Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [66]
The technology of search has created nearly endless queries that can be typed by searchers in order to find your website. In fact, in 2007 Google’s VP of Engineering, Udi Manber, presented that 20 percent to 25 percent of search query terms “we have never seen before.” Nearly a quarter of search terms had never been typed into the search box before! Now, that could make your head explode if you dwell on it too long. More recently, Crystal Semantics managing director Ian Saunders said, “Language changes about 5 percent annually” (MediaPost, June 22, 2010). Our language keeps adding new words through new constructions, names, and technologies.
Digital distribution and search technology have created an endless amount of information that can be searched, which allows people to develop very targeted queries, specific to them. Anderson’s book details the finding that simply because something is in the top 10 (books, music, blogs, websites, search terms, and so on), that doesn’t mean it is the most popular. The ultimate lesson from learning about the long tail as applied to keywords means that ranking for a single, general term isn’t going to be the best strategy.
Typically, marketing managers look at website statistics and get the list of top referring terms. However, because of the keyword long tail, this approach does not truly reflect the visitors who came to the website. Consider an example of an ecommerce website to understand how and why the long tail is good news and how it affects your keyword strategy. For that website, the top 10 keyword terms brought 2,000 visitors to the website (Figure 6-14). However, more than 4,600 keywords brought traffic to the website from the search engines. That means that even though 10 terms generated 2,000 visits, the next 4,600+ terms generated 9,400 visits, more than four times the top 10 terms that are typically displayed and reported by most website statistics.
Figure 6-14: The long tail of keyword referrals
The number of visitors generated by the top 10 terms, added up, usually will not come close to the sum of visitors generated by the rest of the terms. In addition, the top 10 terms tend to be the more general keywords. Because they are general, they tend to result in a high concentration of search visitors, but both by numbers and by percentage, they also bring in the fewest conversions. However, because of the top 10 nature of a typical web stats report, those keywords tend to be the focus of many companies, because the ranking for a general keyword is highly desired, either because of business ego or simply because of the perception that a high-ranking, high-traffic term equals success.
When visits are tied to conversions, a more interesting finding arises. The majority of conversions come from the keywords outside the top 10. In fact, in most cases, the top 10 referring keywords will provide only 10 percent to 20 percent of conversions. The majority of conversions come from keyword referrals that are more specific, detailed, and directed than general keywords, which leads us to Wednesday’s topic: understanding the buying cycle.
Wednesday: Understand the Buying Cycle
As you go through the thousands of variations of keywords and see all the words associated with them, you will begin to see certain patterns arise as to the intent of the searcher. This day covers how you can construct your optimization and website content based on the patterns in the buying cycle.
I find the best way to show the buying cycle is to use the example of someone buying a large-screen TV and entertainment