If you’re shopping around for search engine optimization (SEO) services, or just learning how to improve search engine rankings, you probably noticed that people in the SEO industry use a lot of terminology. One commonly used phrase at Web.com Search Agency is “long tail search” which applies equally to SEO and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) management. Its importance cannot be underestimated.
Generally speaking (and highly oversimplified), a “long tail” keyword is a phrase that is 3 words or longer. Understanding of long tail value involves a certain knowledge of search engine user behavior. People usually start searching with a single word or two word phrase, which would be considered a “short tail” phrase. The search engine then spits out a long list of possible results. If people don’t like what they see, they add another word or two to the query and search again. If this phrase is relevant to what you are offering, this search type can be highly valuable. Having a match for a long tail search, whether it is in natural search results or PPC ads, is a great way to turn a visitor into a paying customer.
(note that the search engine “long tail” differs from the internet sales “long tail” model where you can make money having a diverse set of products on sites like Amazon.com or Ebay.com.)
Millions of people search the internet every day, using millions of different search variations. According to a popular white paper, 41% of people will repeat a search when they don’t get the result they want. They do this by making the search tail longer, or re-phrasing the search. If you can’t afford to get an exact match on the first search, this 41% share represents a huge opportunity.
Getting the most out of long tail SEO
Without discounting the high volume that you can get from matching short-tail terms (which you should generally go after) long tail terms can be moneymakers. Getting found for long-tail terms does not always take as much effort for each keyword phrase, but we generally advise creating more pages of content that can capture these searches. For instance, if you sell thousands of different office products, you can get long tail results like “hp inkjet bright white paper c1861a” with far less effort than the word “paper.” You will need a shopping cart system that can create multiple individual pages that are search engine friendly. Note that you need a big enough batch of products to account for the relatively low amount of searches for each item, and you might need to add content and a few links to product pages that are more competitive. In short, long tail searches create an aggregate of customers, but they can be extremely useful when you factor in lifetime customer value.
There are several other easy ways to get long-tail traffic for very little money. You can put white papers on your site where search engines can find them. You can answer common customer questions online. You can add a forum, but this usually requires a certain amount of maintenance. If you have lots of technical specifications for your products, and they aren’t trade secrets, you can post them on your site as well. Another easy way to get more long-tail results is to have a blog, and talk about what you do, the type of services you provide, and industry news from your point of view. If you measure your results in an analytics program, you are sure to be amazed at the wide variety of search results you see for your products and services after your pages are picked up by search engines.
How to expand your long tail presence in Pay-Per-Click
PPC long tail terms are added by expanding your set of keywords. The first and easiest way to do this is to use the keyword tool provided by the marketing platform. Google Adwords does a great job of suggesting long-tail terms, and anything that is relevant should be added. Adding less relevant terms may result in a lower quality score. Whenever possible, the keyword for each term should land the user on the most relevant page to the product or service. There are multiple ways to organize all of your long-tail terms, but even a low budget site could have several hundred long-tail keywords in a single campaign. Conversion tracking is highly recommended, as you will find that some terms will have a very high conversion rate, and you will want to adjust your budget so you can take advantage of the best phrases. You may also note that some terms get poor results, so you should either pause the keywords or fix the landing page so it matches the customer search term better.
One method for generating long tail PPC terms is not recommended because it may not be worth the time. There are tools that automatically generate long phrases for PPC campaigns, but several of these simply make it harder to track campaigns. Search engines have also placed restrictions on the number of keywords in an ad group, so you are usually better off combing through the list suggested by the search engine’s keyword tool. (You can paste your Google Adwords terms onto Yahoo Search Marketing and/or MSN Searchcenter, and vice versa.) We had one account which had over 40,000 keywords in Yahoo, but when we did a statistical analysis we found that less than 3,000 words got a single impression over the previous 2 years, so we made the customer more efficient by deleting all the unused phrases.
In rare cases with both SEO and PPC, a few clicks a month can create millions of dollars in revenue. There are certain items, like heavy equipment and industrial machinery, that don’t have the short-tail search volume that consumer products get. Nonetheless, the company that is optimized for its product or service is going to be the one that gets clicked, visited, and called. This kind of sales opportunity can’t be underestimated, even for companies with a 2-year sales cycle on an esoteric industrial process. For many companies, the investment of a few thousand dollars on long-tail SEO phrases can return millions in profits.
How do you measure long-tail effectiveness? This is often a tough question. Short-tail terms can be measured in the space of a few weeks based on goal conversion rates. If you have several thousand visits, a 5% conversion rate on a single term makes for an easy decision. On the other side of the coin, if you haven’t gotten 20 visits for a certain keyword, you don’t have enough information to see if the term is doing you any good. Here, you are better off evaluating the performance of the entire ad group, and determining which ads are getting the best results. If you see that keywords with certain short-tail compound phrases aren’t getting results, you can probably turn most of those words off. For the best PPC terms, you should consider building SEO pages that explore the topic (or phrase) in more detail and get a few external links for these terms.
As a tip for our readers, Google Shopping (AKA Froogle) is a great place to test out long-tail terms for products. If you can convert your shopping cart database into a Google Base feed, then upload it to Google shopping, you can profit off the many different kinds of searches that people make every day. As a rule, relevant information (product number, description, color, size, price) will help you pick up on the wide variety of searches people make each day.
Executing a long-tail SEO strategy takes a certain amount of work, but it can be highly rewarding. Since many of the terms involved are not as competitive, there is a potential for cost savings, especially if you are a new business trying to break into established online fields. You can also use the long-tail strategy if you are a small business with a limited budget, and want to carve out a profitable niche among huge retail sites that may not even notice yo
ur presence. Even if you are a large business, you may have a small percentage of highly profitable products that would benefit from a better search engine presence. In any case, ignoring the potential of long-tail search, even for companies that have locked up the short-tail, is a way of leaving money on the table for someone else.
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