We talk all the time about keywords. When the search engine marketing industry talks about keywords, you’ll frequently hear the terms “head,” “torso,” and “tail” to describe the amount of volume that each of the keywords receive.

Head terms are the high volume, more generic and competitive terms. Tail terms are just the opposite.

Conversion Rate Optimization

I’ve recently had a lot of internal and external conversations around the value of the keyword spectrum. We’re asking ourselves:

• Has Google Instant killed the long tail?
• Do head terms provide brand awareness, and feed tail traffic?
• At what point are you done building keywords, and exhaust the long tail?

In order to answer some of these questions I dove into some keyword level data for our clients, and found some interesting stuff.

CTR by Keyword Phrase

Most would broadly define what is a head or tail term by the number of words contained within the keyword phrase. The general thought is you should see a higher CTR when there are more keywords in the phrase because it’s more descriptive.

I took data from two different clients (both one name companies), and plotted out the CTR by word count per keyword phrase. In the first example I included both branded and unbranded terms, and in the second example included only branded terms.

Article by Jason Tabeling Form Search Engine Watch

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A new report from agency GroupM and comScore details the degree to which search and social media have become intertwined in the purchase path that consumers take across the Internet. The report is a follow-up to a similar study done in 2009.

GroupM and comScore looked at consumer behavior associated with purchase decisions in the electronics/telecommunications and consumer packaged goods categories. They found that while search dominates social media among consumers making buying decisions — nearly 60 percent of cases that end in a purchase begin with search – social media play an increasingly important role during consideration and especially after a purchase is made.

The report found that “40 percent of consumers who use search in their path to purchase are motivated to use social media to further their decision making process.”

Click Through Rate

Social boosts search CTRs

The phrase “social media” as defined here includes blogs, consumer reviews, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

The consumer behavior revealed in the study is complex. However the report supports the idea that social media are now critical for product or brand awareness and drive related, subsequent search behavior. GroupM stated that “when consumers were exposed to both search and social media influenced by a brand that overall search CTR went up by 94 percent.”

As one might expect, the “the top motivation of consumers to use social media in their purchase process is to get other people’s opinion (31 percent).” Almost half of those converting in the study used both search and social media, while the other half used search alone.

Article by Greg Sterling from Search Engine Land

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As Facebook has entered the mainstream marketing mix, marketers are having to decide how much of their budget to divert from other channels into social campaigns.

Because search gets the lion’s share of a digital marketing budget, it might seem like the most likely candidate for a cutback — after all, there’s usually so much of it. But marketers might want to think twice before jumping to that conclusion, because it may very well be a blind leap of faith.

Targeting search vs facebook

In the last year alone, the only thing more impressive than Facebook’s growth has been the buzz around it. Users, page views, estimated value, and a Hollywood blockbuster all seem to point to “the next big thing” — something that all marketers should want to be part of.

In reality, Facebook marketing offers a very different value proposition from search marketing, and results-driven marketers can still get a much better return our of search than they can out of social.

Article by Guillaume Bouchard from Search Engine Watch

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It’s that time of year again. SEO bloggers are either looking back at their predictions for 2010 and seeing how right (or wrong) they were, or making entirely new predictions for 2011 — possibly because they were so wrong last year that it wasn’t worth looking back?

I want to focus on just one prediction for 2011 and then go ahead and try to make it happen on behalf of my clients. This seems like a more simple task than coming up with five or 10 predictions, knowing that some of them were made up simply so that I could fill a blog post.

The big news in SEO recently was the revelation that social media signals affect natural search rankings, from interviews with people at both Google and Bing — although no indication was given to how much they affect rankings.

Search Engine Optimisation

To be fair, if you were a search engine and wanted to know what brands, websites, and general content people wanted to interact with online, where would you go first? It has an added benefit for those who think that the SERPs are a bit spammy (I’m not one of them, for the record).

One way of reducing the number of arguably lower quality websites would be to look at who the popular brands are in the social media space and try to reward them with more authority.

How can SEOs take advantage of what seems to be a clear shift toward sentiment as an extra factor in achieving better rankings?

A growing number of SEO techniques can be undertaken with SEO, and specifically link building, in mind — from PR and advertorials to advertising on relevant industry websites.

In 2011, I expect this to become more closely tied with clients’ overall marketing campaigns. The best way to explain this is with an example:

Client A is a retailer, looking to boost sales of a specific range of camping equipment products. Special offers, promotions, and TV advertising is all planned and will revolve around a creative execution involving a character who will appear in their ads.

Article by Gareth Owen from Search Engine Watch.

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Today, Yahoo announced a new tool named Yahoo Clues. Yahoo Clues basically gives you insight into the types of people searching for specific keyword phrases and shows related terms based on those searches and searchers.

The tool allows you to plug in one or two keyword phrases and it then plots the search trends of those keywords on the page. It shows you keyword popularity over time, searches by age and gender, income level, geographic location, “search flow” and related searches.

Let me take you through each metric for a comparison of iphone vs android on Yahoo Clues.

Here you can see the two search trends plotted over time:

Yahoo Clues

Here is a break down by age and gender:

Yahoo Clues gender

You can then click on a specific age/gender segment to see that women are more about searching for white iPhones while men are more about searching for jailbreaking iPhones

Article by Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land

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Let’s be cautious about running too far with these numbers, but Royal Pingdom (using data from StatCounter) has reported/estimated Google’s global mobile search market share to be almost 100%

Google is clearly dominant in mobile search across smartphones (and feature phones). However these numbers may not be completely accurate. For example, the chart above shows PC and mobile search market share according to StatCounter. But while the general PC search share numbers may reflect selected markets (e.g., UK) they’re not accurate for the US and a number of other places around the world.

Article by Greg Sterling from Search Engine Land

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Right now, up to 25% of the Yahoo Search results are powered by Bing. Yahoo began testing Bing search results this month, currently there are live bucket tests underway on both the organic and paid side.

Mark Morrissey, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Yahoo, told me that while only 3.5% of the paid ads are being powered by Bing in their tests, up to 25% of the organic results can be powered by Bing. Yes, up to 25% of the time you go to Yahoo and conduct a search, it can be a Bing powered set of search results.

Article by Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land

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If you own a website, you’re already doing SEO. The e-commerce platform you choose, information architecture of your site, product marketing copy, meta data, and more all affect your organic listings in search engines from day one.

As you continue managing the site, you’re constantly changing your search engine visibility, so it’s important to know if things are on the right track. It takes a combination of several quantitative and qualitative measurements to get a good grasp on the state of your SEO.

Article by John Greer, Search Engine Watch

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Jobs announces at the WWDC keynote that iPhone will now offer Microsoft’s Bing as a search engine.  Google’s search engine will remain the default, but users will now be able to choose Bing, in addition to Yahoo, which has been an option for some time.

Photo credit: gdgt