The Digibuzz

Search engine marketing is getting pretty competitive, and the bestselling keywords are becoming expensive. Take a long-tail approach!

Pay-per-click marketing on search engines through programs such as Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing is becoming increasingly popular among marketers worldwide. These programs work on an auction model: Marketers bid for keywords, which when used by Internet users on search engines, will trigger their ads. The ads of the highest bidders, usually, get top billing on search engine result pages for the keywords they have bid on. Marketers then pay the bid amount for every click that a user makes on their ads.

As these programs become more popular with marketers, the competition for keywords and the cost-per-click for popular keywords are constantly rising. So, how can marketers lower their costs and yet get the clicks they desire? Is bidding for the most popular keywords the only way to get traffic and increase ROI?

It certainly is not. More and more people are buying into the long tail concept. So what exactly is the long tail of search engine marketing? Let’s illustrate with an example.

Let’s say you sell digital cameras and accessories online. You want to run a search engine marketing campaign. To begin with, let’s consider the keyword ‘camera’. Let us assume that it’s a very popular keyword and costs Rs. 50 per click and you get 100 clicks per day. Your cost works out to Rs. 5000 per day. Now what if you have a budget of only Rs. 2500 per day? Check out the tail. Buy lower-priced keywords such as ‘3 mega-pixel digital camera’, ‘5 mega-pixel canon digital camera’, ‘nikon digital slr camera’ etc. These keywords will typically be priced much lower than ‘camera’. Though each one of them may deliver lower clicks, a collection of long tail keywords will give you 100 clicks for Rs. 2500 (assuming an average price of Rs. 25) instead of the Rs. 5000 you would have paid for ‘camera’.

Of course, this is a simplistic example, but it brings out the power of the long tail. The term long tail was coined by Chris Anderson in a Wired Magazine article to describe the success of online retailers such as Amazon.com and Netflix.com. Anderson contended that in the physical world, retailers stocked only the bestsellers since shelf space was limited. Online retailers have no such constraints on the inventory that they can stock. As a result, they were able to cater to the narrowest of niches. In the aggregate, these niche markets often proved to be larger than the bestseller or ‘hit’ market.
In search engine marketing, as the cost of popular keywords keeps rising, long tail keywords can be a powerful force

While, the cost per click of long tail keywords will obviously be lower, there are other compelling advantages as well. Broad-based words such as ‘camera’ may indeed attract a large number of searches, but the conversion rates could be much higher at the narrow end of the spectrum. When someone is searching for the keyword ‘camera’, that person may be searching for anything from camera maintenance tips to camera servicing centers. But when someone searches for ‘5 mega-pixel digital camera’ or ‘nikon digital slr camera’, they are looking for a specific product. Clearly, the narrower the search, the more likely they are to convert.

In fact, many experts believe that people who enter long tail keywords are those who are far ahead in the buying cycle. When people begin researching a product they tend to be more broad-based in their queries. But the queries become more and more focused and refined as they approach the end of the buying cycle.

So, it’s not just a question of lowering your costs, but it is also about increasing effectiveness and ROI.
Here’s another reason why the long tail is important. According to Joe Kraus, a co-founder of search engine Excite, while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these represented only 3% of the total volume on Excite. A vast majority – 97% – of its searches came from the `long tail’, that is, queries asked a little over once a day. According to him, Excite went out of business because it couldn’t figure out a way to make money from that long tail.

Search engine marketing has become an extremely important tool for any online marketer. That’s because it’s relatively inexpensive, can be targeted with a fair degree of accuracy to the right audience, and offers the best return on investment. It’s also becoming big business. According to a study by IBIS World, SEMPO, search engine marketing is expected to become a $19.3 billion industry in the year 2011 in North America alone.

So you can imagine the competition that’s going to be out there. To win, just grab the tail!

In the dense undergrowth of the Web, search engine marketing and optimization are far more effective and economical at drawing attention to your website and products than any other online marketing tool. Traditionally, most marketers have used SEO as a direct response mechanism to generate leads.

That may fast be changing. SEO and SEM, if used effectively, can be powerful brand-building tools as well.

Building brand recall through SEO

It’s clear that a vast majority of potential buyers of goods and services, search for relevant websites through search engines; and that searching is one of the most popular activities online. It’s also well known that most searchers don’t look beyond the first few result – pages. Now, let’s say, your company is the leader in the space that you operate in. If you don’t have a good SEO strategy, regardless of how good your products or services are, you are likely to lose out on several brand-building opportunities, to the exclusive benefit of your competitors.

Being prominently present on search engine result pages can significantly increase brand recall and your brand’s association with your products and services.

The online Indian demographic is young, savvy and flush with spending power. No brand builder can afford to ignore this market irrespective of whether you sell your goods online or offline.

Besides, consumers are increasingly going online to research and compare products before they buy even offline. And the tool they use to do this is a search engine. A user-friendly, information-packed, SEO-optimized site is the only way to get traction for your products among these users.

The brand building blocks of SEO

Many marketers in their desire to rank highly on search engines often compromise a brand’s message. While getting a higher rank is important, it is equally important how your site gets displayed on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

There are three components to a listing on an SERP. (1)The Page Title, (2) The Website Description and (3) The URL. Often, companies stuff their titles with keywords that actually communicate no brand message. Use each page title intelligently, because that is what is going to make a user click to your site and experience your brand more deeply if found on first few pages of the Search Result Pages.

Many sites do not fully use the potential of the description Meta tag under the impression that it does not have great SEO value. Always write a crisp and engaging description of your company or your website. It can draw a user into your site.

An often-ignored element is the URL that is displayed on SERPs. Sites that use automated publishing tools such as a CMS have URLs that are dynamically generated. These URLs are unintelligible to users as they contain a string of alphabets and special characters. Your URLs, as far as possible, must be self-explanatory. For example, if you are a maker of digital cameras, it’s better to have something like www.yoursite.com/digital-cameras/slrs.html rather than www.yoursite.com/?l=php-i22u& r=443385294014131&w=5

SEO can help you create a positive first impression on prospective customers, but you must also ensure that your web site delivers on the promise. A mistake many marketers make is to direct users to the homepage of the site (especially with pay-for-click campaigns). A best practice is to direct users to relevant section pages that are easy to navigate, uncluttered and packed with information that is relevant to a user’s query.

Tackling the flip side

While a good SEO strategy can help you attract Internet users to your Web site to experience your brand, it also particularly useful in times of crises. The online medium is all about buzz and compulsively viral. During a crisis, adverse or false information can spread rapidly and then be picked up by search engines. If you don’t have a good SEO strategy in place, it is likely that when users search for a brand, they may find sites or pages that dilute your brand. Search engine optimisation can help you get your message across to prospective customers and make your voice heard above the din.