I get a lot of questions about using long tail keywords. There is a very fine line to walk when using long tail keywords because of 2 opposite forces working in a PPC campaign.
1. Long tail keywords convert very well, when the finally get impressions.
2. If they don’t get impressions and clicks, they can hurt your account.
So knowing when to keep them and when to remove them is critical to the health of your PPC account. This is one of those areas that is more art than science. I wish there was an exact formula to use, but no matter what a “guru” might tell you, there is not. There is a pretty strong consensus though that keeping a keyword in your account that doesn’t get impressions will hurt the quality of your account.
Personally, I don’t use a lot of very long tail keywords. When sorting through a list, I usually delete keywords that are more than 4 words, and phrases longer than 40 characters. The odds of hitting a phrase that long, especially on an exact match are pretty remote.
I also like to run a tight ship in my campaigns – if something hasn’t got any clicks and minimal impressions in about 3 months, its time to go.
I focus a lot on shorter tail high volume keywords, but long tails are definitely part of a winning campaign if used correctly. What is your take on long tails?
I am more of a high volume short tail type. I add long tails gradually to my short tails, and test them out. ie. I will add a phrase at a time to the short tail and see how that performs, it has worked well for me thus far.
Somewhat random, but where do you do your long tail research Chad? I find Google does not have any data usually to give guidance so I have had to just test blindly with guesses.
Obviously I have data from my site which is invaluable but beyond that I’m lost, especially for entering niches that are new to me.
Long tail makes me feel better at first when entering a niche because I’m more confident it will get profits, but those long tail terms never live up to the hype of long-tail hypesters (go figure). Short tail always blows away the sum of all my longer tail ones by a large margin.
[...] This post was inspired by Chad from CDFNetworks. Chad wrote a post about the good and bad of using longtail keywords and I decided that I wanted to do a post along the same lines. Even though he touched on both the good and the bad, this post will be one sided, I’ll only be talking about the benefits of using long tail keywords. I’ll be talking about some of the reasons Chad gave, and also expanding a little on those reasons and then adding my two cents on the issue of long tails. Make sure to check out his post about removing long tail keywords. [...]
Thanks Chad, for this a great post. Earlier I asked you this question now you’ve answered it. You read my thoughts and I totally agree with you!
Never knew they actually hurt your account, maybe it’s time to start cutting
It is difficult to find those golden longtail keywords. Sometimes you can find the longtails by bidding on short ones
Chad Ive been a quiet reader of your blog for the last year, always inspired by your posts. Very good insights.. Im just starting out in PPC and taking it all in and applying the knowledge of the community, just got my blog up too ;P
I could argue with you here, but don’t want too!
Folks are typing into Google “a ton” of long tails recently to find my blogs.
Some are up to 6 words long!