Long-tail keywords
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Written by admin on September 29, 2008 – 11:33 pm
The long-tail keywords are the ones receiving low numbers of impressions, and the occasional click. They just don’t get enough traffic to justify their own ad or landing page, but collectively are worth bidding on because they are cheaper than other keywords and convert better because there’s less competition.
These two factors lower your global average cost of customer acquisition, and can mean the difference between a struggling and a dominant business.
Each one isn’t anything to write home about, but collectively they may be doing more for your business than any of your top performers just like the hardworking character actors and lighting directors and third associate key grips and assistant best boys who don’t get all the credit but without whom the movies don’t get made. The names in the credits at the end of the movie are the long-tail keywords.
Your long-tail keywords can be in big, undifferentiated groups with a generic “problem/promise” ad: Headline describes the problem, Description Line #1 makes a big promise, Description Line #2 includes a feature and call to action.
You will improve performance by grouping the long-tail keywords by concept. For the gout-campaign example, I used the following concepts to group longtail keywords:
- Diet: Keywords related to diet indicate, as best as I can tell, potential customers who desire to take control and change aspects of their lifestyle. Ads that reassure that such changes are quick and easy do well with this group.
- Food: Food keywords, on the other hand, reflect a narrower mindset related to specific foods to ingest or avoid, rather than a wholesale diet change. Ads that ask ignorance-uncovering questions (What are the 3 worst gout foods? Is cherry juice for real?) will motivate this group.
- Remedy: People who type remedy are looking for home remedies and folk medicine, as opposed to drugs or prevention. They like “secrets” and “what doctors won’t tell you.”
- Symptom relief: People searching for gout pain, arthritis gout, gout symptoms, and gout treatment view gout as a disease not entirely under their control. An ad that immediately offers information about diet and lifestyle change will alienate this group. Instead, empathize and offer quick results.
