Imagine using this type of product to see areas of the country that talk about your product, your service, your competition etc.  Obviously it would only work with more popular items but what this Superbowl example teaches me is that the country is diverse, the search terms are influenced by media and events.  Search engine marketing is about understanding what people are searching for, how they are searching, why they are searching and matching your ads with their expectations.

Could Twitter help with understanding messaging by region? Of course.  Think Pop vs. Soda.  By understanding how people reference the same end product depending on region is helpful for any marketing but especially geo-targeted paid search and messaging.  Isn’t it great to know the NY Times is still adding value:)

NY Times Twitter Tweets Map

The focus of her article was the all important Keyword Effectiveness Index which is simply a common sense approach to targeting keywords that aren’t going to be impossible to dominate. Weighing the pros and cons of a keyword based on competition and then deciding where to advertise.  Remembering that the best keywords are the keywords that have high volume, low competition and great return on investment “potential” (until proven) is important because you can easily show up with everyone else and hope for a miracle but it rarely works.

The key questions to ask yourself (and to get answered by using tools) are:

1. How much competition is there?
2. Is it so relevant to my site, page, product it’s scary?
3. Do my pages match the keywords I’m discovering? (if not, fix it)

One of my favorite sites for Keyword Research tools is KeywordCreation.com.  The tools listed include a handful that help figure out what your competition is doing, a handful to help you figure out the terms customers are using, and a handful to help you figure out where the money is.  Once you’ve built a few keyword lists and been able to optimize a keyword marketing plan you start to catch on to the fact that relevance is key! Overall, you as a business owner understand your business better than anyone else.  It’s a matter of not thinking so hard about online marketing and letting your business strategy kick in.