Longtail SEO Search Marketing

Barcamp Vancouver was my first taste of an un-conference, and fittingly I was un-prepared and gave an un-presentation on longtail SEO. It’s easy to talk about a topic you have subscribed to well before it ever had a name. But be assured, next time I will not have worked until midnight the evening before, and I will have prepared at least an outline of my session. All in all, we just chatted for 30 minutes on how selling ‘less of more’ can have greater returns than the mega-gits everyone craves, and how SEO fits into longtail economics.

In September I will be delivering a course on SEO for Ecommerce Marketers and undoubtedly longtail SEO will be a basis for some of the content. But unlike Barcamp where I talked mostly about SEO strategy, I’ll try to get down to SEO tactics for the longtail, and how conversion should be the horse pulling the cart, not traffic.

Now I know I mentioned a few tools for session attendees to check out that will help establish longtail SEO, but only two come to mind (chime in if I am missing any).

Keyword generator

Way back in 2001 Justin Tilson and I developed a little access database program to do this very task of generating all our keyword variations, permutations, and modifiers. We talked about making it a web service but never got around to it. Lucky for you someone else has made a small desktop app for keyword generation.

Eye Tracking Studies

Because my field is developing technology for ecommerce and online retail companies, the MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide is one of the best $300 I have ever spent on research. The eye tracking charts on user behavior are fantastic. Make sure you check out some of their other reports as well.

I am a devote reader and evangelist of MarketingSherpa - if you are a marketer and do not read MarketingSherpa reports, articles, case studies, and attend their conferences - you are not as effective as you could be.

So thanks to Barcamp organizers and sponsors, it was a fun event. I look forward to future ones.