By Aaron Evans 3-13-09

I came across this cool free tool called batchSEARCH that allows you to copy and paste your list of search terms into a search bar. Up to 1,000 search queries at once can be pasted into the batchSEARCH bar. You can then get back up to 50 results per query. So in just a few moments, you are looking at 50,000 search results that are indexed and hyperlinked in a organized way to help you with your searching efficiency.
This tool is called batchSEARCH because as the name suggests, it allows you to search multiple queries at once by cutting and pasting from a document, Excel file or other file list. You can search many different sites including Google, Ebay, HOME Depot, CNet, Amazon and more. You can submit a site you want to batchSEARCH and they will index it for you in a few days. You can even add batchSEARCH Enterprise to your site and let searchers batchSEARCH your site, creating 1000’s of links at once. These are deep links into your site that can indexed internally or externally for the search engines.

With the free version of the tool, you can enter up to 10 searches at once with 10 results per query from 2 different websites, for a total of 200 results in just seconds. There are upgraded versions of the tool that allow you to get up to 50,000 results from 2 different websites in seconds. You can even request a site to be added and they will do that for free in just a couple days turn around time.

You may be wondering why you would want to search more than one query at a time. There are many examples of uses for multiple searches. I like the story of the guy who founded batchSEARCH. He is a computer hardware technician for out-of-production components for military aircraft computer systems. He needed to look up 1000’s of computer components across different sites to find the lowest price and if they are in stock or not. He was forced to enter one search at a time and found it very inefficient and time consuming. So he had a patented tool built that can search multiple queries at once from different websites. Now, with this tool he can enter 500 search queries across two different websites or 1000 queries from just one website. He can then control the results per query from 1-50. The final results could be as many as 50,000 search results per website in just minutes. The results can then be downloaded into excel. This makes searching for many parts prices at once easy.

That is just one of many possible uses for batchSEARCH, however. The search results will pull in different information depending on the site being searched. For instance, if you choose to search Ebay for a list of products, it will return the product listing title, Bid price, Buy It Now price, and Best Offer price. If you search HOME Depot for construction materials, you will get the product title, price and model number for quick addition to buying lists.

By now you should be able to see the potential for this tool. Here are five examples of web searchers who can benefit from batchSEARCH.

1. Price Comparison Shoppers:

* Ebay Users and Auction Shoppers – simply put, batchSEARCH is the best Ebay buyer’s and seller’s tool available. Search multiple Ebay listings at once and pull into excel. Sort your list in excel to find the Bid price, Buy it Now price and the Best Offer price. Click on the URL link from the search results and find the lowest price results for multiple products at once. Nobody else has a bulk auction pricing tool like this.
* Google Shopping Users – Find prices on all your Google shopping products. Simply copy and paste your products in bulk into the search bar. Instead of just seeing a few results as on the Google SERPs, batchSEARCH will allow you to see results for 1000’s of products at once.
* Purchasing Managers – Copy and paste your entire inventory into the search bar (up to 1000 queries at once) and choose the number of results per search. Quickly find the lowest price for each product complete with a hyperlink to the site. Find your competitors prices on all your products in just minutes.

2. Business Research Tool:

* Ebay Store Owners – BatchSEARCH is a must have for any competitive Ebay store owner. Quickly search your product list to see what the competition is selling their products for. Search current auctions for the going rate on products you are considering selling. See the bid price, “Buy it now” price and Best offer price. Quickly find opportunities for big profits. The uses for batchSEARCH on Ebay are limitless. Get the edge you need to make your Ebay business a huge success!
* Importers & Exporters – In the import and export business, you deal with large lists of items to buy and price shop. You need to find the businesses that buy and sell these parts. Cut down on your research time significantly by batch searching all your products at once.
* Competitive Business Analysts – Research your competitors inventory, product prices, and whatever else is out there on the web about them. BatchSEARCH is a powerful business intelligence tool that allows you to search multiple elements of your businesses competition at once.
* Parts hunters & Dealers – auto, electronic, electrical, plumbing, construction, repair, etc – drop your model/part numbers into Ebay, Google shopping, Amazon, HOME depot, or specialty sites you request. Cut your parts hunting time down dramatically!

3. Professional Researchers:

* Data Miners & Information Gatherers – BatchSEARCH is a must have for data mining. Search lists of phone numbers, SSN’s, Names or other info and get multiple results. Save time and money by scraping large amounts of information from the web with one click of a button. You have never been able to gather so much information so quickly! BatchSEARCH is the only service that offers the ability to perform multiple searches with multiple results per query.
* Web Scrapers & Harvesters – If web scraping and information harvesting is your task, you can increase your efficiency by orders of magnitude with BatchSEARCH.com. Information that used to take weeks to compile can now be done in hours by searching multiple queries at once and pulling up multiple results for each search. You can get up to 100,000 results in just minutes.

4. Recreational Web Researchers:

* Music Lovers – Input your entire playlist into the search bar to get more information on each artist or song instantly. A great way to discover new music or find out news on your favorite songs and musicians.
* Video Buffs – Search through news clips, Youtube clips or other online video listings quickly and easily with batchSEARCH.com. You can search databases for obscure film titles.
* Collector’s – Search your lists of antiques, baseball cards and other collectibles to find prices, availability and information quickly and easily.
* Sports Researchers- Search stats for multiple players or teams at once. Search for prospects for your fantasy teams or opportunities for your sports book.

5. SEO/SEM Research Tool for Professionals:

* Search Engine Optimization Competitive Research – Search your competitors web sites, products, keywords. Find out the top SERP rankings for all your keywords.
* Research Top Website Rankings for Keyword Lists – See how your competitors rank for each keyword in your paid and organic marketing efforts quickly.
* Google Shopping Product Research – shop your competitor’s prices for your product inventory. In charge of creating lists for a CSA (consumer shopping engine) like nextag, shopping.com, Google Base or bizrate? BatchSEARCH.com allows you to quickly find your competitors prices for your whole feed lists quickly.
* Increase Inbound Links – create a list of hyperlinks to your site to send to other webmasters. Add your site to batchSEARCH.com and create hundreds of additional links that link deep within your own site. batchSEARCH will then start sending you additional traffic whenever someone searches your site on batchSEARCH.

There are much more detailed explanations of how people can benefit from batchSEARCH on the website batchSEARCH.com. It has really helped me do SEO and SEM research for keyword lists, link building and competitive analysis. Check it out for yourself at batchSEARCH.com

Aaron Evans
websiteclarity.com

Here are some steps to take to optimize your pay per click accounts and improve your ROI:

1. Do Proper Keyword Research – Keyword research is the first and perhaps most important step you can take to improve the ROI of your SEM account. By finding keywords that your competitors aren’t bidding on, you can have a good chance of getting clicks at low cost per click. If the traffic is relevant, you should be able to convert that traffic at a profitable ROI. Check out this article on Keyword Research for SEO for more keyword research tips. Remember that in many industries, the long tail of keywords can bring in 50% or more of the traffic and revenue. Don’t forget about your top terms, however.

2. Watch Your Top Terms Closely -In most PPC accounts, there are 5-10 keywords that make up 40-50% of the cost structure. Yes they bring in revenue, but they are highly competitive and are frequently caught up in bidding wars. If you are using automated bid managment software, it may be 1-2 weeks before your algorithms pick up changes in CPC, ROI or other metrics you are using to change your bids. Your top terms should be hand managed and checked frequently throughout the day. Think of PPC as day trading. Decide what you can afford to pay per click to achieve your target ROI, and don’t exceed that even when a bidding war drives the cost up.

3. Expand your ROI Horizon – Most PPC account managers measure ROI based solely on what percentage of the product price they can afford to spend. If an item sells for $100, and there is a 20% margin, then they figure that they can afford to spend up to $20 on their PPC marketing costs and still break even. Or they will only spend up to $10 per conversion to preserve their profit margin. But if your not taking into account your customers lifetime value, then you may be leaving money on the table. First, figure out what your return customer rate is. Then figure out how many times per year your customer returns and what they spend on average. Use this info to create a lifetime value for your customer. This will increase the amount that you can spend on a conversion and allow you to stay more competitive.

4. Watch Your Match Type -If you are running up costs on a keyword that has a good CTR and a decent conversion rate, consider only using exact match for that keyword. This will filter out some searches that are less relevant and help to pull your ROI in line. On the other hand, if you are running a great ROI on an exact match keyword, but your volume is low, consider trying broad match to bring in more traffic and see if it is worth it to your bottom line.

5. Split Test Your Ad Copy Regularly – It is surprising how simple this is, yet how often it is neglected. One problem account managers sometimes have is dealing with the sheer volume of ad copy to change. Try changing your copy in bulk in excel by having constant phrasing for description line 1 and 2. You can then use a find and replace to change key phrases or product names. This makes it easier to edit large amounts of copy without spending all day at it. Also, try using keyword insertion in your title to increase your CTR’s.

6. Research Your Competition’s PPC Strategy – Use Spyfu.com and other competitive analysis tools such as batchsearch.com to analyze your competitors keyword strategy. By understanding where they are, you can formulate a strategy to be where they aren’t.

7. Track Your Offline Revenue Back to Your PPC Channel – In many E Commerce businesses, your customers will likely find you through a PPC ad, and then pick up the phone to place their order. This will likely break your conversion tracking and web analytics. There are ways you can connect the marketing dots with promo codes, different phone numbers, etc… that will allow you to find out how a customer found you and then allow you to attach that revenue back to your PPC accounts. See this article on setting up offline tracking for web analytics for more info on how to implement offline tracking.

8. Set up Multi-Variate Testing For Landing Pages – It is amazing how different conversion rates can be for two different landing pages. Content, design, layout, images, titles and promotions can all affect your customer in different ways. If you are using a standard A/B split test, you may not know exactly what it is about a certain page your customer likes or doesn’t like. By using multi-variate software (there are some affordable options out there), you can isolate different areas of your landing page to test.

9. Turn on Content in a Different Campaign – Content works well in some industries and not so well in others. In any case, you should test it out. But don’t turn it on in the same campaign that you are testing your search campaigns. It is best to isolate this test in it’s own campaign. That way you can also turn on a placement campaign and hand-select the websites you want to target with your message. This will allow you to establish a separate ROI for content.

10. Bid On Your Competitors Key Terms – This can be a quick win. Try bidding on your competitors business name and website keywords. They will be very cheap and you can target your ad to try to pull away their business. In one high profile example, expedia.com was able to pull away around 20% or Orbit’s PPC traffic just by bidding on their terms. You may piss some people off, and they may turn around and bid on your terms, but if you are the underdog and recieve less business searches than a large competitor, than this is a great tactic.

By Aaron Evans 2-11-09

There are many Keyword tools available to use, so which are the best keyword research tools for your needs? First you need to understand the difference between the different types of keyword tools. Here are the different basic types of keyword tools available:

1. Keyword Suggestion Tools - This type of tool will suggest keywords based on either keywords you enter or URL’s that you enter. Some popular keyword suggestion tools are:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Keyword Elite
• SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Wordtracker
• Keyword Discovery
• Wordze
• Microsoft Keyword Forecast
• Yahoo Keyword Tool

2. Competitive PPC Keyword Research Tools - Competitive PPC keyword research tools measure the competitions paid search keywords, CPC’s, Budgets and overall search marketing strategy.

• Compete.com – A good tool that is relatively low cost with that shows competitive PPC keywords
• Hitwise.com – A great competitive research site if you can afford the expensive upfront cost
• KeyCompete.com – Download competitors keywords and adwords
• SEMPhonic – A competitive SEM research consultancy
• Spyfu – Download your competitors keywords and PPC data

3. Competitive SEO Keyword Research Tools - Competitive SEO Keyword Research tools focus on the organic strategy of competitors websites and measure the keyword rankings, keyword density, backlinks, internal links and other SEO-related factors.

• SoloSEO – This tool uses its IndexRank to collect Google indexing rate data for different time periods
• SEOMoz Trifecta – Measures domain, blog and page strength
• SEOMoz Linkscape – Measures unique domains linking to competitors websites
• Spydermate – A free SEO tool Crawls URls and gives Spyderranking with lots of SEO stats
• SEOBook Keyword Density Tool – A free tool that quickly shows the number of each keyword occurance
• SEOBook HubFinder - A tool for SEOBook members that shows authority sites for various industries based on keywords
• SEOBook Link Popularity Comparison Tool – Compare your backlinks to a competitors
• MajesticSEO – A competitive Link Analysis Tool that analyzes anchor text and backlinks
• batchSEARCH.com – a bulk search tool that allows you to search multiple keywords at once with up to 100,000 search results in just minutes.
• googlerankings.com – A Keyword density SEO tool

4. Keyword Ranking Tools -

• Firefox Rank Checker – A free browser plugin to rank up to 100 keywords in google, yahoo and msn at one time.
• Cleverstat – A google ranking tool for download. only works with Windows.
• mapelli.info – Calculates your supplemental index ratio

There are other keyword tools out there and more popping up everyday. Stay tuned for a future post about link analysis tools and an update on new SEO and SEM keyword tools.