The Fortune 500 might have spent $51 million per day on PPC keywords in Q4/2008, but only 20.82% of those keywords rank in the top 100 organically.
What does this tell us?
In theory a company should focus investment on keywords that are generating business benefit, i.e., driving sales or generating leads. If we assume the FTSE 500 is efficient with their investments (in fairness this is unlikely!) then the keywords they are bidding upon must be important to their business, right?
So if the FTSE 500 only appear organically on 20.82% of those keywords you can conclude that they are doing a pretty bad job of performing SEO to target the keywords they deem as important to their business.
Another interesting point from Conductor report was the mention that FTSE 500 visibility decreased on the longer tail search terms.
Why is this so interesting?
It’s particularly interesting to me because the long tail is a critical component to SEO success and yet clearly large organisations in particular lack the understanding in this area. It suggests those that do have a strategy still only target the broad, generic phrases which drive volume, but are far more competitive to achieve high rankings upon.
Why is the long tail so important?
The long tail consists mainly of search terms that are around 3 or more keywords in length, for example “seo services Leeds” could be deemed as long tail.
The generic phrases like “seo” are huge in terms of their search volumes, but this makes them extremely competitive and difficult to obtain a high rank upon. A large organisation could spend a significant volume of budget and resource on targeting this phrase, and still never get close to a first page ranking.
Long tail phrases on the other hand are far less competitive, but in my experience provide a higher level of conversion, because they are much more specific. The increased specificity of the search term suggests a user that is further along the line in terms of a purchase decision.
If you have content that matches that long tail query, your opportunity to rank highly on that term and win the customer is significantly increased when compared to the broad, generics.
Whilst these long tail queries may only drive 1 – 10 visits per month, combined they may well account for 75%+ of your total organic visits. The long tail when added together is far bigger than the head.
Interesting Fact: 20% of Google searches each month are completely unique, never seen in the search database before. Thanks to SEOMoz for highlighting that statistic.
Don’t waste your SEO investment chasing big generics because someone more senior says “why aren’t we showing on the term x” educate them about the long tail, and produce a strategy which attacks those terms.
Here are some ideas:
Look at your analytics
I know from experience that if you manage SEO or PPC in a large organisation it’s hard to find the time to really delve into your web analytics and indentify the long tail search queries that are driving your numbers.
The fact is though, you need to find time because it only takes a single targeted piece of content to start ranking organically on that great PPC keyword that is driving amazing ROI.
Try one or both of these ideas:
Create a blog
Probably the best way to drive the long tail traffic is to create a corporate blog and then create posts specifically targeting your keywords picked up in the analytics sweep.
If the users are searching for something specific then try and answer their query, and deep link into relevant content or products within your transactional site. Be careful not to just dump keyword rich content onto the page though, because ultimately it still needs to drive the conversion.
Focus time on improving on site content
Similar to the blogging idea, if you know that a particular long tail phrase is driving great ROI from PPC, then either create some specific content within your site, or look for some related content that already exists and work on improving it.
For example,
- Is the title tag well optimised?
- Could you modify the header tag?
- Could you build some additional internal links into the page?
- Could you move it up your product hierarchy?
- Could you add a more descriptive Alt tag?
These are all relatively small changes, but given the less competitive nature of long tail search queries, small changes can have a big effect on your ranking in this area.
I hope this has been useful, please comment and/or share if so.