You’ve probably heard people talk about the ‘long tail’ of search many times, but the key challenge for most businesses is how to exploit it. A well optimised e-commerce site could pick up visits on literally thousands of long-tail search phrases every month, but it’s less obvious how a service-based business might go about this. Fortunately, there is a great chunk of search traffic you can easily capitalise on – question based search.

Question based search is exactly what it says on the tin – a situation where a user types a question into Google, rather than the name of a product or service. The type of search often indicates the user is in the research phase rather than ready to buy/sign up, but this isn’t always the case (for instance, many users will search for something like “where can I find a ….”). Either way, if you are thinking long-term, you’ll gladly take the extra traffic (and potential leads) that ranking well for these particular terms can yield.

In order to succeed with a question search strategy, you need to break the process down into 4 steps :

1. Identify your customers questions
2. Decide which questions you’d like to answer
3. Answer the questions
4. ‘Convert’ the searcher into a lead

Identifying Questions

There are many places where you can look for questions that have already been asked – although you’ll be competing with other websites, you’ll have the benefit of knowing that those questions are definitely of interest to people. Some ideas for finding questions would be as follows :

1. Look at your analytics search phrases ; the chances are, you’re receiving the occasional visitor on question searches already. Another way to use your existing site data is to use your internal search data – which you can also track through many analytics packages.
2. Do a google search for a broad term, and then select ‘discussions’ from the options menu on the left
3. Search websites such as Yahoo Answers, as well as any industry specific forums individually

I did a search on Google for the word ‘accountant’, and clicked discussions – an encouraging 700,000+ results. Yahoo Answers alone had over 4,000 results.

Also, don’t forget about the questions that may never have been asked – you could raid documents, textbooks and even exam papers here – an accountant, for instance, might find that many of the questions in their tax textbook would be of great interest to small businesses.

Filtering questions
Given that finding enough questions to answer won’t be a problem for many businesses, selecting the best questions to try and answer is probably the key challenge. You’ll want to consider several factors in this,  but some of the more important questions you should ask yourself are as follows:

1. Can I actually answer the question? (be honest with yourself!)
2. How long will it take to provide a good answer? (again, be realistic)
3. Is there likely to be any value in attracting this type of visitor?
4. What competition am I up against?
5. How often do I think this question may be asked?

By filtering with the above 5 criteria, you should get a large number of questions that will be likely to offer a reasonable reward in respect to the effort expended in answering. You can then pass the list to your staff / content writers or perhaps even work down them yourself in an effort to create some genuinely useful content.

Answering the questions

Now, depending on available resources, this part could be the easiest or most difficult. Factual based questions are likely to be among the quickest to answer, while complex questions may need a good writer to explain. Either way, you’re going to need a section of your website where you can actually put these answers. Some of the places you could put this content are as follows:

1. FAQs section
2. A knowledge base system
3. Your blog
4. A traditional ‘articles’ section

If the system you choose has the flexibility to allow users to ask their own questions, you should try and take advantage of this, since you’ll be getting content ideas  for free via this route.

Getting a conversion

Probably most important of all – you’ll need to get these visitors to convert. Often providing different ways of converting will be your best bet here.

If you think you can convert your customers straight into leads, then by all means push a ‘get a free quote’ or similar message at the customer, but if this isn’t the case then you might want to consider pushing a softer conversion type. Newsletters, mailing lists, white paper downloads etc might not make you any money right now, but they all provide you with a means of building your customer database, and hopefully an opportunity to sell your services to these visitors in the future.

For a long time, advertisers on Google AdWords have struggled to cope with the large variance of traffic volume and ROI in using Broad Match keywords versus Phrase Match or Exact

The general industry-accepted idea is that while Broad Match keywords are useful for new and old advertisers alike, there are many situations in where using them may not be in the best interests of the advertiser.

Whilst Broad Match keywords promise to give the advertiser maximum exposure, exactly how relevant that exposure is often called into question. The result is that many advertisers will get left with numerous mismatched impressions that negatively affect their campaign quality score and worse, clicks that result in no material gain; as in some instances searchers will click on these mismatched ads, but not go on to convert once on the site. Hence, the cost of that click may not be realised now or ever.

While the more restrictive Phrase Match option covers this issue to a large degree, it achieves that by compromising on ad exposure which means lower traffic and conversion volume. Increased ROI at the cost of significantly lower volume of conversions is not very appealing to businesses/marketing professionals.

The accepted norm in the search marketing community until now has been to start with Broad Match keywords with an extensive list of accompanying negative keywords to manage exposure to relevant searches. Search marketers will then identify the keywords/phrases that perform to the desirable level of ROI and subsequently move them to the stricter Phrase and Exact Match types. In all this, the start of the campaign has been most crucial and the precision and accuracy with which the initial selection of Broad Match and negative keywords work has been of great impact on the success of the campaign.

The search community has long debated over the usefulness of Broad Match and demanded an alternative for and more control over the random search queries their keywords end up getting impressions for. Google have finally answered by introducing a new match type in the arsenal. It’s called the Broad Match Modifier (BMM). Essentially, it fits somewhere between the Broad Match and Phrase Match keyword types. The object it satisfies is to stop individual words from Broad Match keyword phrases from triggering impressions on ‘deemed’ related words in user searches. Google have released the graphic below to explain exactly how BMM differs from all other match types.

Click for larger image

With Broad Match, the words ‘formal’ and ’shoes’ will both be independently considered and matched to singular/plural versions, synonyms and other related words not included in the campaign keyword. ‘Formal’ triggered impressions for ‘Evening’ and ‘Men’s Dress’, while ‘Shoes’ triggered ‘Footwear’ and ‘Wingtips’. If the advertiser earlier only wanted people searching for shoes and Phrase Matched ‘Formal Shoes’, they would lose impressions on searches like ‘Evening Shoes’ and ‘Black Dress Shoes’ because their ad will only show if the phrase ‘Formal Shoes’ was part of the search query.

However, by introducing a “+” sign just before the word shoes, they can achieve exactly what is desired, without losing on a possible load of other search queries that are not part of their campaign.

Google has reported that advertisers who used BMM during beta testing of the new match type reported seeing higher clicks and conversions than before. However, Google reported their findings from advertisers who earlier mainly used the Phrase and Exact Match types. Clearly, the increase in exposure lead them to receive more traffic, but with greater control over click-quality – this probably led to the rise in conversions. The report clearly shows the BMM as a means to entice cautious advertisers to have a more bullish approach with their marketing without losing too much control. But what does it mean for the rest of the advertising community that already uses Broad Match?

Other beta testers have independently revealed that on introducing BMM keywords into campaigns with existing Broad Match keywords, BMMs had significantly higher CTRs and conversion rates than the traditional Broad Match terms. We experienced similar results on testing the BMM with one of our clients.

Overall, we observed average conversions on BMM keywords to be double that of the Broad Match keywords.

All in all, Google seem to have hit the right note with search marketers with this release, although it will be interesting to see how keywords utilising these matching options perform in the longer term.

Please note, for now, the release has been made available to advertisers in the UK and Canada only.

If you have kept up to date with the blog, you will know our Director Kevin Taylor is looking to relive his glory days when he was a young racer. Seeing the 6th Rocky or Mickey Rourke’s return to the silver screen in the ‘Wrestler’, shows you’re never too old to make a comeback!

Last time we left off, Kevin raced well in the E3 Sport team’s Mazda, making good progress. This time around though he had a much tougher time at Cadwell Park on the 5th and 6th of June. Kevin was the only E3 Sport representative with team-mate Chloe Edwards watching from the sidelines. Despite running well in Friday testing, Kevin only managed 17^th on the grid out of 28 cars in Saturdays qualifying.

The weather for the races was pretty grim too and sitting in his open-top MX5, Kevin was soaked. Kevin managing a poor 24^th in the first race and a disastrous retirement in the second.

Better luck next time where on 19 and 20^th June, Kevin and the team head off to Castle Combe for the next round.

Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Balboa_(film)

When I presented at the Best of Richmond knowledge session on 14th May, lots of local business owners were keen to find out more about how to create a local business listing on Google – hence this post.

These instructions are intended for those businesses who have 10 or fewer locations – if you’ve more than 10 locations, you’ll need to do a bulk upload – click here for instructions.

Ordinarily there are two steps to getting listed; you’ll need to submit your business details and then verify your listing.

However, in some instances you may find that your business is already listed. Typically (but not exclusively) this tends to happen to restaurants, pubs, bars etc. If when you search for your business on Google maps, you’re already there – you’ll need to claim your listing.

So first things first – search for your business!

Go to Google Maps and type in your business name and location; then skip to the relevant section below depending on whether or not a listing appears for you:

No Business Details Appearing…

1. Go to Google Places
2. If you already have a Google account, sign in with your username and password. If not, you’ll need to create one.
3. Click on ‘add new business’
4. You’ll then be taken to form which you’ll need to complete with your business details
5. Click next, and you’ll be taken to a further form which will enable you to enter more details about your business – the most important part of this is the categories section – Google will suggest categories, but remember you only need to choose one of the categories which they suggest. The remaining four categories are free text – so you can pop in anything you like. These categories will help people to find your business so make sure you’re using terms which people are likely to search for.
6. Throughout the process you’ll be able to see your listing as it will appear on the right hand side of your screen. Once you’re happy with everything – click submit.
7. You’ll then need to verify your listing. This can either be done by post, or by phone. If you elect to go for the post option you’ll receive a postcard with a pin number. Once you receive it, you’ll need to login to your account and submit the pin to verify your listing. If you elect to go for the phone option – make sure you’re sitting right next to the phone and you’ve got a pen at the ready! The phone call comes through almost instantly in my experience – a funny, tinny, automated voice will read out your pin. Login to your account and submit the pin to verify the listing as before.

Business Already Listed…

Google have used a variety of sources for local business listings – e.g. directories, other review sites etc, so it’s actually pretty common to have a listing even if you’ve not submitted the details yourself. If your business is already listed you’ll need to follow the steps below to verify and take control of the listing:

1. Click on the ‘more info’ link alongside your listing
2. You’ve now arrived on your full listing page – click on the ‘Business Owner?’ link
3. If you already have a Google account, sign in with your username and password. If not, you’ll need to create one.
4. You’ll then be asked whether you want to add, edit or suspend your listing – whichever option you choose, you will be asked to verify your listing. This is normally done via postcard – once you’ve verified your listing you’ll see your changes go live.

Hopefully you’ve found this post useful, if you do have any questions, please let me know via the comments, or drop me an email – hannah@gravytrain.co.uk

Image credit Lars Plougmann

Last week I was invited to a ‘Brand Marketing in a Digital World’ session at Google.

Currently in the UK,  total ad spend is £20bn, with 23% of the total spent online. However, there’s a bit of a disconnect when it comes to Brand Marketing –  offline, the split is around 50% on brand marketing; and 50% on direct response. Whereas online, just 5% is spent on brand marketing and the remaining 95% is on direct response.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the primary purpose of the session was to grab some more of that brand marketing budget… well there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right?

However, the session managed to avoid being entirely pitch, and some pretty interesting stuff was shared – so in the interests of share and share alike, I thought I’d share some of it with you.

Undoubtedly digital has profoundly changed both how companies reach their target audience, and indeed the ways in which they communicate with them. Traditionally marketing has been very much about the ”push’ – i.e. transmitting messages from the brand to the consumer. However, increasingly brands are electing to utilise ‘push’ techniques in a slightly different way – rather than simply ‘pushing’ their advertising messages, they are using ‘push’ techniques to encourage consumers to engage with their brands. This stimulates ‘pull’ – i.e. where consumers actively choose to view a brand’s content. ‘Pull’ is essentially about consumer engagement – and of course, here content is king.

The challenge for brands today is to create content which ‘pulls’ consumers in – they actively want to engage with the brand, and perhaps even participate.

Doritos were highlighted as a case study see http://www.youtube.com/user/DoritosYouMakeIt – a campaign (NB this was heavily supported offline too) encouraging consumers to create their own TV ad.

Incidentally – did you know…

1. Video accounts for one third of web traffic, and by 2013 they’re predicting this will reach 90%
2. 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
3. 2bn videos are streamed every day – or in other words, everyone on the planet watches 10 videos per month
4. YouTube is the second largest search engine – proof further (if indeed it were needed) that Bing/Yahoo have a long way to go

Bruce Daisley also highlighted that of course, YouTube is not just for brands… Check out this kid – well it is Friday:

I’ll spare you the rest of the YouTube sales pitch… and instead highlight some free, fun tools which you should definitely go play with:

Google Insights for Search – check out search trends over time.

Google Ad Planner – know what your customers look like? (I mean demographically – not literally) Check out which sites they frequent here.

Twittr Ratr – see whether people are responding to your brand positively or negatively on Twitter (NB this isn’t particularly reliable, but quite fun nonetheless)

Brand Tags – a collective experiment in brand perception. See what people think of famous brands here – tons of fun…

Well that’s all for today folks, hope you have a fabulous weekend