SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Ignore the Tail at Your Peril! from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

The long tail can be applied to both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) management alike.

I have seen many clients and SEO/PPC agencies alike who target the “fat head” and/or “chunky middle” (see the video for an explanation), even sometimes just the “fat head” – but they do not consider or even recognize the long tail.

As Rand explains, up to 75% of all traffic can come from the long tail. Therefore if you are only targeting the “fat head” and/or “chunky middle”, you are missing out on most of the traffic that could be coming to your website, and the most relevant traffic at that!

Yahoo have lost 15%, MSN have lost 21% and Ask has also lost 21% over last year.

Searchers are also now using longer search queries when searching for what they want on the web. What does this mean? This means that the average searcher now knows (better) how to use a search engine to find the results that he/she is searching for.

Longer search queries are becoming more popular as year over year increases (and decreases) show just that.

• 1 word search queries have dropped by 3%
• 2 word search queries have dropped by 5%
• 3 word search queries have remained stable
• 4 word search queries have increased by 2%
• 5 word search queries have increased by 6%
• 6 word search queries have increased by 8%
• 7 word search queries have increased by 12%
• 8 word search queries have increased by 22%

This means that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) management have become a lot more difficult as search queries become longer and therefore more varied.

Paid advertising using keyword targeting will become more difficult as accounts become larger due to increased keyword numbers. As keyword phrases become more targeted, so too must paid advertising campaigns such as Google AdWords, in order to maximise quality score, reduce Cost Per Click (CPC), and thereby increase Return On Investment (ROI).

What effect this will have on Google’s ranking system (quality score) may be questionable as Google may not be able to determine which advertisers are keeping their AdWords campaigns targeted and therefore relevant to users’ queries. This is something that Google will have to think about before implementing this feature.

However, it is most likely that paid search without keywords won’t be happening for a while yet as the current system is working very well and currently there is no need for change. Change now may upset the apple cart and Google wouldn’t want that considering that 99% of their revenue comes from paid advertising.

Selling SEO Projects Against PPC Campaigns discusses the easy part of selling PPC, the hard part of selling SEO and finally, selling your SEO product.

Although this article is not so much for clients reading about whether SEO is a better investment over PPC or vice versa, it does offer some interesting information for the client on why PPC is easy to sell, and why SEO is more difficult in comparison.

Often Ad Text is overlooked as it would appear that your bid price and CTR are more important. This is however not necessarily the case.

The wording used in your ad text must connect with your visitors and trigger a reaction to turn them into a potential client. This is extended further into the landing page (which website page the ad points to), however that is another story altogether.

It is easy to throw ad text relevancy to the side as CTR can take over. When running your ads side by side you may see that one ad is achieving a much higher click through rate than the other. CTR refers to the amount of clicks an ad receives divided by the number of impressions (or views) it has before someone clicks on it. So for example ad ad that receives 100 impressions and gets 10 clicks is achieving a CTR of 10%. Depending on the keyword phrase bid upon, this may be high or it may be low.

Another problem with focussing on CTR is that some PPC managers will focus on inflating CTR as much as possible due to the fact that they are being paid in percentage of ad spend. Therefore the more clicks they get, the more they get paid. While this may increase visitors to the site, it may not result in the most conversions. The same goes for advice from Google as they also wish to increase your ad spend due to the fact that Google gets 99% of their revenue stream from AdWords.

Optimising for Return On Investment (ROI) as well as CTR will result in the best performance of your campaigns. Targeting the correct keywords and using them strategically in your ad text will work to improve your Return On Investment, especially when combined with conversion tracking to be sure that visitors coming to your site are actually performing some sort of goal – be it visiting the contact us page, filling out a form, adding an item to their shopping cart and proceeding to your payment gateway, or visiting a specific series of pages in a row.

Therefore choosing an ad that results in the most conversions & having a higher Return On Investment, and also looking at the ad that receives the highest click through rate – choosing this ad will ultimately give you the ultimate Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

In this article on “Paid Search: Building Brand Loyalty Two Seconds At A Time“, Brian Yamada from iProspect, discusses three elements of building brand loyalty with paid search – relevance, messaging and feedback.

In this article on “Click Fraud 101“, Ron Jones from Search Engine Watch, discusses the ins and outs of click fraud, who does it, and what you can do about it, as the advertiser.

In summary, click fraud is a malicious act carried out by someone who intentionally clicks on your ad when they are not at all interested in your service or product. This may be carried out by your competition in order to drain your Pay Per Click budget, or it may be done by site owners who get a revenue from Pay Per Click engines when someone (in this case them), clicks on the ads that are displayed on their website.

Therefore the main focus of Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click marketing is on keyword phrases. Keyword phrases consist of numerous keywords stringed together. Usually when we type our search query into, say, Google, we will start off with something basic like ‘books’. If that keyword is too broad we may refine it by adding another keyword, ‘books hong kong’. Further we could add to that ‘dean koontz books hong kong’. In fact, the number of keywords strung together could be infinite, but usually we will look at a maximum of about 5 keywords in a keyword phrase as users are less likely to use more than that.

When it comes to optimizing ones website, or managing a Pay Per Click account such as Google AdWords, these keyword phrases come into play.

With Search Engine Optimization it is highly important to have these keyword phrases visible throughout your site. This may mean:

• Keywords in your domain name eg. www.hiking-hong-kong.com
• Keywords in your Title and Meta tags (coding tags used to describe the content within your website)
• Keywords in your website content
• Keywords in your image description tags
• Keywords in the links that point to your page from other websites eg. Hong Kong Hiking Trails

The more relevant your website looks to a search engine in terms of the keyword phrase a user searches for, the more likely that your website will be listed higher in the search engine results.

However it is not as simple as just adding keywords wherever you can at a whim. Careful placement has to take place to ensure that there are not too many keywords used on a website. In the past, spammers or Black Hat SEOs used to take advantage of search engines by inserting hundreds of keywords into a page to trick the search engines into ranking their websites above the rest. These days, as a result, search engines are much more diligent.

Consequently, Keyword Density plays a big role alongside the use of keyword phrases to make sure that there are not too many incidences of a keyword in any particular area, which, if too many exist, may result in a penalty consisting of a drop in rankings on a search engine rather than that which was sought, a rise in rankings. Search Engines are very strict now, as they want to provide the best user experience by providing the best search results. 

Similarly, Keyword Phrases play the most important role in Pay Per Click marketing. Search Engines use Pay Per Click engines such as Google’s AdWords to list sponsored links on their search results as well as on content sites. These sponsored links (ads) are triggered to appear when a user types in a keywords phrase in a search engine that matches the keyword phrase bid upon by the advertiser. This also works with content placement ads (ads that appear within the content of other websites) in that a site about ‘dean koontz books’ will trigger your ad selling ‘dean koontz books’ if the content on that site mentions Dean Koontz and if you have also bid upon that keyword phrase.

With Google AdWords, for example, different factors play a role in optimization such as:

• Campaigns focused on certain demographics (in relation to where your product/service is and which languages you provide it in)
• Ad Groups focused on different keyword groups eg. Dean Koontz, Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle
• Keyword phrases related to these specific Ad Groups
• Exact Match, Phrase Match, Broad Match or Negative Match keyword phrases (different ways to bid on a keyword phrase depending on the variations of what a user may actually type into a search engine)
• Ad Text and the use of keyword phrases used therein
• Keyword Phrases used on your website (where your ad points to) in relation to the keyword phrases you are bidding on

In both cases, Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click marketing, Keywords or Keyword Phrases to be more precise, play one of the most important roles. Therefore it is paramount that you get this right when either establishing a Search Engine Optimization campaign or in targeting the correct clients in a Pay Per Click engine. Because if the keywords you target are incorrect, then your entire campaign will be worthless and your Return On Investment (ROI) will be nothing as you will be targeting the wrong group of people.