Many activities in the field of search engine optimisation are related to research and benchmarking, there are a number of tactics commonly used in the SEO industry that are applicable in the field of product management. In this article, Dan from Dejan SEO shares some of his favourite research tools and methods that will be of benefit to anyone who wants to establish a successful online campaign.

Phrase Research: Volumes

The most common keyword research tool available is Google’s Keyword Tool available at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The process is simple enough to be comfortably applied on a regular basis and it can be broken down into four distinct steps:

1. Initial Search (broad search including industry jargon terms)
2. Phrase Refinement (including disambiguation and removal of low volume terms)
3. Term Selection (eliminating phrases by filtering, sorting and manual selection)
4. Application (naming, marketing, copywriting, placement)

Search Terms

The whole process starts with the initial search by entering most obvious phrases in the Google search box. Select “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” once you are confident that you have a good range of phrases in the box, as demonstrated in the example below.

Match Types

Many do not understand the difference between Broad, [Exact] and “Phrase” match in research filtering so it’s good to give some examples:

• Broad match: The sum of the search volumes for the keyword idea, related grammatical forms, synonyms and related words
• Phrase match: The sum of the search volumes for all terms that include that whole phrase
• Exact match: The search volume for that keyword idea

(Source: Google.com)

The whole process starts with the initial search by entering most obvious phrases in the search box. Select “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” once you are confident that you have a good range of phrases in the box.

Advanced Options and Filters

Google gives your further refinement options via Google Keyword Tool where you can select country and language as well as platform and technology used for searching. You can even remove terms which are not relevant at that point of research.

Click “Search” and observe the table below. The default view gives keyword suggestions including the level of competition, monthly searches (for local and global searches).

Select the terms which are of highest interest and export as CSV for future reference and reporting.

Google Trends

Going further into phrase research you may wish to employ tools such as Google Trends to gain additional insight into the popularity of certain terms including yearly trending, geographic  and lingual popularity. This data is also available for export in CSV format.

Google Trends is available from the following location: http://www.google.com/trends

Google Insights for Search

Insights for search provides insights into broad search patterns and features nice comparison and filtering capabilities. Google Insights is available from: http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Google Ngram Viewer

Google has an enormous amount of data at their disposal and some of it is available to users for research. Google Ngram Viewer enables you to search through literature in a few languages with custom date ranges. When deciding how to place your product in the market it’s important to understand how it’s perceived not only by consumer but also journalists, academics and publishers. In the example below it’s obvious that term “cloud computing” wins over “distributed computing”. What may be essentially the same technology for you could be very differently perceived by your audience:

Social Signals & Product Perception

There is no doubt that people talk about products online and keeping up with the real time buzz and managing the sentiment is very important. This, however, can be quite time consuming. Luckily there are tools out there which enable easier monitoring of the latest consumer and media buzz.

Knowem
Enables you to check availability and register your product name or brand online in hundreds of different places at a relatively low cost preventing false profiles and malicious misrepresentation by competitors.  Link: http://knowem.com/

Google Alerts

Practically a standard in reputation management and monitoring. Easy to set up but not as good with picking up real time buzz from Twitter and Facebook. Link: http://www.google.com/alerts

Trackur

Offers a variety of white-labelled social media monitoring tools. Link: http://www.trackur.com/

Google Suggest

Gauge the general sentiment by scanning Google’s suggestions which are based on search volumes, this is evident in the following examples:

Understanding your product strengths:

Recognising weak spots in your product:

Is your product easy enough to buy?

Competitor Strength

This method can be used to scan competitor’s influence in the online space. For example type in a generic purpose for a product and observe if any brands pop up in the suggestion box. Another great way to understand the status of your competitors online is to look at their link profile. More people link to them, better their rankings and online reputation. To do that go to Google and search the following: link:competitorwebsite.com

Example:

link:microsoft.com (number of results: 20,700)
link:adobe.com  (number of results: 29,400)

This type of link analysis is very basic and if you wish to refine you have a choice of several tools including Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer.

Search Verticals

Behind the simple interface of search engines is a very complex world and it’s important to remember that there are many search verticals worth exploring in your research. Google for example includes the following verticals:

Product Images

Google has recently introduced a new feature for their image search where users can upload the source image to visually guide the search from that point similar to TinEye. In the example below you can see how an uploaded image affects search results:

Understanding how your product is used online is not only helping understand its popularity but could also be critical to further decision making and brand protection.

Remember the fact that search engines continue to grow more complex and sophisticated every year. This is both a blessing and a curse – in any case, the tools and data are there, it’s how you use it that will determine how well your manage your products online.