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.

Hal explains that advertisers want to show relevant ads (most of the time), users want to see relevant ads, and Google wants the best for both advertisers and users.

Hal explains how the maximum Cost Per Click (CPC) is not necessarily what the advertiser will pay.

Hal continues to explain quality score. The most important factor is Click Through Rate (CTR), followed by relevancy (how well ads relate to keywords bid upon), and last, the landing page quality in relation to both ads and keywords bid upon.

Quality score ensures that the most relevant advertiser is ranked first and therefore gets the most visibility. Quality Score also ensures that the price paid per click is reduced for the most relevant advertiser.

Watch the video below for a clear, precise explanation:

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.