This is good news for small business clients that don’t have a lot of time to dive in there every month, and can’t justify a budget for somebody else to roll-up their sleeves every month.

In simple terms, this means that if you set this up properly on a poorly optimized account and come back in a month, your overall conversion rate should be higher.

You will find the settings in the “Ad Delivery” options in AdWords, check out Google’s official blog post on ad rotation for conversion rate.

Long Tail SEO & ROI

If you’re looking to squeeze a little more ROI from your Google AdWords lead generation, going after the by tail is a good place to focus your efforts. make or break a campaign even before it is started. The first step in doing keyword research is to start with the most obvious, your primary keywords, primary keywords are those which you would identify with your product in your own or your customers vernacular.

The challenge with the primary set of keywords is that they are often the most competitive and can have large upfront costs, which you may not want to incur during the early stages of your advertising campaign. Furthermore because these keywords are generic representations of the niche that your brand or product is identified by, they are also not as targeted towards customers who are “buying”. As a result many seasoned internet marketers will start with ‘Long Tail Keywords’ in order to avoid large amounts of competition and increase early ROI’s (return on investment) in their campaigns. So what is a “Long Tail Keyword“, quite simply it is a keyword phrase which has at least 3 words and possibly as many as 4 or 5 words.

Where to Start
The first step in conducting long tail keyword research is to find your primary keywords, lets use the example of a coffee company called ‘Big Beans’ who sells wholesale bags of beans in the localized market of San Jose. Since this particular coffee bean company has been in business for a respectable amount of time their primary keywords are fairly obvious to them, some examples could be :

- Coffee Beans

- Big Beans

- San Jose Coffee

- Wholesale Coffee

Now these terms will produce a lot of traffic for Big Beans coffee company, however they are very broad and could encompass many different types of visitors who are exclusively looking to buy wholesale coffee beans, therefore decreasing the ROI of their marketing budget. However, when doing long tail keyword research this is a nessecary step as we will use our primary keywords as building blocks for finding keywords which are more targeted and will drive better ROI.

Discovering Your Long Tail Keywords

There are two ways which you can start discovering your companies long tail keywords, you brainstorm them (the tough way), or we can use a set of free tools. In most cases I prefer to take our primary keywords and use tools to dig down and discover long tail keywords, because there is really no point in re-inventing the wheel at this stage of the game, furthermore by using long tail discovery tools we can get an idea of what type of traffic we should expect from our long-tails.

Tell Me More About The Tools

The first tool and probably my favorite tool is the free Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. I like this tool because it does the best job of digging down on our current primary keywords and uncovering long tail variations of the same primary concept. Keep in mind when using either the Wordtracker subscription service, or their free keyword tool that all of their search data is based on meta searches and is only a representation of possible traffic values (although it can be fairly accurate.) If this concerns you, fear not as we will cover the wordtracker Gtrends tool as well which uses Google Trends data combined with wordtracker data to get more specific estimates on google search data. Lastly we will cover googles keyword tool itself, this keyword tool is very useful however I find that it is much more accurate in its estimations in regards to paid search rather than organic search terms.

Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool
The wordtracker free keyword tool works really quite simply compared to our other long tail discovery tools, we simply just place our keyword in this case “coffee beans” into the keyword box, check whether or not we want to filter adult results, and then hit the “Hit Me” button.

You can find this tool here : http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

and it looks a little something like this :

Wordtracker Gtrends Tool

The Gtrends tool, combines google information with wordtracker information to provide the user with a more accurate estimation tailored towards google. The Gtrends tool does exactly the same thing as the free keyword research tool however it provides the google trends graph along with the word so that you can predict how your keywords will do if they achieve number one position in google. To use the added functionality in this tool, simply follow the same steps as outlined in the Free Keyword Tool, after your lists of results are up then you will see a small graph icon on the left hand side of the keywords, when you click this a google trends graph will then pop up to give you more information about your long tail keyword.

You can find this tool here : http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends

Google Keyword Tool

Lastly, Google itself provides a keyword tool which can be used to develop and find longtail keywords. The tool offers two ways of doing so, you may either put in your primary keyword and google will find similar keywords, or you can input a website and google will read the website and make inferences about possible keywords. This tool can be very useful in digging down past our primary keywords, however keep in mind that this tool was made to estimate for the google adwords ppc campaigns and not for organic search.

You can find this tool here : https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Conclusion

Now that we have covered what a long tail keyword is and how to find them, you should be well on your way to discovering a whole multitude of undiscovered business that you were once missing out on. However, when delving into new longtail keywords remember to use your judgement and link them back to what your brands core values are to make sure that the keywords which you select are relevant to your value proposition and will actually lead to a return on investment for your company.

Most importantly for those of us in the B2B market,there is a new opportunity to dominate our niche markets and boost our marketing ROI significantly by really getting focused on who we serve best.

How Long-Tail ROI Works: Laziness

Your competitors are lazy! Okay, while we know that’s not the case, but the reality is that a lot of B2B markets have just started out with their Search Engine Marketing Strategies. What this means is that they are looking for the 5 most obvious keywords and paying Google a lot of money to ensure they get found for those.

Most recently we were asked to do some research for a company that sells CRM software and low and behold, it costs over $6 per click for that term. Not only that, but it is a very competitive market, with several options for the customer to compare. Because it turns up so many results, the likelyhood of a customer staying on your page versus hitting the back button is very low and the likelyhood of them actually completing your landing page (submitting an inquiry and creating a lead for your sales team) is even lower.

So let’s do a little math: very high cost per click ($6) times very low retention rate (say 4% ) and even lower lead capture rate (say 2% ) = a very very high cost per lead (in this case $300). Not only that, but that customer is so completely overwhelmed that your sales team will have a tougher time converting (competing) to turn that lead into revenue.

The real winners in this market, other than a few dominant $1billion ++ players, has been the long tail crowd. Hundreds of software companies have gobbled up nice, profitable parts of the market capturing inquiries for “Insurance Broker CRM” and “Real Estate Software.”

As the search terms get more and more focused, the cost per click decreases significantly, and B2B marketers can easily lift their Google ROI by as much as 100% by creating more targeted ad groups, serving very niche ad text and landing pages.

Over the years, internet marketers have watched internet users become more and more trusting of Google and it’s ability to deliver exactly what they are looking for in one search.

Anderson’s ‘megahits’ occupy the blue region of the chart, while the long tail is the red:

Long Tail Graph

Boost ROI With Your Long Tail Strategy:

This is especially relevant if you are doing some Google AdWords advertising, as illustrated above. Even the most narrowly focused businesses we work with generally have over 20 keyword groups and many variations of ad text and landing pages. If your doing less than this, you are probably only represented in the blue area above and are missing opportunties to more narrowly target your audience and their needs. In return for a more focused effort, you will see your campaign ROI increase by as much as 300%.

Start listing off all the sub-niches within your markets. Friday’s article will provide some more tools and guidance on developing your long tail strategy, so stay tuned!

Wed, June 10, 10 am PST, 1pm EST

Learn the fundamentals of setting up Google AdWords to generate B2B sales leads.

Google AdWordsFind customers who are actively looking for your products and services, engage them effectively and generate qualified leads.

Target Audience:

• marketing professionals
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“101 Level” this course give an overview for marketers or business professionals that are new to Google AdWords or even new to all forms of online marketing.

For more experienced marketers, there will be a wrap-up look at ways to boost campaign performance and increase ROI by decreasing cost-per-lead.

REGISTER NOW!

The question was the same from most of this group – we don’t have 100 hours a month to devote to this, nor do we have unlimited budget, but we need to know how to get online lead generation working for us.

The answer starts with Google AdWords:

1. It’s easy to control costs (maximum daily budgets)

AdWords gives you the unique opportunity to pay only for clicks, and to tell you exactly how many of those are turning into leads. On the simple side of things, you can estimate the value per lead and adwords will show you if you’re in the black or not.

If you are running an e-commerce system, realized revenue can easily be matched to a specific campaign and thus you can always see which campaigns generate the highest ROI.

If you are B2B, it will be important down the road to track ROI of specific campaigns by integrating AdWords with a CRM system like salesforce.com this way you can tell exactly how much forcast and realized revenue is coming in for every dollar going out the door.

TIP: I like to look closely at customer’s average deal size and profitability for a specific campaign that we’re targeting, so before I get going I can understand what our target “Cost Per Acquisition” should be.

2. No overhead to start seeing results

In competitive markets, a small business webiste may never crawl to the top of the search engines, even with 100 hours a month in Search Engine Optimization, link building and content generation. It is possible to lay out 100K just to get there!

3. You only pay for very targeted clicks

If you are looking for people in your local market that are looking today fora mortgage, AdWords will deliver those people in a lot less passive way direct to your website (ideally to a landing page) we will talk about that in a later post.

“elliptical trainer” “first time mortagage” “mortgage broker, Vancouver” (+ regional limitations)

4. Again, contrary to any myths out there, you only pay for clicks.

As our markets get more competitive and customers are constantly getting inundated with information, many SME’s are finding their costs are just too high on AdWords. The reason for this is largely due to lack of targeted ad text and realavent landing pages that drive conversions.

Most customers I look at that say AdWords isn’t working, (while there can be a variety of issues in their account), the biggest thing is lack of realavent, targeted landing pages, with clear calls to action.

Many customers have had conversion rates below 1% on cost per click of over $2.00 for a small business that’s selling a $2000 item, $200 just to get a sales lead is a little tough to swallow.

So now that you understand why AdWords can help you generate leads for your business, you’ll need to learn about landing pages..

Stay tuned for landing pages 101 and a free webinar on best practices for landing page optimization.

1. Regular & Plentiful Content

Not that volume alone will make you a star, but it’s a good start. Chances are, as long as you’re sure what business you are in, you will be climbing the right rankings wall.

Most marketers simply don’t post enough content with enough frequency!

2. Relevant & Useful Content:

Even if google can’t figure out with its spiders that your content stinks, you won’t generate many inbound links from others if it is not useful to them and their readers.

As a marketer, and a consumer I love little tidbits that I can consume in some meaningful way.. like the old standby – “10 Tips..” “5 Rules of..” etc..

3. Link to people that are ranking well, often they will reciprocate

Link to other recognized authorities in your industry, wikipedia articles, etc.. and don’t forget to use trackback urls!! These tell others that you have linked to them so they can (and most will) reciprocate.

4. Narrow your focus on your keywords

Make sure your headers, titles and copy have your keywords. Remember, google is smart, so don’t “spam the search engines” it will backfire and get you de-listed for up to 6 months.

5. Get Guerrilla!! Pick a Narrow enough term that you can own it..

Narrow even more!! It’s a jungle out there, get picky .. that’s why I’ve chosen to work only with software marketers.. not because we haven’t done more.

Once you’re on a roll, make sure that you’re not biting off more than you can chew; for example, unless you’re Seth Godin, don’t try to dominate “New Marketing, or Web 2.0″ it won’t work!!

Link / Reference

PART 2 – Coming Next Week! Register / RSS