Let’s take a recent project we worked on for Sonus-USA, who offers wholesale car detailing supplies.

Step 1: Visit Google and look at the keyword completion tool.  First off we start by creating a list of common keyword within a theme. We begin entering “detailing products…” and Google tells us that users are searching for ” detailing products manufacturer” and “detailing products wholesale” both are added to our list.

Step 2: To get additional ideas for keyword, we visit the wonder wheel tool under search options.  As shown, this tool shows related keywords such as “detailing products distributor” and “wholesale detailing supplies”.  Building additional phrases to our list.

Step 3: We create tight groups of related keywords which we can place into Adwords, assign to related on site content and use within our content.

Step 4: We take our list of keyword and enter the related terms into Google’s Insights for Search. This research tools gives the keyword comparison we said was so important. We see that “car detailing” is searched for 40% more than “auto detailing” and “car wax” twice as much as “car polish”. We also see the list of breakaway keywords which can be additional keyword ideas.

Once we have our list of keywords, researched and have a comparative analysis done, we’re ready to continue with integrating these topics and keywords into our onsite and offsite optimization.

In some highly competitive keywords especially, this has been a great opportunity for more keyword inventory and to really control a cost for conversion for a client. However, with so many opportunities and each site offering a slightly different package and type of customer a search engine marketer’s job is growing increasingly more difficult.

Over the next several weeks, we are going to open up our Advertising Portfolio and share real traffic patterns and conversion rates for the different IYP to show which sites drove quality traffic and leads and the sites whose advertising structure actually hurt our search engine efforts.  You will want to stay tuned, as we rank each traffic source… you are not going to believe how the traffic from the different IYP behaved or how drastic different results were from the same sources to different industries.

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The test is not particularly difficult if you have been using Adwords, but there were several questions which you just have to save time to look up, like, “If you are a pre-pay account can you pay your account with western-union or cashiers check.” Since this doesn’t apply to me I had to look it up. So anyone looking to take the test, keep your Google help open.

I noticed for my test, that there was a large section on new ways a site marketer can integrate with the Google Local Business center within their adwords account.  Since I had attended Google’s launch of these features in 08/09 in San Jose I had already been testing conversion when adding this association. But this was really one of the few times I had noticed a strong push for Google to start monitoring Google Local business and maps.  More on the Adwords / Local Business integration at a different time.

It is a really fine line between low quality traffic and click fraud. No matter how you divide it, itis clear traffic from some partners is much better then others, so by taking steps to block low quality traffic this will improve the quality of PPC traffic to your site and decrease wasted spending.. This is especially true on Yahoo, where you cannot opt out of search partners like you can with Google Adwords.

The first step we take when looking at a Yahoo! Marketing Campaign is to Block Domains.

Blocked Domains lets you specify sites on which you don’t want your ads to appear, whether they’re competitors of yours, or have products or content that you don’t want associated with your brand. Blocked Domains lets you block up to 500 domains. These can be an entire domain, a subdomain, or up to two subdirectories per domain. For more information on when and how to use Blocked Domains click here.

Here is an additional list of Yahoo! distributes which have a very high bounce rate, low time on site and conversion rate less then 10% of the campaign as a whole. If you are starting a campaign, I would block these before you pay for a single click from them.

Blocked Continents
When you opened your U.S. account or upgraded to the new Sponsored Search platform, the Blocked Continents feature in your account defaulted to exclude traffic from continents other than North America. If intercontinental traffic is not important to your business, you may find that this capability helps improve your overall conversion rate.

If intercontinental traffic is important to your business, you can choose to change your continent blocking settings.

Click Filter Report
The Click Filter Report gives you greater transparency for click activity and filtering. It’s part of our overall effort to protect our advertisers from receiving invalid clicks.

The new report will be available in your account interface and provide information on the number of clicks on your ads that our Click Protection System has identified as invalid, and, as a result, were not charged to you.

You can run the report for your entire account or your individual campaign. You can customize the columns in your report to show data such as impressions, invalid clicks, invalid click rate, and average cost per click. If you have multiple accounts, the report can display data from all of your accounts simultaneously.