Our MyST Blogsite generates highly qualified leads compared to other venues of online lead generation. One of the primary reasons is we have a trust factor, which we built (and continue to build) by providing dependable and accurate information through the blogsite. As a result, actions are more meaningful for business and the customer."
It's no surprise that Google has tilted toward favoring longer querys for better search results. Short-tail keyword strategies are quickly becoming ineffective.
Right now, Google is really good with keywords and that's a limitation we think the search engine should be able to overcome with time.
–
Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience
The next time you have the occasion to watch over the shoulder of a search user, study their search behavior; you'll see that they start with a few keywords and when they've found what they were looking for (or they gave up), the query string is likely to have 4, maybe 5, or even as many as 8 keywords in it. Remember that keyword strategy you and your marketing team developed on the whiteboard a few months ago? Yeah... the one that lists 20 or 30 terms each with one or two keywords? How valuable do you think that approach really is for improved organic search or PPC campaigns?
Getting a top ten ranking for "security" is admirable, but you should be careful about such "success" - your prospects my be jumping over this term to read your competitor's blog.
Longer keyword strings are necessary because Google has managed to index so much content and for every subject, there is an abundance of information. The web once was a fairly flat plane and content wasn't so abundant, especially on focused topics. Back then you could craft a short-tail keyword strategy and do pretty well with organic findability. But the web has changed, and more importantly search engines and search habits have significantly changed. As a general rule, searchers now understand that a few keywords are far too ambiguous to find the information desired. Search users do not have unlimited time to find information, so they've been conditioned to be more specific - many experienced searchers start with more than 5 keywords; searchers are smarter now.
Long Tail is Increasingly Favored
The topology of the web, and search productivity, is increasingly shifting to favor the long tail of search, and Google's latest enhancements confirm search behavioral changes. Last week, the company announced on its blog that the new technology will allow Google's search engine to identify associations and concepts related to a query, improving the list of related search terms Google displays along with its results.
"For example, if you search for 'principles of physics', our algorithms understand that 'angular momentum,' 'special relativity,' 'big bang' and 'quantum mechanic' are related terms that could help you find what you need," wrote Ori Allon, technical lead of Google's Search Quality team, and Ken Wilder, team engineer at the company's Snippets project.
Bottom line - longer queries will include more text to help you decide which organic search results are worth drilling deeper into. This will reinforce the behavioral trend toward longer keyword queries, thus eroding short-tail keyword strategies even further.
Conclusion
The future of search is clearly a world with less ambiguity, and that suggests good, articulate, and focused marketing content is even more important. In my view it also suggests businesses should spend less on short-tail [traditional SEO-based] organic search tactics, and more on long-tail [social-based] content development.
Google has given its Web search engine an injection of semantic technology, as the search leader pushes into what many consider the future of search on the Internet.
Search behaviors by consumers are changing in ways that are predictable, but not obvious. Search optimization for terse key-phrases are being skipped over for more focused phrases that produce instant findability.
I spoke with a group of bloggers in Phoenix recently. What I found is that very few had any business from their blogs despite a lot of effort. I have 5 closings and 7 active buyers directly from [our MyST blogsite] in 2008. I know because I ask. One person told me they have been reading my blog for almost a year before they called me to buy a property."
