4 replies to this topic

[ChuckFinley]

Hi All,

I'm hoping you can help me out here. 2 questions --

1) When I create a long-tail keyword list, should I care whether the Adwords Keyword Tool shows any search volume for the long-tail keywords I select? All of the long-tail keywords I create show zero search volume and a very low number of pages are returned on an exact match search -- low competition.

2) Is the power of the long-tail because it will rank for many orderings (permutations) of the words in the long-tail keyword phrase (4 or 5 words or more)?

[Jill]

Long tail keywords, by their very nature will likely NOT show any searches in the keyword tools. They are, by definition, those keywords that are only searched upon once in a very long while. They are not necessarily keyword phrases that are made up of lots of words. Long tail is all about the number of times searched.

For more information please read:

The Great Myth of Longtail Keywords

[suzstephens]

2) Is the power of the long-tail because it will rank for many orderings (permutations) of the words in the long-tail keyword phrase (4 or 5 words or more)?

I don't think the order of the words in a long-tail keyphrase matters. For example, I've found that including information on lots of subdivisions to a real estate site will attract lots of visitors who've used a wide variety of keyphrases that include a particular subdivision name.

[sergiuliano]

Longtail Keywords

advantages:

- low competition -> easy to SEO and to rank higher
- CTR for longtails is much higher as the user is looking exactly for the service/info from your page


disadvantages:

- small number of searches
- not present in keyword search statistics, so prioritizing them might be a bit more difficult

[Michael Martinez]

It's difficult to publish content and NOT get traffic from the long tail of search. On a normal, healthy, "not-pounding-the-vanity-head-terms" Website you should see something like 70-80% of your traffic coming from mid- to long-tail keywords. You just don't get that much traffic from the head terms unless you deliberately try to carve the long tail out of your strategy (which I've seen some people do).

There have been a few studies published (mostly from PPC houses like Rimm-Kaufman) that show the most money (conversions) comes from queries with 4-8 terms (which would include many long tail terms).