Ride the Long Tail for profit

We love those ‘Best Of’ lists in the UK. Well, Channel 4, a host of popular magazines and the press do. Top chat up lines; best ever music videos; you name it, we’ve been polled over it and the results banded about and hotly debated by the water-cooler.

The requirement to ‘be the best,’ to ‘top all polls’ and to be positioned and sold as such has been endemic to traditional marketing activity in the relentless battle to catch the eye and ultimately the wallet of the consumer.

The physical limitations of this selling arena, be that in the media used or even the time we consumers actually have to absorb traditional push advertising has distorted and even dumbed down consumer choice.

But the digital age is revolutionising attitudes to evaluation and buying, with a host of new trends and developments now the consumer has full power. It’s a fascinating theory expounded by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine using the entertainment industry as an example.

And then there are search engines. Establishing a search engine marketing campaign involves a great deal of research in establishing exactly which keywords and phrases are responsible for driving traffic to a site.

Indeed, honing a list of 20 ‘benchmark’ keywords and phrases is the cornerstone of Vertical Leap’s Fully Managed Search Engine Marketing Service.

A new campaign should feature a spread of competitive keywords, which have to fight hard against competing pages in Google, Yahool and MSN for instance, right through to those not so well known phrases that may only be responsible for a site being found a handful of time a month.

Why bother with the lesser known keywords and phrases? Well, because believe it or not, queries that are less mainstream can be responsible for more actual conversions, and sooner, than benchmark ones.

And here is the crux of the issue: good search engine marketing will campaign the ‘head’ of performing words and phrases, but must never ignore the potential of the ‘long tail’ – the thousands of keywords and phrases generally ignored by marketers who instead obsess with why the most competitive search keywords and phrases are not on the first page of Google.

In many ways the power of the long tail is a further indicator of how unlimited selection is revealing the truth about what sales prospect want and how they go about finding it on the web.

Unlimited selection means there is no single route to your web site; the long tail dispenses with the convention of entry always being via a home page (or treating it like some kind of magazine cover) and provides literally thousands of opportunities for motivated people to find your site first - with the right optimisation, of course.

Instead of adhering to the old 80/20 marketing mantra – where the top search terms drive 80% of the business, marketers evaluating more mature search engine marketing campaigns are finding that the sum total of those less popular search terms can frequently add up to more conversions that those battle-weary top 10 keywords.

Vertical Leap has recognised this trend and features its own Analytics module to track benchmark keywords and phrases, but also those which are ‘acquired’; search queries which are either highly specialised or use an unconventional word formation or even misspelling.

Over the life of a campaign, such tracking can point to opportunities that might otherwise be missed for new rounds of optimisation and even specialist pages to further build on these visits and conversions. A degree of fluidity should be maintained in constantly monitoring and progressing performance.

Vertical Leap’s Campaign Delivery Managers proactively monitor this on a client’s behalf.

The power of the long tail is further proof that the emerging digital economy is going to be very different from today’s culture of mass marketing consumerism. The art and science of bringing a company’s products and services to the attention of their prospects online is simply not as regimented and defined a it is in the conventional world.

Reaching new business, Vertical Leap’s strap-line is no empty promise. Our mission is to get your website found not just on Top Ten or Twenty keywords and phrases, but via literally hundreds. By making our client’s websites search engine friendly through making recommendations ranging from which keywords and phrases to campaign through to changes in the ‘meta-data’ or the page code, the aim is to maximize your share of the long tail.

Let Managed Search Engine Marketing ride the long tail for you. You’ll find it more profitable than you expect.