Why Long-tail Keywords Equal High-value for your Business

The new black in the keyword world

Long-tail keywords are becoming more frequently used, and working better for many businesses out there. If you’re not using long-tail keywords or at least planning to use them, then you should be. Long-tail keywords are the new black.

But, before we get to ahead of ourselves, what is a long-tail keyword?

Let’s say you have started a business selling chairs. Should you be advertising for the keyword ‘chair’? Probably not, it’s too broad, and while you’ll get a huge amount of traffic from such a broad term, you are unlikely to get customers buying from that click too often.  We’ll see all sorts of random search queries that include the word ‘chair’ and while you could minimise some of this traffic with negative keywords, you’ll be there all day. The worst part is you’ll end up spending vast amounts of money for not much in return.

So instead, you’ll whittle down that broad term to something a little more meaningful. Let’s go with ‘dining room chairs’.

Great, we’re on the right track now – you’re advertising for a more specific product, something your business probably specialises in, and is likely to get much more relevant traffic. The problem is you’re still advertising against most of the competition. Your keyword costs more just to get on the first page, and you still might not see much of a return.

What you will see is customers clicking on your ad, maybe looking at your products and bouncing off to another of your competitors because they didn’t find what they were looking for. This isn’t saying you shouldn’t advertise for that term; definitely do – as you can use this to your advantage, but more on that later.

So next we increase the number of words in your targeted search. You start advertising for ‘solid oak dining room chairs Brisbane’ and in dropping your potential search traffic; obviously you’ll get lower volumes from a term that is not as common. What you will get are searches with more intent to buy. They’ve already done the research with broad terms, they’ve found the type of dining room chair they’re after to match the décor, and now they’re looking to buy six of them for the dining room.

This is the power of long-tail keywords. You’ve stopped targeting the customer in their research phase where the click is more competitive and therefore costs more, and instead are grabbing them when they are closer to the buying phase, where there is lower traffic, less competition and you’re not paying a premium to be at position one because that keyword is simply not as relevant to so many of your competitors.

The funny thing is, really broad terms only make up about 10-15 percent of everyday search terms. Another 15-20 percent would come under the middle length search terms, those with three to four words. That leaves over 60% of searches using long-tail keywords. How many of these do you think have direct advertisers? There’s a whole market of searches out there that are not getting targeted, and you could be capitalising on it!

Let me draw your mind back to earlier in the piece. What happens when you sell more than one product? Maybe you sell hundreds of dining room chairs, all different sizes, colours and materials. Yes, creating a long-tail keyword for every product and directing that keyword to its own ad pointed to its own landing page is a great idea – but you could be waiting a long time to find out if you’re actually going to get traffic.

This is where your broader terms come back into play. Keep your ‘dining room chairs’ keyword running; maybe drop the bids a bit so you’re still on the first few ads but not trying to knock off the top spot. From this, you will see searches that you can use as long-tail keywords. You might see that colour is used more often in searches than the material is.

‘Green dining room chairs’ or ‘black and white dining room chairs’ over ‘wooden dining room chairs’ or ‘plastic dining room chairs’.

There are so many options out there for your long-tail keywords that you need to do the research to find the ones you want to use. Once you find them though, you might stumble across a gold mine of relevant traffic that ends up converting more often than not for a lot less than you would think.

Time to get cracking! Talk to SponsoredLinX today on 1300 859 600 about long-tail keywords and take your Google advertising to the next level.

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