SEO and Article Marketing

I started out the day looking at the new Google Instant release, fully intending just to write about that, however the more I dug in, the more intriguing things got. So, this post is not just about Google Instant, but a bunch of random meanderings including keyword targeting; commercial intent; and of course as we’ll see, just how darn effective article marketing continues to be.

With that being said…here we go! I hope you find it helpful and interesting.

First, let’s have a look at Google’s new interface!

Now at first glance, I began thinking this interface is pretty cool, but annoying, but really neat, and annoying, but still cool, and really annoying. You know what I mean.

It’s neat that it has suggestive searches. It’s neat that it displays search and paid ad results in real time. It’s very cool the technology and incredible processing horsepower this must take to be this quick. However it is bit annoying in how it makes a lot of assumptions on our behalf.

So it’s all very intriguing, but the big thing I wanted to know was if this was a positive thing for internet marketers, or not.

First impression? Yes AND No! Yes, if you are good at SEO – No so good if you don’t take your SEO efforts seriously.

But before we get to that…

… did Google Instant come packaged with a new algorithm?

Google says not, yet over the past couple of days since its release, many of our sites have not only seen a large increase in traffic, but rankings for some very competitive keywords have shot up dramatically. For example, the case of the short-tail keyword ‘stop smoking’ we rank for on one of our sites. It has literally jumped a HUGE number of pages in Google to the #5 spot since the Instant release. Good news to be sure.

As we heard back with the release of the caffeine algorithm, Google is going to be rewarding content driven sites more and more. And this doesn’t just mean on-site content, but backlink driven content as well, such as backlinks embedded in article resource boxes.

Whaddya know….this article marketing stuff really works!

So, a new algorithm or just coincidence? Who knows…simply stating an observation and including you in on my first random thought. Regardless, the increased traffic is always welcome!

So what’s next?

Is there anything about Google Instant we need to be concerned about?

Well, yes…

The one obviously negative about Google Instant is that it definitely takes up some valuable real estate. With the five ‘suggested’ keywords showing in the dropdown, it effectively removes one or two of the top organic search listings.

This means it is going to become even more important to be at the top of the search rankings. Before, we used to shoot for ‘Top 5′ listings, but with the decreased screen space now available above the fold, it now looks more like ‘Top 3′ is going to be the new sweet spot – depending on how many ads are showing at the top of the search results.

Conspiracy theories abound, and we’ll probably never know if it was intentional, but there is certainly no doubt that the elimination of available space certainly makes the paid ads more prominent as they now take up a larger proportional percentage of the screen.

But how does this affect us as marketers – especially SEO dependent ones?

Let’s look at an example.

To do this, we’ll look at a stop smoking review site we use to track the benefits of article marketing. First, a little explanation is in order. Yes, this is a real affiliate site and is set up as a normal WordPress website. The only reason we call it a ‘test site’ is that it is 100% promoted by article marketing. There is no Pay-per-click. No social media. No other methods of SEO. Purely 100% article marketing. This allows us the ability to create valid testing without the results getting skewed.

Let’s use the new Instant interface to drive down a couple of levels and see what we can find.

As we’ve already seen, when the letters ‘stop sm_____’ are entered into the search box, we are prompted with the suggestion of ‘stop smoking’, which as we know ranks our site at #5′.

But what about the next suggested Google Instant listing of ‘stop smoking aids’?

If we select it directly, it gives us a hard search result just like the old interface would have. Which I am happy to report, ranks our site at #1.

But if we don’t choose a suggestion and instead continue to type ‘stop smoking ai__’ here is what we get.

So the first question that comes to mind – is do we now target all these long-tail keyphrases shown in the Instant dropdown box?

As always, we have a definitive answer for you here – MAYBE!

As we can see by looking at the example, we get a dropdown of 4 suggestions, as the fifth is only a partial. Now in this case, we know that we already rank #1 for the top two suggestions – ‘stop smoking aids’ and ‘stop smoking aids reviews’. So the question is, should we be targeting the next two keywords on the list – ‘stop smoking aids free’ and ‘stop smoking aids coupons’?

Again, the answer is maybe. SEO, done properly takes time, effort and money, so as savvy marketers, we need to decide whether to target these keywords based on research and NOT just because they show up in the suggested listings.

The first thing we want to consider is what is the commercial intent of the customers entering or choosing this keyword. Commercial intent or OCI is data collected by Microsoft’s adCenter Labs and gives an indicator in decimal form whether or not the keyword is commercially viable. Market Samurai also has this feature built in.

So we head over to the Microsoft labs and enter our keyphrase. It comes back with a 0.92 probability of non-commercial intent, which is what we’d expect since the keyphrase has the word ‘free’ in it. Not a great indicator of someone who is willing to spend money on your product.

Do we not bother with this keyphrase? Again, MAYBE. You knew that was coming didn’t you.

First let’s go looking for some more data. We follow the search through and find that our site is on page two at spot #11 for the keyphrase anyway. Pretty cool!

Just to digress a moment and make the point again about just how effective article marketing is, we do not specifically target ‘stop smoking’ or ‘stop smoking aids free’ yet we are ranking highly for them. By targeting the long-tail keywords with high commercial intent, we also get search ranking for similar and complimentary keywords.

Anyway, back to the task at hand. Do we target this keyword or not? In this case because we are already so close to the first page, why not. We’ll throw a few articles at it and get it ranked in the top three results.

But what if we weren’t on the second page? What if we ranked on the 20^th page? For that we would need to pull out every business person’s most effective tool – gut instinct. The OCI data tells us that 92% of people searching for that keyphrase may not be willing to spend any money. So let’s look at search volume with Google’s keyword tool to see what else we can find. Market Samurai has this feature as well.

It shows that the monthly search volume for ‘stop smoking aids free’ is only 880. So if 92% (810) of people are not willing to spend money and only 70 are, then perhaps this is not a good keyword to target.

BUT…if you know your conversion and profit per acquisition for your site – and you should – then you can make an informed decision about whether to target this keyword. So assuming that 70 people per month could be buyers and we know our site converts at 3.94% (let’s call it 4% for easy math) and our profit per acquisition is around $50, then we can rightfully assume that we will sell 2.8 units per month for a total yearly profit of $1680 (2.8 units per month x 12 months x $50 PPA). Not too bad. Definitely worth considering.

Now this is very top down thinking of course. There are a number of other variables to take into account such as the fact that the #1 ranking will only get 40% of the clicks and so on and so forth (this may change dramatically and give much higher click through rates to the top listings with the decreased organic real estate). But even at 40% CTR (click through rate), that still leaves nearly $700 a year profits less the cost of a handful of articles to get the site to rank #1 for this keyword. Still not bad.

Still the question remains, do we spend the time, money and effort to push our site to #1 for this keyword? In this particular case, because we can target more than one link in each article we send out, I would say yes. Matter of fact, I believe we will be targeting these two links heavily for the moment – ‘stop smoking’ and ‘stop smoking aids free’ for as exciting as getting 40% of 880 monthly searches might be, hitting #1 and getting 40% of the 550,000 searches that ‘stop smoking’ receives, gets me all excited!

The BIG plus

So the main downside to the new interface is simply a smaller piece of real estate for organic listings. Not a big deal, for as marketers interested in SEO, we are used to the competition. However, there has to be a huge upside here for someone, right?

There sure is. The people who own the top 3 listings should see a dramatic increase in traffic as it is only human nature for us to click on what we can see. And if you can only see three to five listings now, the CTR of those sites will definitely rise.

So how do you get rankings like this for hundreds and thousands of keywords?

Simple. We’ve been preaching it for years – CONSISTENCY and QUALITY!

Target a varying group of long-tail and short tail keywords for your niche. Write or get well written articles done for you via a service like MyArticleExpress. Keep sending out one or two articles per week for each of your sites.

Not trying to turn this into an advertisement for article marketing, but you can clearly see that this methodology is extremely effective to driving top search rankings.

And yes, you should be using video, podcasts and press releases as well as discussed in our free report on Organic Marketing That Sticks – Where to Start With Your SEO (PDF download).

So the magic formula once again is…

Target Long-Tail and Short-Tail Keywords – Write Quality Content – Submit Articles Weekly

And there you have it.

Thanks for sharing in these random thoughts with me.

Wishing you all the success in the world,

Noel Swanson

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