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Just when is it right to accept a free gift or money in exchange for an article or review on a website or a blog? Always, in my opinion, so long as you are open about that transaction and don’t dress your article as anything else than a paid piece of prose.

Michael Gray makes a challenge to the ethics of TechCrunch writer, Sarah Lacy, today in his post about the difference of ethics between types of writers; be they bloggers or journalists. Fair enough.

With spin being the staple of successive Governments and also of traditional offline PR, Media and Business it can hardly be that surprising that these same tactics are employed in the online environment. The sad reality is that payola in all of it’s guises is a publishing fixture and is likely to remain such so long as there are hearts, minds and importantly consumer spending habits at stake.

Aside from the potential infringement of numerous country specific regulatory controls regards honesty and integrity in communications it may not be immediately appreciated that a lot of good writing talent is forced to tow the line in creating biased copy.

The humble writer can be drawn into a murky world of paid constructions through their need to satisfy the ’style’ guidelines of their employer and even perhaps the ‘brand guidelines’ of a brand that may be sponsoring the writing.

Complicating the matter more in the online world is a lack of consensus from the traffic driving search engines in defining where the lines of bias lay, as they themselves are not always completely transparent about their commercial benefits that they relinquish for bias (of positioning, thinking paid inclusion (Microhoo)).

I have worked with a number of demanding clients over the years and it is often taken for granted that clients understand the implications of actions that they demand in an online world; but they seldom do and nor are they keen on listening. Clients are pressured by what their competitors are doing and a need to be seen by their own executives to be responding.

Considerations such as a penalty being applied by a search engine for flouting a search engines definition of acceptable are measured against the risk of being caught out. This is not anything new, search for “Max Clifford” in your favorite engine to see shocking examples of media and populous manipulation.

I also agree that we are well enough into the era of online to understand that there are certain rules that should be adhered to. I do not think that the determining point on this whole issue are for the search engines alone to release their next iteration of how they each respectively determine if a link is valid or not, paid for or not. The argument is far wider than that and consistency is needed:

• across international law dealing with advertising standards,
• search engine policy applicable to not just links but persuasive text,
• search marketing professional adopting a code of practice, and;
• client organizing groups that are willing to drive change

I beleive that these combined have the power to endeer change to us all. Of course there are more important issues facing us such as plastics in our oceans.

Just how do you go about deciding which keywords and phrases to use when optimising your site? Tough decisions also need to be made when planning keyword usage for your tactical paid search (PPC) indeed any pay for performance marketing activity where keywords are used in context to best trigger your product or service messaging.

Practitioners that are familiar with this type of semantic research will agree that a seemingly simple task as this in our measurable world of search marketing is often one of the most time consuming tasks to undertake at the outset of a campaign, let alone when it is reviewed periodically as a part of an overall optimisation strategy. Especially so as our campaigns get more and more complex and need to target products and services to many different consumer groups.

I have provided an example research outline below for gathering, refining and evaluating your candidate keywords and phrases that I hope will save you time when creating or optimising your next campaign project. There are of course other ways to undertake this process, so feel free to adapt it, pick and mix for your particular needs.

There are some underlying focus areas that can be used to guide you in your selection process. I have grouped these into 3 memorable areas:

• Collection – use keyword research tools to uncover keywords and phrases that are up to 5 keywords in length.
• Potential – how much traffic ‘volume’ will a phrase potentially drive?
• Risk/Reward – what are the servicing (Agency, tracking, your time) and click costs involved in capturing the potential and what is the benefit in terms of success events (sales, sign-ups, leads generated, ect…)

Collection

When collecting keywords and phrases I use Excel as it provides me with the ability to create filters and assist with the later segmentation process. There are three primary sources that I use to uncover candidate keywords and phrases and they are:

1. Your website analytics data – this is important to capture for existing sites so that keywords and phrases that are already driving traffic volumes are not overlooked. Collecting the value of page loads for these historical keywords will help you understand their relative traffic volume importance later on and contrast against volume estimates that Step 2 provides.
2. Google Keyword Suggestion Tool – this data is indicative and provides you with an insight into the volumes to expect which we use later in judging the potential.
3. WordTracker.com – to understand the ‘modifier’ keywords that are used in combination with your keywords and phrases. Modifiers are words that infer an action like ‘buy’, ‘purchase’ or a question ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘why’. Most often people are trying to answer a particular question when they search and placing your thoughts into that particular questioning mind-set when you are collecting your keywords and phrases can help you do a fuller job.

Potential

Once you have completed the keyword collection you will likely have a *massive* list of potential keywords, some of which will not likely gain even a single impression each month! So it is very important that you you narrow down your collection and begin to segment your data into groups of keywords that express a similar concept. This process of judging the potential will also enable you to create a campaign structure later on for your SEM activity that is mapped very tightly to your SEO content hub pages and/or PPC landing pages. The process I use to gauge the potential within the collected keywords and phrases for a project is:

1. How much traffic has a candidate keyword or phrase received historically on your site? Uncover this data by looking at your website analytical data or web server log files collected earlier.
2. How much traffic does Google Traffic Estimator suggest a keyword will receive per day? This can provide you with an indicative measure of the traffic volumes to plan for.
3. Does the keyword phrase contain any combination of my brand or trademark terms? If Yes, you may want to split out these keywords into a distinctive ‘Brand’ keyword set for cost efficiencies later on. If not then you want to group keywords and phrases of similar concepts into respective listings.

Once you have made your analysis against your collected keywords and phrases and filtered them into Brand and various concept segments you are ready to evaluate the Risk/Reward of the collection.

Risk/Reward

This aspect of the research can be the most challenging. It requires that you have an understanding of the commercial drivers and minimum margins in your business to define the reward or success targets. You may have this data in your business already, in which case great news! If not, and your proposition is new then the only sure fire way to gain the necessary insight is to engaging some tactical PPC activity for your defined concepts. The results from your trial/s should empower you to judge the future investment into SEO and other online context channels in the medium and longer term more effectively.

Working on the assumption that you have the historical reward or success data it is best practice to establish your success targets. The simplest measurement of success is made where a consumer takes a converting action, like a sale or a sign-up. The logic is quite straight forward:

For every £1 that you spend on your online marketing (advertising) how much money do you make as a result?

With the best online agency/client relationships the online agency will seek to work to a deeper level of success meaning, one that is more aligned to your business’ success than pure Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS).

With this deeper level of success measurement comes the need for more open and transparent relationships between clients and their agency partners. More complex ways of measuring effectiveness such as a multi-point Return On Investment (ROI) scoring, which I will explain in a future article, can help clients that are particularly sensitive about their margins and true costs/benefits ratios.

The Risk/Reward calculation in it’s easiest form is based on what the projected cost for a keyword or phrase or even concept group is over a defined period of time v’s what is the benefit (based on success measures) that the business will obtain in that same period. These are typically referred to as the hard-line conversion metrics. Once this data is put into a formula and applied to the data that you have collected and segmented in your collection you will immediately see those concepts that demand your fullest attention and those that require more effort to deliver successfully.