitable keywords, and the goal is to try to stay in the
OVERTURE top 4 and still make money. There were 561 unique keyword phrases that
directly resulted in online sales.
The great thing is that 54% of this store's directly
trackable keyword sales came from the TOP 40 keywords and phrases, so that's
where we focus our dollars and attention.
Looking at the competition in OVERTURE, about half of the words don't even have
bidders. And most of the other half consists of bottom feeders paying 2 or 3 cents
for the keywords. Holy COW!
There were also 3 phrases where a national manufacturer who sells direct is paying
close to a dollar per click through. That tells us how much THOSE phrases are
worth to that guy! Probably need to open another Yahoo! Store just to go after
THOSE phrases!
TRAFFIC KEYS -- After consolidating the same phrases that were on multiple
search engines into a single unique list, the second list boils down to about 15,000
unique words and phrases. For example, a search for "blue baby bed" on Yahoo,
Alta Vista, and Excite would count as 1 unique phrase with 3 searches.
Since only 15% or so of our sales come from directly trackable links with the specific
search phrases, we know that some of these 60,000 shoppers with 15,000 keyword
phrases really ARE buyers. How do you get this list down to a manageable
size?
I take this list of 15,000 keywords phrases and start chopping to remove the words
that don't really make sense. In your Top 50 Sources of Traffic, there may be as
many as 25-30 search engines, meta search engines, and directories. Any keyword
phrase that was only requested 2 or 3 times from these sites over a period of many
months probably isn't worth spending the time to write a title or description.
I also use the Pareto Principle, also know as the 80/20 rule (80% of your results
comes from 20% of your efforts) to see where the break is. I can get 70% of my
"bulk keyword traffic" with about 2000 keywords. OVERTURE is going to cut this list
pretty hard anyway. My goal is 750-1250 nickle keyword phrases when I get
finished.