Insights

Wasteful Wednesday #25 – Keyword of the Week “Scholar”

Watch Episode 25 on "Scholar":

← Watch Episode 24 on “Definitions”

Read the Transcript on Episode 25 on "Scholar":

What's up friends, Wil Reynolds here and I'm back for another Wasteful Wednesday.

This Wednesday I decided to look for clues and domains around Google Scholar.

So I think that this video is going to be helpful for almost eve ryone, but it's going to be most helpful for those folks that are in the healthcare industry.

We decided to take a look at where Google Scholar is showing up in the top five or top ten results. Then use that information to say, "if Google is showing Google scholar in the top few, that means that people might also be searching for parts of journals and then clicking on my clients' ads when that's not what we want".

So let me go ahead and show you a couple of examples to just give you a feel on why you might want to take your organic rank data, join it to your paid data and start saving some money.


Keyword of the Week: "Scholar"

Walkthrough: Healthcare Related Queries

Query: "Leukemia proton beam therapy"

I don't know anything about this query, but I do know that Google is listing Google Scholar as a top result.

That doesn't mean that these are not worth targeting for people in paid, but it does tell you that Google has learned over time that some people searching for that are looking for scholarly articles.

And they're putting that right up here at the top. So that's a pretty strong clue.

Query: "CBT for depressed children"

This is an actual query somebody typed in. Again, I get to see these scholarly articles at the top.

It might make me think differently about my strategy on what I'm going to negate.

Query: "Hospice nurses and addiction"

I want to call this one out scholarly articles for hospice nurses and addiction.

So what I thought was really interesting about this query is look at the ad, it's specifically for people that are healthcare workers who are facing addiction issues and the page itself is really about health care professionals.

I just thought that man, this is the kind of thing that you really want to use this data to help you to target people better, specific to things that matter to them.

Query: "low dose mammography"

Google believes that scholarly articles are helpful in this process for somebody searching for words like these.

You can see down here that we have different sites paying for those words, which is fine, and it might be working great for them.

I'm just saying that when you see the scholarly article, it's another clue that helps you as a marketer to better understand what Google learned about that searcher and what is Google using all that learning to think is the best answer for them.

Walkthrough: In-the-Wild Examples

Query: "technology and consumer behavior"

Here's a company going after that word probably makes sense, but it is telling that there is some scholarly articles here showing as well.

What I'm saying today is not to go negate these words. I'm never saying that. What I'm saying is, it's another clue for you to use to determine whether or not those words are working for you.

It's another clue for you to understand just what might be on the minds of your customers or the searcher so you can better target them.

All right. Have a lovely Wednesday.


Key Takeaways

  • Combine SEO and PPC data to identify Google scholar snippets that give intel into user intent when searching for a specific query.
  • Keep watching Wasteful Wednesday episodes here!

New call-to-action


Sign up for our newsletter for more posts like this delivered straight to your inbox & subscribe to our channel on YouTube to be notified of new videos!

SIGN UP FOR NEWSLETTER

We love helping marketers like you.

Sign up for our newsletter for forward-thinking digital marketers.

Wil Reynolds
Wil Reynolds
CEO & Vice President