Words? Words are all we have. You might look for an appropriate TV program to air your commercials on, or a particular section of a newspaper or website you want an ad on, but search marketing lets you focus even sharper.

Here, our SEM and people pick words and phrases (“keywords”) that your visitors, prospects or buyers are likely to search for – and make sure your ads appear against each of these.

It might seem easy – in fact you can probably think of 50 search phrases that are relevant to your product right away. The problem is that your competitors have done exactly the same thing. Now there’s no fixed price for these keywords. Google, Yahoo and others make you bid against other advertisers to traffic from a phrase – what you’re willing to “pay-per-click”. So the prices for each of these words go up, up and way. That’s good news for the search engines – but real bad news for you – for at the end of it you get the same click.

Some keywords have over 90 advertisers, with per-click costs getting into the tens of dollars – we’ve seen cases of prices well in the US$40+ per click range. Insanity, if you ask us – and no, we don’t own Google stock

We think search engine advertising is wonderful for the engines – but sucks for marketers who have to get into pitched battles to outbid each other on phrases they want to be on. At the same time, millions of other words have no bidding pressure and you could get traffic there for as little as 5 cents a click or less. (Google says that at any given time about half of all searches are unique – and never happen again. That shows you how much ‘legroom’ you have for as-yet-undiscovered keywords with low bidding pressure.

This is a classic application of what we (and Chris Anderson and the rest of the world) call the Long Tail phenomenon.

Our BroadWords® technology goes straight for the long tail of relevant but low-priced keywords and helps our brand managers sniff out tens of thousands of keywords that are relevant to your offering, but have low competitive bidding pressure.

While you might be happy with 10 or 50 keywords, a typical campaign we run will feature at least 10,000 keywords – and there are a few in the hundreds of thousands of keywords range. What this gives our clients is a far ‘wider’ coverage than their competition, and, also, lower costs per response compared to others bidding on a limited set of words.

Here’s an actual example. One of our clients felt a particular set of keywords were essential to their business – but even bidding at 21 cents a click we were at low position 7 or 8 on the page with half-a-dozen people outbidding us. And we were barely getting 1,500 clicks a month on those words. We used BroadWords to discover a few “virgin” keywords – where we were the only bidder, at 5 cents, and where one keyword alone was giving us 8,000 clicks a month.

As you can imagine, technology like this is a tremendous advantage for any marketer. Here’s what we do next.