22 December 2009

Let's pretend you own a business that sells home furniture, and your mission is to dramatically increase the number of couches you unload. You're looking to generate most of your business promoting your company online. How do you do it? Just a little bit a research will tell you that millions of people type the search query “couch” into Google alone every single month, and presumably most of them are at least starting to think about buying one. If you do the search yourself, you'll also find that the keyword phrase is heavily targeted organically and in paid listings by some of the world's biggest companies and organizations.

Now you could invest a lot of money into showing up prominently for that search and, yes, doing so would probably increase your sales figures provided your website is designed well and your products are worthwhile. But if you're looking for a more affordable and quicker way to go about it, you'll go after the terms that have significantly lower search volumes but, when added up, will account for most of your business. Instead of concentrating on a few big terms like “couch,” “couches” and “leather couch,” you could go after more targeted terms like “green sofa couch,” “couch for living room” and “white couch living room” and see a bigger return on your investment.

Why's that? Any SEO who knows what she's talking about will tell you that most of a site's traffic – usually around 75 percent – comes from long-tail terms that alone may only have a handful of searches each per month. They also tend to be searched for by consumers who have a pretty good idea of what they want, and if they find you during the buying cycle, you're in a great position to close them. Someone typing just “couch” is likely at the beginning of the cycle, while someone who searches for “black leather couch living room” is probably a lot closer to making a purchase.

The term “long tail,” when applied to search, comes from Chris Anderson, who documented in an October 2004 edition of Wired Magazine that Netflix and Amazon.com got most of their revenues not from blockbusters and bestsellers, but from lesser-known movies and literature. Anderson expanded on his concept in the book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.” In short, he found, it's more effective to sell smaller quantities of many low-demand items than larger quantities of a few extremely popular ones.

So, how can you apply this theory to your SEO campaign? Create lots and lots of pages of relevant content about your products and services targeting keywords phrases that don't have a lot of search volume. Long-tail search phrases typically take less effort to rank on and they also tend to convert better than ones with high search volumes. As long as your site is structured properly and you have quality links pointing back to your site, you'll be in good shape.

08 October 2009

Google has launched a new advertising platform geared toward businesses targeting consumers in their local areas. The program, which is rolling out in the San Francisco and San Diego areas, differs from Google Adwords in that businesses are charged a flat monthly fee based on their categories and locations rather than having to shell out dollars for every visitor who clicks their ads.
The listings will appear above unpaid local listings when users conduct searches as well as in Google Maps. With the listings, advertisers get a basic ad displaying their company's information, address and contact details, a unique phone number that Google will use to track calls and regular reports on conversion. It's unclear what the pricing will be for businesses in New Hampshire and New England, but it'll likely be based on search volume.

Make no mistake about it. This is clearly a first step toward Google doing what we've expected they would for years: charging local businesses for inclusion in the first page of search results. For now at least, small businesses with tiny marketing budgets can have some visibility in Google by creating and maintaining listings in the Google Local Business section. Now, we suspect, that section of free local results will continually be phased out in favor of paid listings. It might not be tomorrow, but it'll happen. If you're a business owner, it's important to not rely on something that may soon be irrelevant, even if it is free for the time being.

Obtaining organic search engine results will now be more important than ever. Sure, it might be worth the monthly fee for a paid ad, but organic results are still more trusted by consumers. In fact, about 75 percent of search engine users ignore paid listings completely and instead focus on the unpaid ones. We're not anti-PPC here, but we always recommend that our clients devote more of their resources to obtaining prominent organic ranking through honest SEO techniques. It's wise to go after the results that the vast majority of click, and, unlike PCC campaigns, search engine rankings don't automatically disappear if you pull the plug on funding your efforts.

When local listings are no longer free, the competition for organic results will be even more fierce. Some industries are already pretty cutthroat when it comes to SEO – real estate brokers, auto dealers and lawyers come to mind – and we could very well see the same level of competition trickle down to fields that even SEO novices can obtain high rankings in at the moment. And surely Bing and Yahoo!, which will soon use Bing as its default search engine, will at least consider charging for local listings if Google does so first.

 

If you want to learn more about SEO and PPC campaigns, feel free to contact us by calling (603) 529-8175 or shooting us an email.

Written by Administrator | 04 August 2009

The news that Microsoft and Yahoo! plan to join forces to compete with Google makes it clear that SEOs can no longer concentrate on obtaining high rankings on just one search engine. Google has long dominated the search marketplace, but there are still other search engines that, if you properly optimize for them, will drive relevant traffic to your site. And while Google may be on top now, the company is only a decade old and there's no telling what the future holds for it. It probably won't happen tomorrow, but consumers may very well jump ship if Microsoft/Yahoo! develops a superior product.

The latest statistics from Hitwise, an Experian company that tracks Internet traffic, show that Google's marketshare is at 71.42 percent, far ahead of Yahoo!'s 17.18 percent, Bing's 8 percent and Ask's 2.47 percent. When Microsoft's Bing becomes Yahoo!'s default search engine, the two companies will presumably have roughly 25 percent of the marketshare. Obviously, ignoring a quarter of the market is not a wise business decision, especially when there's evidence that its gaining headway. So far, Microsoft has done a good job at piquing the public's curiosity about Bing, and SEOs have praised the relevancy of its results.

The number of visitors your site gets from search engines other than Google largely depends on the nature of your organization. In the last month, this site has gotten 26.5 percent of its search engine traffic from Yahoo! and Bing. An IT company whose site we manage, however, got only about 5 percent of search engine traffic from them, even though it ranks well on both. That's likely because its tech-savvy clientele is more devoted to Google. They tend to favor Google's stripped-down approach to search.

Since their algorithms are different, it takes extra work to ensure your site ranks highly on all the search engines. Optimizing for Google doesn't automatically lead to high rankings on its rival sites. While Google's algorithm seems to be the most advanced, its competitors appear to be catching up. Years ago, it was possible to rank highly through black-hat techniques like link farming and keyword stuffing, but that's no longer the case. Today, search engines do a good job of weeding out the spammers for the most part. The ones that do slip through the cracks almost always fall off the map completely at some point. The only to obtain long-lasting results is to use above-board tactics that are actually encouraged by search engine developers.

Written by Mike Kalil | 25 June 2009

Press releases are much less powerful than they used to be for SEO purposes. While churning out news releases and submitting them to free sites may not do much, the medium can actually be more powerful than ever if used right. Convincing a single reporter or high-profile blogger to pick up your news is infinitely more beneficial than posting worthless releases all over the place and Digg'ing and StumbleUpon'ing them with your multiple accounts.

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