When you want to go somewhere, such as to eat or to find something you need for a project, that’s what Google defines as ‘I-want-to-go’ moments. Finding places to go has become a massive function of online searches, so being able to take advantage of those moments is vital to attracting customers.

‘I-Want-To-Go’ Moments Defined

In many instances, ‘I-want-to-go’ moments involve “near me” searches. In other words, someone might search for “restaurants near me” or “hardware stores near me.” By and large, these searches are more generic than specific, so very few people are going to be looking for your brand. Instead, they’ll be interested in whoever is closest who can satisfy their needs.

A Scenario

Let’s take an example. Suppose Mr. Jim has a hankering for some waffles one Saturday morning. He also kind of wants to eat out rather than fix them himself. He pulls out his phone, and he asks Siri to search for “waffles near me.”

If you serve waffles, you want to make absolutely sure your restaurant comes up on that list. If it doesn’t, Mr. Jim is not paying you a visit. If it does come up, and if your site presents the quick message that your waffles are more amazing than anything ever (or if they at least look appetizing enough that Mr. Jim’s stomach screams “WANT!” to his brain), he’s likely going to visit you ASAP.

Making the Most of the Moment

To make the most of these ‘I-want-to-go’ moments, you need to remember a few things. These are:

• As stated, most “near me” searches are for generic keywords, not specific brands.
• Customer loyalty is nowhere near as important in these searches as convenience and instant satisfaction.
• Half of those who conduct these searches will visit the store within 24 hours.
• Roughly one out of five “near me” searches results in a purchase.

So the question now is whether your brand has the online presence needed to come up on “near me” searches. If you want help establishing that presence, contact our team of Digital Marketing Rockstars at Accelerate Online Marketing.

Recent research conducted by Google has shown that people are no longer going online for extended sessions of research. Instead, their internet usage is described as ‘micro-moments,’ or quick instances of online activity in which they actively search for specific information.

‘I-Want-To-Know’ Moments Defined

Some of these instances are called ‘I-want-to-know’ moments. In these moments, a person uses a device to search for answers to questions, whether out of a desire to make a better decision or simply for curiosity’s sake. These moments might be broken down as follows.

A Scenario

Suppose you’re relaxing for the evening in front of your TV. A commercial comes on, and it makes some astronomical claims about a product’s capabilities. You don’t really feel like you need the product itself, but if it’s all it claims to be, it might be worth looking into. And after all, you kind of wonder if it actually does everything the commercial says it does.

So you reach for your phone and ask Siri to pull up some reviews. That moment is when your question needs to be answered, and you’ll probably stick with whatever information you find—positive or negative.

Making the Most of the Moment

If the company is smart, they’ve probably published some content about their product that will work within this moment. The response they tailor for the question you have (something like “Is this thing legit?”) needs to have these qualities:

• It must be concise and quickly digestible.
• It must have a genuine tone that is consistent with the company’s other advertising.
• It should be informative. If it provides no value in the first few seconds, it will likely go ignored.
• It should be optimized for search engines so it ranks high on the list.

A wise company will have incorporated content onto their site that will provide the answers you are looking for. Those answers will be quick, succinct, and informative.

Now, if you’re a company looking to make the most of ‘I-want-to-know’ moments, internet marketing services like Accelerate Online Marketing can assist you, so contact us today.

I want to talk to you today about A/B Testing and always keeping your website up-to-date. So, when we look at web design, I have a lot of clients that, in the past, have not really messed with their website much for maybe a few years. They have it designed, they spent a lot of money with an agency, and then leave it alone for two, three, or maybe more, maybe 5, 6 years, and they really don’t significantly change it.

So what happens is they get up to date with technology and then it stays stagnant and technology keeps going upwards. Finally, they jump up and are in line with the rest of the world.

Mobile Responsive Design is probably the most recent example of a website update that a lot of people didn’t do immediately and now everyone is finally catching up to it. But what if we thought about it a different way, and let’s take the best in-breed companies, and I’ll have you think about Amazon right now. So amazon.com, can you remember a time when they made a radical update to their website layout and changed it completely? No, because they haven’t done it.

Their website instead has improved in small increments literally on a daily basis. Now, that company and their entire business is based on their website so they do it all the time, but even if we made small incremental changes on a weekly or monthly basis, the website can stay up-to-date and current without having to have a radical design change.

One of the other challenges with radical design change is if you have a successful site and you completely change it, sometimes you throw the baby out with the bad water.

I’ve seen sites that have maybe a somewhat ugly design, but they work. They get it redesigned and suddenly they don’t perform as well. Instead, if you implement an A/B test on a regular basis to determine if a small change will improve or decrease performance, and then only implement winners, you’re constantly enhancing your site rather than taking two steps forwards or one step back.

With over 100 million .COM names registered (and counting) some businesses are finding it exceedingly difficult and more expensive to find competitive edge in SEO and SEM.

With most meaningful .COMs taken, businesses are spending more to drive traffic to their domains.

Our team wanted to research how keyword-rich new gTLD domain names affected the SEM value of an online property. In other words, would naming a domain with a new gTLD (in this case, .BEST) rather than the traditional .COM have a positive statistical impact on a website?

Based on our testing and research of a series of domains on Google throughout May 2016 (testing which included hundreds of keywords and thousands of impressions), Globe Runner arrived at the conclusion that the .BEST domain conferred a tangible benefit over the .COM domain in online advertising efforts.

As pictured below, utilizing a .BEST domain boosted results both in cost and clicks.

Our research shows that you can save money and reduce your cost per lead by using one of the new gTLD domain names.

Particularly in the moving industry, the .BEST domain name allowed us to save dollars-per-click within Google AdWords. In the long-term, after thousands of clicks, this price difference would make for significant savings.

If you’d like to know more about the sponsored study, download our report and compare the results between .Best and .Com domains.

by Alicia Kan

Everyone always asks a digital agency about their keyword research process. The truth is that there are as many techniques as there are ways to take your coffee: Literally hundreds, and no way is right or wrong.

At Globe Runner, we’ve got a keyword research framework that everyone has customized with their favorite tools and resources. Use it to build your own process for your own purposes, and keep it flexible enough to accommodate any new keyword research developments that come along.

Why conduct keyword research at all?

Because skillfully incorporating search terms your target audience is using to find your products or services increases the likelihood of their finding you. Whether you’re launching a new website, aiming to grow your blog readership or wanting to increase your social media followers, doing keyword research helps to make your activity more focused and strategic.

Step 1: Do baseline and gap analyses

If you are working on improving your website, what does the current situation look like and where would you want it to be? Start with how many keywords the site is actually ranking for. Create a spreadsheet to keep track of all the terms, and to give you a firm idea of how close/far you are to your goal.

Each section of the site should have a tab in your spreadsheet. For example, if you have a fashion e-commerce site, have a tab for each category of clothing, e.g. tops, bottoms and shoes. Each tab will have multiple types/variations of keywords. Tops might have t-shirts, tank tops, blouses and so on.

Keeping a spreadsheet not only organizes your activity but allows you to break down the job in manageable chunks. It also gives you a sense of progress as you complete each section.

Step 2: See how you stack up against the competition

After you’ve assessed where you are and where you want to be, it’s time to look at the competition. What keywords are they ranking for?

Use SEM Rush to plug in your site as well as those of a few worthy competitors. With SEM Rush you get a better idea of what your site and those of your competitors are ranking for and how they’ve been affected by Google’s algorithm updates over the years.

Under the ‘Organic Research’ tab, find the ‘Positions’ menu (see red arrow in our example using Inbound.org). You’ll see a list of keywords as well as a graphic showing historical data. Export the organic positions data (where the other red arrow points to). This way you get the ‘money terms’ only.

Once you’ve exported the list, delete all columns except for these:

• Keyword
• Position
• Search Volume
• URL
• Competition
• Number of Results

Sort by Search Volume – Largest to Smallest.

Step 3: Get creative — find suggestions

Use the keywords you gathered and plug them into Google for it to auto-suggest related terms. You’ll see several recommendations that users might be more apt to choose over their original search term. We’re using one of the terms that Inbound.org is ranking for on page 1, and that’s ‘hubspot certification’.

Pull terms you don’t have in your spreadsheet and add them to the relevant tab. You’ll also see a similar list of suggestions at the bottom of the search page.

Rather interesting how ‘exam answers’ and ‘cheat sheet’ are popular related searches 🙂

Google’s auto-suggest feature is just one tool to use in digging up other related keywords but there are more choices out there, such as:

Google Keyword Planner. Obviously where everyone starts. ‘It allows you to easily organize keywords and download them in a format that can be imported into Adwords Editor.’ – Katy

Keywordtool.io. ‘It lets you see what kind of questions people are asking.’ – Jenna

Hashtagify. ‘Great for finding popular terms on social.’ – Lauren

Keyword Shitter (yes, it exists). ‘Easy to use; no fluff.’ – Zain

As for myself, I like using different tools depending on the situation. Moz’s relaunched Keyword Explorer has at least two billion keywords to nerd out to — this Reddit thread is a great conversation between Russ, the developer who worked on it, and members of the SEO subreddit. Google Trends is particularly useful for determining seasonal content — enter a search term and it’ll show search trends over time and related terms at the bottom of the page. Spyfu is worth its weight in gold when it comes to PPC and beyond. I’ve used competitors’ best performing ads to extract keywords for web copy for instance.

Don’t forget too that sometimes you can find gems closer to home. If you’ve got Google Search Console all set up, head over to the ‘Search Traffic’ tab and down to ‘Search Analytics’. You can filter Queries by ‘how’, ‘why’ and other qualifiers in order to see what questions people are typing into the browser.

Step 4: Test your terms

By now, you should have a dizzying abundance of keywords. It’s time to narrow them down to the best ones.

Enter the keywords you’ve gathered into Google’s Keyword Planner — click the ‘Keyword Ideas’ tab below the bar graph to find exact search volumes for the terms you entered. Below it you will see several keywords similar to what you entered that would be good candidates as well. Look for keyword opportunities with high search volumes and low to medium competition that may not have been targeted previously.

Once you’ve narrowed down the list, enter them into the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool to determine how competitive the terms are. The difficulty will be expressed as a percentage; the higher the percentage, the more competitive the term will be.

Have thoughts on Grep Words, Top Visor and other new(er) keyword research tools? Know of any other resources? Add them to the comments below.

Photo of antique keys by Sergio K via Flickr