Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

Archive for August, 2009

Search Marketers’ Toolkit – 60 links you need to know

August 20th, 2009 | Category: Marketing, SEM, SEO

Search Marketers Toolkit

I’ve often used this blog as a knowledge repository for myself, as well as many of my colleagues. Providing lists of great sites, or tools I think are useful as a search or digital marketer. Below I’ve compiled 60 links which I think are relevant and useful to search marketers at any stage in their career – whether their just starting out or they’ve been doing this for years. I tried to make it a mix of both SEO and SEM/PPC sites, tools and analysts, but I think in the end it may have swayed more to the SEO side. Mostly as I think SEM is one of those things that people have all their own tools to do the analysis. I’d love to make this a working list, so please feel free to add additional tools, links, blogs, analysts or useful sites you think others may or may not know about. This is by no means all the sites out there, but I think it’s pretty representative.

Development / Browser Tools:
These are several of the tools I’ve used over the years to make sure my site is valid and indexable, as well as measuring optimization over time.

Keyword Research Tools:
Below is a list of keyword research tools I have used in the past or have heard anecdotally from others that these are viable tools. In the end, it the tools you have the most confidence in that will give you the best results.
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Broad Match vs. Exact Match: What’s a good starting point for paid search?

August 10th, 2009 | Category: Local Search, Marketing, SEM

match-type

So the other day, I was having a meeting with a client and there happened to be another agency in the room. We began talking about paid search strategies in terms of whether to start with broad match keywords or exact match or a mix of the two. I can come up with reasoning for both, but it just depends on the situation.

When is it best to start with broad match?
I would equate broad match as the sledgehammer of keyword matching tools. It’ll definitely get the job done, but you might also bring in lots of impressions which aren’t necessarily applicable. Now, if you are new to paid search or just starting off a paid search campaign, this is a good place to start. If you have the budget flexibility, it might be good to just let a broad match campaign run for a short time frame, depending on volume, and then review the campaign analytics to see which words to add to your negative keyword list. So let’s say you have a campaign running for a local car wash, you might advertise against: