Ecommerce sites 'could benefit from long tail keywords'

14:20 16th February 2010

Ecommerce sites may find that adding long tail keywords to their search engine optimisation strategy could result in increased sales for their products.

Matt Lawson, director of marketing for Marin Software, told Search Engine Land that digital marketing professionals for companies who sell lots of products through their websites may see benefits from using long tail keywords.

He said business models should be evaluated to see how important using long tail keywords could be to a company's search engine optimisation strategy.

Mr Lawson explained that examining how successful keywords and landing pages are one at a time is tough as it would be too time-consuming and that testing should be scaled to thousands of terms.

Estimating the cost of placing a pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement for a keyword is not possible by just looking at its past performance, Mr Lawson advised.

He said: "Applying a portfolio approach to bidding allows you to leverage data across related keywords to properly estimate bids. Using a bid tool or methodology that supports portfolio based bidding is critical to success with long tail strategies."

PPC can also be used to check whether or not current search engine optimisation campaigns are working, it has been stated.

Robert Enriquez, founder of Search Exchange, said in an article for Search Engine Journal that not using PPC would set a business up for failure.