Update (August 2020): I am not sure if the tool described in this article is still available to the general public. Please let me know if you still can install it, or if you found a replacement.
It’s been a while since anyone in the SEO/PPC industry made available an advanced, powerful tactic on how/what to use to optimize your SEO and/or PPC landing pages.
I’ll show you how to reverse engineer the relevance of a web page using the Ad Intelligence add-on for Excel.
The purpose of the Ad Intelligence add-on is to help you find as many as possible keywords to advertise on, so Microsoft makes more $$$. But this tool has a better use as well: reverse engineer and improve your landing pages and help you optimize them for search engines.
Let’s get started!
Keep in mind that you need to have an AdCenter account in order to use this tool. If you don’t have one, go and create one. Then, install the add-on and start your Excel. If this a new install you will be asked to provide the username and the password of your account.
Click on the Ad Intelligence tab. Now type the URL of the page you want to analyze and optimize on cell A1 and select the cell by clicking on it:
Next, click on the Keyword Extraction icon and you will see new columns, similar to:
What the new table is telling you, is that for the provided URL, there is a 0.8536 confidence (or 85% relevancy) that the content on that page (URL) is highly related to the keyword search engine optimization service. The maximum confidence is 1.00 (thou I never saw this in real life). The higher the confidence number is, the more the content is relating to that specific keyword and the lower the minimum CPC will be.
To reverse engineer the confidence factors, all you have to do is to test the page against various SEO factors, like the title tag, h1, h2, body keywords density, etc. Change one element at a time, and rerun the Keyword Extraction.
Remember to always keep the original file unaltered and test your ideas on copies. I also suggest that once you identified a winning combination (confidence higher than 0.9) move it to a specific directory for your MSN Ad Center and point your ads to the new page. Eventually, you may want to test the page performance in search engines (rankings) and see the results.
Let’s say you want to see how changing the title tag is affecting confidence. After a few tweaks, we reached a great confidence level:
Well, that’s all folks. Happy testing and do not forget to share findings with us.
TIP: you may find some page to be relevant to keywords that are not really prominently on that page. Think of the backlinks when you find them.