Long Tail Keywords

In the BI class on Monday, Dr. Ram has talked about the term "long tail" which means selling small amount of each item with a large amount of different items. Applying the long tail keywords will be pretty powerful for small business, because they are more specific and precise for each item. Let's look at an example first. The following table shows the keywords for "logistics" company. the word phrases has a high competition, and it costs more to show up in the front when people search these keywords. Even though the website shows up, visitors might not specifically want to click this website. The long tail keywords are more specific and contain a lot of words in the phrases. Although the impression will not be increased, there are more people going to click the website once the website show up, which also increases the CTR.

table 1 long tail keywords example

There are so many keywords or phrases we can use for the Adwords, and each of them might only attract few clickers. However, the total clickers will be high as a result of a large amount of the keywords.

"When looking at sales generated by search terms,18.6% of conversionswere from top 10 keywords. Conversely, 81.2% of the conversions were from hundreds of other search terms outside of the top 10. The 80/20 rule works in reverse, providing a sweet spot of opportunity"(Matt Bailey). This is pretty interesting, because when we search the items on eBay or Amazon, we always use more specific keywords instead of only one word. When we did the Adwords research, we found out that even though some keywords like "restaurant", "Indian restaurant" have high impression, the clickers were pretty low which caused low CTR. Thus, when we do our Adwords campaign we cannot just focus on the keywords that has been searched most. Instead of that, we should use the long tail keywords and try to be as specific as we can.

Besides, when talking about the competitors' keywords, we also found out that there are some Chinese restaurants showed up when we search Indian restaurant. However, the CTR was pretty low since almost no body want to go to the Indian website if they are searching Chinese food. For some small companies, who have low differentiation of products might be able to use this strategy. But for our client, Chinese restaurant might be a negative keyword to improve the CTR.

References:

Matt Bailey. Keywords Strategies - The Long Tail. Search Engine Guide. Feb. 20, 2012.

http://www.searchengineguide.com/matt-bailey/keyword-strategies-the-long-tail.php