It is the afternoon of Day 1 of SMX Advanced and it has been an amazing show so far. The weather is amazing, the venue is top notch and the speakers are incredibly knowledgeable.

One of the sessions today was on “Mythbusting PPC Urban Legands” with Scott Brinker, Reid Spice and Frederick Vallaeys. One of the key things that stood out for me was the discussion on long tail keywords. In the past, long tail KWs have been suspended due to low search volume, but according to Frederick, that is about to change. Google will be slowly reversing this in the next while and we should start seeing these terms come back online. Frederick also recommended using the search based keyword tool to reveal some of those long tails that you could be using. I guess if they came out with a tool to help you find long tails, they need to let you run ads for them!

Anther good discussion centered around “is broad match worthless?”. Queries of 3 words or more are gaining in share and as queries become longer it more difficult to predict what people are going to type in. Of course, broad match needs to be used correctly to be effective, but according to Google, broad match generates about 1/3 of clicks and conversions. As a side note, using broad match will not hurt your quality score and changing a keyword from broad to exact will not improve quality score. So run search query reports on a regular basis to watch those broad terms, bid differently on broad terms vs exact terms and use conversion optimizer.

Off to a keynote with Matt Cutts, will post more later.