The KeyWord

Long Tail SEO

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads on networks like Google AdWords can be extremely effective for driving conversions on your website.

When it comes to pay-per-click, the competition can be fierce and the cost-per-click can be expensive. One way to keep costs down and your conversion rate up is to incorporate "long tail" keyword phrases into your PPC campaigns. A long tail phrase is a specific phrase that may not receive a lot of clicks, but the cost per conversion is generally much lower. Using lots of long tail keyword phrases will in aggregate add up to a lot of traffic. In PPC advertising, broad generic terms always cost more per click. Advertisers with the biggest budgets get their ads placed in the top search results and they end up with mediocre results at best. The best way around this issue is to set up ads with long tail keyword phrases. Long tail search phrases allow for more control over whom the PPC ads are presented.

A few examples of broad generic phrases could be "restaurants", "air conditioning repair" or "mortgage refinance." These phrases would most definitely have tough PPC competition. Plus, once these phrases are entered, the person doing the search would have to click through pages of search results to find exactly what they were looking for. This is not how most people use search engines. For the most part, when we are looking for something specific online, we enter a phrase into a search engine like Google and if we do not see what we are looking for on the first page, we simply type in a new search. Each search tends to get more specific.

Taking into consideration the search phrases from the example above, the next round of keywords would be more "long tail" search phrases such as "lunch restaurants East Raleigh", "air conditioning repair South Tampa" or "refinance mortgage broker Hartford Connecticut." As you can see, each of the long tail phrases include more descriptive wording. True, these phrases might not get a lot of traffic but the people that are searching on the long tail phrases are more likely to convert at a fraction of what the broad (less descriptive) phrase conversions cost.

Incorporate your long tail search phrases with targeted ad copy and landing pages and you will have a winning combination.

Horizon Marketing Group is a Google AdWords Certified Company. If you are interested in creating a new stream of conversions for your site, we would be happy to develop a comprehensive SEM plan that meets your objectives. For more information contact us here.