Corn Syrup, Mercury, Bees and CCD: The Long Tail of News

Forgive me for diverging from this blog's normal topic of marketing, but I feel that the importance of researching the long tail of news cannot be understated and the following could be a good example of this. The following chain of events occurred from reading the news -- not from using HitTail -- but I think it just goes to show what can happen when you dig deep into data. Hopefully this is not lost on today's investigative journalists. I hope one of you will find this story and research it further than I can.

This morning I read on a story buried on page 8 of my morning paper that mercury has been found in a large percentage of corn syrup. An hour later, I read a new column on the New York Times website about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that is quietly ravaging American bees and endangering our food supply. CCD has been a mystery since its discovery in 2006. Yet today I noticed one key aspect that had been left out of prior reporting that I had read. Honeybees are fed on corn syrup while being moved between farms. Corn syrup that has now been found to likely contain mercury. While a minor amount to humans, this could be toxic to bees.

Part of the problem of CCD is that once bees are infected, they often leave the hive never to return. That makes diagnosing them difficult. Yet, according to Wikipedia, symptoms in mercury poisoning include include sensory impairment (vision, hearing, speech), disturbed sensation and a lack of coordination. Maybe the bees can't find their way back. It probably also lowers their defenses, making them susceptible to other diseases.

Bee keepers, please try feeding bees on something else other than corn syrup. Reporters, keep digging in the long tail for potential news angles like this one. I don't know if there is any correlation between the two stories, but both are important issues that independently deserve more press.

HitTail is now a PPC Product?

So there you have it. I've been dropping hints for a few days now, but HitTail's premium service for driving down CPC has just been launched... and HitTail is entering into the world of AdWords campaign optimization. HitTail is now a PPC product.

Yes, it's true!

But how can that be? HitTail lands firmly on the free and organic side of search engine optimization. Isn't this some sort of betrayal suddenly releasing features designed to encourage you to plow even more money into pay-per-click? Isn't HitTail--the kooky company that always advocated freedom from PPC--reneging on its word?

The answer is No.

This is the creator of HitTail speaking, and after many months of managing AdWords campaigns, I'm here to tell you that HitTail methodology rocks the AdWords world--to the point where you can get a deal on the AdWords side that rivals PPC--and additionally have the satisfaction of managing campaigns that today's SEM companies can hardly even compete with. In my recent experience, I set up a "longtail" campaign in AdWords, and systematically moved the best words into this campaign, knowing that there was already SOME traffic on these words, but we weren't coming up on the first page of results. The idea with AdWords is to get these awesome longtail keywords WORKING FOR YOU RIGHT AWAY without even having to produce organic content for your site.

And it paid off in a big way... a very big way... a big enough way that me--one of the biggest advocates of better search results through blogging--to now also be an AdWords advocate...

...but only conditionally... on the condition of getting one over on AdWords.

What happens if you take the super-charged keyword lists provided by HitTail, where you know traffic is already occuring on your site, but not on page one, then you plug it into AdWords? The answer is you instantly get page on of search results (albeit in an ad) on words where some determined searchers went many pages in. So you suddenly tap into the exponentially greater number of people who never make it past page one, and a significant portion of these people click on ads. With effective keywords in-hand, instead of just moving them to your To-Do list and allowing them to unacceptably age, put them to work for you right away.

And the actual goal here is to lower your overall cost of acquiring customers (audience, visitors, whatever) by eliminating (at least temporarily), the most tedious and unlikely to occur part of HitTailing--namely, creating new website content. Now we still do encourage new website content as your long-term road to PPC freedom. But until you get that content out there, put the super-charged keyword lists to work for you.

Broad match not always best for PPC

If you run PPC search marketing campaigns, are you aware of "broad match" functionality? It sounds good in theory for those advertisers who are busy and cannot think of every possible keyword under the sun to add to their PPC campaigns. It allows you essentially to add a wildcard. Come up on all ads that include X or Y, no matter what other keywords are appended afterwards.

Obviously they have not been using HitTail to let their audience do the brainstorming for them! Sure, we are biased and hold strong beliefs in getting very granular about the terms you want to focus on in the long tail. That's why we allow you to export your HitTail suggestions for use in PPC campaigns.

Fortune 1000 marketers in particular should think twice about using broad match for PPC advertising because once you get big enough, then you will probably have to deal with public relations problems at one point or another. However, that doesn't mean you have to pay to make it worse.

When a crisis emerges, new keyword combinations that you may not have expected could suddenly become more popular. That's why it's safer to specify exact search phrases.

Does HitTail Work Every Time?

HitTailing to get more website traffic is a hit-or-miss proposition sometimes. This blog post is to discuss a miss.

Not everything you do in real life can be an automatic success. Sometimes, it takes a few tries. HitTail is analogous to entrepreneurial success in real-life. You will have your successes, and you will have your failures. But on the whole, your successes should outweigh your failures, because you learn from the past, do more of what worked for you, less of what didn't, and play to your strengths.

You selectively concentrate your successes, and make your failures work for you the best you can.

Case-in-point, we hit a home-run with the concept of "Top PR firms in NYC". We get tons of hits every day on this concept. There are apparently a lot of people interested in seeking out the best folks in one of the best branches of marketing in one of the best cities in the world. Go figure. And no one "owned" this 5-word long tail phrase, where significant amounts of highly qualified traffic exists, but it flies beneath the radar of keyword inventory tools, such as those built into AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

But conversely, I HitTailed the concept "blog marketing", and we didn't show up until 23 pages in!

The likes of people who kept us buried on that terms is just about every marketer on the planet who advocates the use of blogs for marketing. In other words, I stepped into a competitive term! Though it's not as competitive as "second mortgage". Still.

Even with a mildly competitive term, HitTailing is still worth it. The fact remains that we deliberately penetrate the search engine results, no matter how buried (it could be worse than 23 pages). And the article is being added to a long-page-version of our content (magically generated by blogging software), letting the term "blog marketing" combine itself at random with other related topics that I have blogged about during the course of August, 2007. I could be getting issued suggestions on "corporate blog marketing" or "blog marketing consultants" or some such.

So even though viewed on its own, it was a failed HitTail attempt, I am still optimistic that on the whole, it will lead to future successes.

Long tail keyword research

HitTail has long been referred to as one of the tools for long tail keyword research. But on searching the term, I did not see it on the first page of results. Just about every entry on page one of the Google results was a HitTail review. But the site itself was oddly missing.

Here, we notice another HitTail issue. It's based on long tail keyword "actuals". Just because a word combination CAN lead to a site, doesn't mean it ever will. As it turns out, the HitTail site is currently found eight pages in. But that happenstance surf, click, suggestion will never occur, because too many prior pages are good candidates to the curious searcher.

What can we conclude? Well, HitTail is uniquely suited to spaces where all the prior pages are unappealing, and they STILL find you. This is why it's SO EASY to pick up the traffic from a HitTail suggestion. The implication is that not only is it a keyword where traffic exists, but it's a space where all the other content is unappealing.

But then, how would I ever think to target the new term? The answer is, I didn't have to. I actually am incredibly optimized on that term, because there is functionally no escape from HitTail once you're researching that phrase. But the question we must ask as the HitTail developers, is whether that is a generality. Should we keep our suggestions hardwired to actuals, or should we "spike" them with speculative terms from other sources?

BlogKing hits on the chicken and egg issue in his latest post, where he recommends reading the news in the morning, commenting in the afternoon, and checking your traffic in HitTail in the evening (or a few days later) to go another round. Going another round implies zeroing in on where the traffic is REALLY at.

And therein lays the true answer to what this post asks. Start with keywords that you KNOW SHOULD lead to your site, based on whatever sources, be it intuition, brainstorming, keyword inventory tools, the morning news, or wherever. Once you've "seeded" your site with content, watch what HitTail is trying to tell you in its capacity as a web suggestion box.

You might have been close with your original post, but you could really hit it home and optimize your website for natural traffic with just one more post.

The Lost Art of Writing Well

Writing copy all over the Internet is getting mangled in the name of search engine optimization. HitTail aims to bring back the lost art of writing well, by excusing you from targeting the most competitive terms. These are the terms that make you jump through hoops and do backflips in order to move up by one page, tweaking keyword densities, moving words around on the page, and otherwise doing things a good writer shouldn't.

Back in the days of print, this criteria was known as "word count", and The New York Times joke was "All the news that fits, we print." A play on their motto "All the news that's fit to print."

Well, today's online world has the equivalent. If you're not being found through Google, it wasn't worth writing in the first place. That might be an overstatement, as running things on the homepage of massively popular sites is a viable alternative to a Google search. But who gets their stuff run on the homepage of the NYT or MSN websites? That's why Digg has become so massively popular so quickly. It gives the little guy a fighting chance, without being beholden to Google or other big media.

Even the old-school big-media guys are giving up their beloved double entendre headlines, in favor of matter-of-fact headline. Every few months, big media runs a story about how headlines have to just get to the facts, because it's generally the headlines that show in Google. And if it's not DIRECTLY about what you're looking for, it's not going to get the click.

So, how does HitTail remedy this?

First, you must understand that there are 2 types of matter-of-fact headlines...

1. Those that will get the (pre-existing) search engine traffic easily.
2. Those that will never get the (pre-existing) search engine traffic.

That's right. It's all a grab for pre-existing traffic patterns. No one is going to search on what you wrote about BECAUSE you wrote about it. The cause/effect relationship is exactly the reverse off what most people think.

People will find you because what you wrote about GETS IN THEIR PATH.

Being a cat-owner, never was this as clearly demonstrated to me as the outbreak of poison cat-food. It was a massive pattern of traffic that never existed before. But when the story broke, everyone started searching on it. Then more and more pages popped up getting into the path of those surfers. An entrepreneurial cat food manufacturer would have had dozens of pages out there explaining how their cat food is guaranteed safe, complete with an online ordering form. They could have had a windfall, but probably missed their window by now. I know there's not pages like that out there, because I didn't find them. They're targeting the wrong--or too small--of a list of keywords and phrases.

Once you construct a headline that you KNOW will tap into pre-existing traffic (thanks to HitTail suggestions), it frees you up to write well on the rest of the page. Imagine the burden of knowing that all that SEO criteria for getting the search hit simply goes away. Writers can do what they do best: write. And because writers write to be read, they can have peace of mind, because they know they will be read, simply by virtue of selecting an effective headline.

So don't simply write your headlines in a matter-of-fact style to appease search. Write your headlines KNOWING you're tapping into pre-existing traffic corridors. Or as a speculative alternative, write about topics that you KNOW WILL have the traffic patterns. Can you say, Election 2007? That reminds me, political bloggers should really be using HitTail to raise their voice above the fray of the noisy blogosphere. But that's another story.