Keyword Selection for: Search Engine Optimization | Search Optimization Marketing | Pay Per Click

“Long Tail” is the distribution of highly searched terms followed by a long “tail” of less frequently searched terms. While each term in the tail may not be searched in significant numbers the total of the numbers can be worth targeting as a group.

 I believe that in search optimization marketing using a large number of targeted terms has the overall cumulative value of a few high volume search terms with much less competition to get well placed.

 “The Long Tail” a recent book by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson goes into great detail about how the economic efficiency of online selling extends the number of products that can be economically marketed. Companies such as Amazon, Netflix, iTunes and Google are taking advantage of this and contributing to their bottom line and the bottom line of a number of clients. This is why the future of business is selling low amounts of much targeted products and services in a large number of very niche markets to add a significant amount to a companies’ bottom line. The concept of The Long Tail should also be applied to search optimization marketing, (SOM) to achieve optimum Internet marketing results.

 Long Tail distribution and search engine marketing can be combined in two different ways. SOM’s high ROI enables a company to market a significantly larger number of products at a low enough cost that long tail distribution is cost effective enough to be effective. The other application of long tail distribution is applying a large number of keywords to your marketing mix to bring in a large number of small searches.

 In the book “The Long Tail” the author uses Amazon as an example of how this would apply. A typical Borders bookstore has about 100,000 books while Amazon carries 3.7 million book titles. The total sales for Amazon include the strong selling books but in addition have an additional 25% of sales for books that are not available in bookstores. The profit margin for these harder to find books is greater so the bottom line is even better at an estimated 33% profit for these books.

 Clients ask me how many search terms they should target. My answer is as many as you can come up with that will target the various vertical markets they wish to sell to. With web sites being created dynamically it is possible today to create an somewhat optimized page for every product a company has available. It is also very effective to create pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns that include a search term for every product name, number and description.

 Some of the highest ROI for PPC search optimization marketing campaigns is for the very specific search terms that include the product name and numbers. Someone searching for a kitchen faucet is just starting to look but someone searching for an American Standard faucet number 3971.000.297 is ready to buy. This targeted search will create a much higher conversion rate and the cost-per-click is much lower for the specific part number creating a significantly higher return on investment.

 The problem with this is that the number of searches for the specific part number is very low. This is not a problem if you have a large number of search terms or products with part numbers. By targeting a large number of terms the small trickles will combine to form virtual rivers of visitors. For natural or editorial search this is effective because the number of competitive pages is very limited for such specific search terms. For natural search to be worth doing it is important to create dynamic pages created from a database that have been optimized for the search engines with the important granular information properly placed in the on-page key ranking factors.

 It is important to use an e-commerce platform that allows changes to the important ranking factors in the page set up. To be effective for PPC it is important to use the proper title, description keyword merge format in the bulk submitted spreadsheet that will automatically target the large list of search terms.

 While all this has been made possible thanks to the tools that Google, Overture and the other search engines now make possible it is still beyond the ability of the average user to mange hundreds or even thousands of search terms.

 Top selling terms are still important but targeting the Long Tail of search terms and products will create a much more profitable bottom line.

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