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.

When we’re evaluating potential link partners for our clients, one of the key things we look at is whether they are in the business of selling links. The last thing we want to do is expend our resources targeting websites that might pass little or  no value, because they are obviously selling links without using nofollow. The chances are, if you are confidently able to determine that a given website is selling links just by looking at it, the search engines will also be able tell and thereby nullify any value passed.

Bear in mind that Google doesn’t need to be too concerned about making mistakes when doing such a classification – as long as they penalise link sellers (by stopping them from passing value) they don’t risk excluding sites unfairly.

make sure your links don't look like this

Here’s just a few of the many signals we look at to determine if a site is selling links:

Look out for Blocks of Links

Some websites are less savvy about Google’s terms than others. Whilst it may be against Google T&C’s to sell links (unless using nofollow) many webmasters are unaware of this and don’t go to a great deal of effort to disguise the fact that they are selling links. They will therefore mark up the section ‘Sponsored Links’ or something equally blatant. This is extremely easy for either a manual reviewer or an algorithm to spot. If you are familiar with HTML, you can also check the source of any link blocks to look for clues in the markup if you see something like ‘div id=’ads”, then you have another clue

Another obvious signal is where you find a block of links, often in a dubious place on the website (e.g the footer), that all link to a set of seemingly unconnected but commercial websites. A key thing to differentiate here is a ‘Blogroll’ from a block of ad-links – a Blogroll will usually link out to useful resources which tend to be a mix of other blogs, commercial and non commercial links – a block of ads will link purely to commercial websites.

Check the Anchor Text

Another obvious signal is in the anchor text of links – i.e. the text you see on the screen for the link. If all the links say things like ‘Credit Cards’, ‘Car Insurance’ etc, then there’s a str0ng possibility somebody paid for the website to link with favourable text – this is especially likely to be the case if:

a) the site being linked to isn’t called ‘Credit Cards’ (i.e. doesn’t have the url www.creditcards.com)

b) the site being linked is obviously targeting ‘Credit Cards’ as a keyword

Who are they linking to?

Possibly my favourite test of all when looking at a website’s outbound links is to see exactly who they are linking to. Generally, you can identify the major link buyers in any industry – the types that have chunky five figure link building budgets that buy rich links from anywhere and everywhere. If the website you are looking at links out to these (especially with rich anchor text in a sidebar) then it’s almost certain they are in the business of selling links – Google knows who the major offenders of link buying are, and therefore by association has a good idea of who the sellers are too – don’t get yourself involved with this crowd because you’ll probably be wasting your time/money… or worse, you may see a your site penalised.

Who owns the website?

Although this might lead to an occasional false negative, the owner of the website can give you a good clue as to their intentions. There are two interesting things to look out for here:

1) Is the website owned by a publishing company? If so, you can almost certainly buy a link. Generally speaking links tends to be nofollowed and go through some sort of tracking url. However, some publishing companies have wised up to the potential income from followed links…

2) Is there a disconnect between the websites owner details and their audience? For example is the website targeting a UK audience but owned by an individual outside the UK who also owns 572 other domains. Why should this concern you? Because there are literally thousands if not millions of websites created every day,  purely to sell links to other countries. Although there will sometimes be a perfectly legitimate reason why the domain owner is overseas,  it’s just another indicator that the website was created with the intention of selling links which can be balanced against other signs and signals.

Use your common sense!

It might be difficult to see every link on a page, but given you can pretty much ignore internal links for this purpose, scan your mouse over all the main link blocks and pay attention to the external links – a simple sense check can often tell you whether or not the link deserves to be there. Put yourself in the users shoes – if there’s no logical reason you’d want to click on the outbound links, then chances are, the site’s selling links.

Image credit Tim Parkinson

There are no short cuts. There are no ‘easy ways’ to make a living online. You cannot make it to the top of the organic search engine results for just $50 per month. There is no secret sauce.

In every industry there are cowboys. Search is no different.

Sadly, many businesses are scammed because they get drawn in. They leave their common sense at the door.

So what is the truth about SEO?

1. You cannot buy an organic ranking on a search engine.

Even if you could, (which you can’t) you probably couldn’t afford it anyway. However, you can pay to advertise on search engines – this is called PPC or Paid Search. That’s what many of the $50 per month guys are actually offering. Alternatively, they may be offering you the opportunity to rank 1st organically for your brand name. You’ll probably find you already rank 1st for that anyway.

2. There’s no such thing as a Google / Yahoo / MSN Approved SEO

None of the major search engines offer training or qualifications in SEO. Anyone who claims to be Google / Yahoo / MSN approved or qualified is misleading you.

Somewhat confusingly, the major search engines do offer training in PPC or Paid Search, and, if you want to undertake PPC or Paid Search then by all means pick a qualified company or individual to run your campaign for you. Just be aware, that those qualifications they’re parading around have no bearing whatsoever on their SEO ability.

3. There are no guarantees

This is perhaps the most important point. Be extremely wary of anyone offering you guaranteed first page or first position rankings. Why?

Because there’s not an SEO on the planet who can control the search engine’s algorithms. And frankly, if you can’t control the algorithm, you can’t guarantee a ranking.

Search engines are understandably precious about the algorithms which they use to rank web pages. They have to be. They don’t share them. They make constant tweaks and refinements to try to return the most relevant results for users search queries. 

Many who offer guarantees are again actually just offering you the first place in the PPC or Paid Search listings - not the same thing at all.

 4. It makes no odds who you know at Google

Seriously. The notion that various Google employees sit around manipulating search results for their mates is nothing but a nonsense.

No one has a ’special relationship’ with anyone at Google. Well, actually – I’m sure they do – the guys and gals at Google have wives / girlfriends / husbands / boyfriends and so on, but that a different kind of  ’special relationship’, right?

It can be difficult to know who to trust and who to believe. Our advice? Read around the subject. Take the time to educate yourself and keep your wits about you. Oh, and if it sounds too good to be true -  it probably is.

Image credit Peter Blanchard

Well, hello there and happy Friday!

Welcome to our new feature. Each week we’ll be bringing you a round up of some of the best blog posts/articles we’ve read relating to Search Marketing – so here goes!

SEO

Stephan Spencer (via Search Engine Land) rants about a site which despite being ‘unfriendly’ to search engines, still ranks well.

Small Business SEO

Sugarrae (Rae Hoffman) wrote an excellent post on how small businesses might increase their online presence. She’s used lawn care to illustrate her example, but the ideas can easily be applied to any business.

Search Engines

Google Searchology 2009, saw the launch of some new developments – Google Search Options, Wonder Wheel, Google Squared and Rich Snippets - see Matt Cutts’ thoughts and Danny Sullivan’s Live Blogging coverage.

Blogging

Preparing to launch your blog? Or maybe just considering your options? Don’t miss Lucy Langdon’s fantastic blog launch checklist on SEOmoz.

Social Media

There’s been a whole lot of noise about Twitter, but I couldn’t agree more with Dr Pete’s post about the real power of Twitter on SEOmoz.

Jennifer Horowitz talks us through the seven deadly sins of social media - check yourselves boys and girls :)

Web Design & Usability

OK, so this post wasn’t written this week, but I think it’s fantastic. Dr Pete’s created a really rather marvellous cheat sheet to designing a usable website. The man’s a genius.

PPC

Joe of PPC Hero wrote a great post about broadening exposure on the Google Content Network - now many advertisers elect not to run on the content network, but for some clients we’ve seen some really good results – if you’re thinking about trying it yourself, it’s a must read.

Aaaannnnd Finally, Friday’s Funny

Well there;’s not much point in doing this if we can’t make you smile. 1000 Awesome Things is a blog – where in, as the name suggests they count down 1000 awesome things. Kinda like a daily reason to be cheerful – enjoy and have a lovely weekend.

Is there something I’ve missed? Hit up the comments

The BBC reported today that Search Engine Ask is reverting back to its original name Ask Jeeves, and is bringing back the Butler character as part of their corporate branding.

Jeeves the Butler was dropped from the brand back in 2006 as the brand attempted to increase market share.

Jeeves explains his own absence as follows:

The search engine has been through a series of rebrands, including a TV advertising campaign portraying it as an underground alternative to Google.