What a great reception at the e-consultancy SEO Supplier showcase in London last Thursday. For anyone who couldn't attend it was Neutralize (*\*) and the other 'usual suspects' from the UK search marketing scene presenting our wares regarding search engine optimisation to almost 200 quality attendees. What I really like about these events is watching the other agencies pitch. We rarely get to learn about each other - what we've done or how we perceive the industry or our role within it, so I think it's refreshing for all of us, plus it stops anyone talking complete bullshit.

As a follow-up it seems we really hit a nerve and have had a lot of feedback about about one particular slide which was included in the business case for SEO section of our presentation "Cutting off the Long Tail".  At the time this was purely a brain-dump on our part, but it seems a lot of other people are experiencing the same thing, so maybe it's more of a problem than I'd first thought. The point we made was that these days there are certain search terms that you just cannot get relevant content in-front of using Pay Per Click advertising. Match types and recommended pricing were making it harder to load viable long tail based Pay Per Click campaigns, and therefore if you were a big site owner SEO along side your Pay Per Click campaign really made sense in order to tap into high value searchers that use more sophisticated searches further down the tail.

I am going borrow a quote from Bokardo that I have just found and although not written about Pay Per Click or SEO it perfectly sums up why there is a problem with match types and recommended pricing in the way they control what words can be effectively advertised against:

...controlled vocabularies marginalize many opinions, works, and ideas that live in the Long Tail simply by making them extremely hard to discover, or even worse, by excluding them

...SEO to the rescue.