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Talk Is Cheap, But Long Tail Keywords Are Not – The Power of Seeds

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Long tail keywords have a low cost per click (CPC).

That is what we’re commonly told, but it is not always true. To lower keyword cost per clicks, you consulted all of the best internet marketing blogs and they all said the same thing – add additional terms to your current seed keywords to transform them into long tail keywords.

A seed keyword is a one or two-word phrase, such as “sneakers.” Long tail keywords contain more terms and are variations of the seed keyword. For example, “black running sneakers” or “light weight hiking sneakers.” You are told long tail keywords have less competition, dramatically lowering CPCs. You followed the advice and spent the time to create and implement long tail keywords in your campaigns. However, these long tail keyword CPCs remained the same or were only marginally less expensive when launched.

Even with long tail keywords your cost per click is high, your cost per conversion is unsustainable, and your PPC campaign is eating money like cookie monster at a Mrs. Fields.

These blogs have missed an important aspect.

You Are Not Only Competing With Other Long Tail Keywords

The problem is that your long tail keywords are not only in competition with the exact series of words you are bidding on. While it would seem unlikely that competitors would target your exact long tail keyword – they actually don’t need to.

With the advent of broad match modifier, it’s easy for your competitors to match on all of your long tail keyword searches.

For example, imagine you run an SEO company and you begin your PPC campaign with the seed keyword “SEO Company.” As the campaign gathers data, you find that the CPC is prohibitively high, so you decide to try a series of long tail keywords based on your target market (which, for this example, is real estate). You come up with the following long tail keywords:

  • Best SEO Company Real Estate
  • Excellent Real Estate SEO Company
  • Results Based Real Estate SEO Company

You figure there is almost no competition for these long tail keywords since they are so specific. However, the long tail keyword logic begins to fall apart. The other companies don’t need to bid on that exact long tail keyword to match you in the auction.

Competitors that want to advertise can simply have the keyword “SEO Company” in broad match modifier  (+seo +company) and they match you for every single one of the long tail keywords you created. Since so many companies do bid on that keyword, the competition and CPC will always be high.

Your PPC Problem: Your Seed Keywords Are Hotter Than Larry Bird’s Shooting Hand

Hot Hand

Now that you see how easy it is to match on long tail keywords, let’s talk about the issue with the high CPCs and how it relates to seed keywords. When we talk about seed keywords at Nerds Do It Better, we define it as the main keyword (or keyword phrase) to which you build your ad group. In the example, “SEO Company” was the seed keyword.

There are seed keywords you do not want to build ad groups around because just by having these seeds in the long tail keywords, the cost per conversion is unsustainable. These are called hot seed keywords (as in too hot to handle). In the example, no matter how long tail you make the hot seed keyword “SEO Company” you want to stay away from it because the competition is so high that your cost per conversion makes the campaign unsustainable.

The Solution: Do Not Be Explicit: Find Non-Obvious Keyword Seeds Your Competitors Missed

Do not be Explicit

The solution to a lower cost per click is not simply adding more words to your current seed keywords with the hope of making them long tail and unique. The solution is to find new seed keywords that your competition is not bidding on. These seed keywords will be non-explicit keywords that are not obvious to your competitors and, because of that, will have less competition in the AdWords auction and a lower CPC.

How To Turn Your Campaign Around: Pause Poorly Performing Seed Keywords, Find Non-Explicit Seed Keywords, And Optimize Your Campaign For These New Seed Keywords

Step 1: Identify The Seed Keywords That Are Too Hot And Pause Them

The first step is to find the seed keywords that are crushing your cost per conversion and pause them. This is going to take some Encyclopedia Brown style detective work. There is no hard-set number to categorize them, but you know your individual campaigns and an acceptable cost per conversion.

It is important to note that just because the actual cost per click is high, it doesn’t necessarily mean a seed keyword is too hot. The cost per click can be high, but if the cost per conversion fits your business goals, they may be acceptable seed keywords.

Step 2: Create A New Seed Keyword List By Going Beyond The Explicit

To avoid seed keywords that are too hot, you need to find ones that are not as obvious and really do have less competition in the PPC auction. Here are three exercises to find these non-explicit seed keywords (we will continue with the example in which a fictional SEO company tries to avoid the hot seed keyword SEO Company).

Exercise 1:

Find New Seed Keywords By: Thinking About How Your Ideal Customer Would Search To Solve The Problem Non-Explicitly.

The first exercise is to imagine that you are your ideal customer and are looking for a solution to the problem that your business solves.  Think of all of the different angles you could search for a solution. For example, the fictional SEO company may conclude that their customers would have search queries for problems such as:

  • How do I increase sales from my online store?
  • How do I get more customers to my website?

Possible seed keywords may include (in broad match modifier):

  • +sales +online +store
  • +more +customers +website

Exercise 2:

Find New Seed Keywords By: Describing The Symptoms Of The Problem.

How would your ideal customer describe the symptoms of the problem they are having? For example, the fictional SEO company may conclude that customer symptoms include:

  • Low traffic to my website
  • No visitors to my online business

Possible seed keywords may include (in broad match modifier):

  • +low +traffic +website
  • +visitors +online +business

Exercise 3:

Find New Seed Keywords By Thinking About Small Informational Searches.

In this exercise, think about, and create seed keywords based on the small informational searches your customer may be making.  This is the most extreme of the exercises, but it may be necessary if you are in especially competitive verticals. These are very top of the funnel searches and may not even show explicit interest in your business. I typically use a mind map for this exercise to branch out and think of everything my business touches. For example, the fictional SEO company may conclude that their user would search for:

  • What is a keyword?
  • How do inbound links work?

Possible seed keywords may include (in broad match modifier):

  • +what +keyword
  • +inbound +links

Step 3: Customize Your Campaign For These New Keywords

One of the most important (and difficult) steps in the process is creating an ad and an offer that match the keyword’s search intent. Since many of the seed keywords that you discover from the three exercises are top of the funnel, your offers should reflect that. Don’t try to sell customers when they are just looking for information. Instead, be the company who provides the information, and continue marketing to these customers.

For example, if you make an ad group around the seed keyword +low +traffic +website then you want an appropriate ad that addresses questions about low traffic websites, and a landing page with an offer such as an eBook about low traffic websites and ways to increase traffic. Design the landing page so the offer can only be attained if the user provides their email and allows for an opt-in email list so you will have the ability to market to them in the future.

What are your thoughts about the current state of long tail keywords?

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You have probably heard talk about long tailed keywords in PPC  – they are mentioned in all the major blogs from PPC Hero to Search Engine Journal.

In fact, it feels like I can’t read or see anything without them being mentioned….long tailed keywords are basically the Kardashian’s of the search engine marketing world.

Many search engine marketing blogs discuss how to research them (long tailed keywords – not the Kardashian’s) such as:

Yet, few if any of these blogs discuss what to actually do with these long tailed keywords in pay per click once they have been uncovered. 

Most of these blogs focus only on researching them, which leaves you wondering – what do I do once I find them?

This blog post aims to help you use long tailed keywords for PPC so that you can maximize your revenue in your Google Ads campaigns.

What is the Long Tail?

The Search Demand Curve

The term long tail was originally coined by Chris Anderson (who also founded the tech magazine Wired) in his book, which was appropriately titled The Long Tail.

The premise of the book is:

  • Online, a massive variety of items receive small numbers of purchases individually. These individual purchases collectively make up for a larger percentage of revenue than the small number of items which receive a large number of purchases (as is the case with traditional brick and mortar stores).

I know this can be confusing, so let me use a real-life example.

Take a physical CD store like Strawberries, where there is a limited amount of shelf space.

In this CD store, you have a small number of items which are big sellers, such as Chumbawamba, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Boys II Men (the last time I was in a CD store was the 90’s).

Those 3 bands drive the majority of your revenue. You would stock the shelves with multiple copies of CDs from those 3 artists so that you don’t run out.

For this example, let’s say that 10 people came into the store – 3 bought Hootie and 3 bought the Chumbawamba’s, resulting in 6 total purchases.

However, there would be 100 people in your town who love different music genres that you don’t carry. In your town, you might have 2 hardcore Jazz fans, 1 hardcore spoken word fan, three fans of death metals, etc.

These people collectively would buy 50 CD’s – but each individual CD is sold once or twice.

You just couldn’t hold that kind of inventory in a physical store.

You would have rows and rows of random CDs for these very niche musical interests.

If you had an online CD store, you would still have those small numbers of the big sellers (big bands like Hootie) – but because there is no limit to the physical space, you would also stock all those small music genres for each individual to purchase.

These combined individual purchases of unique CD’s make up the majority of your sales.

What are long tailed Keywords?

long tailed Keywords

In the same way that there is a long tail with merchandise, there is also a long tail for search queries or keywords.

Here is how it works:

Keywords are typically divided into three categories:

  1. The fat head: These are searches that consist of one word like Car or TV. They do not really tell the search engine nor the advertiser what the user is specifically looking for. Fathead searches are typically when users are just browsing.
  2. The mid-tail: These are 2-3 keyword searches. Searches such as Porsche car or plasma TV. These are good keywords to advertise on as they provide the search engine and the advertiser more information about what the user is looking for.
  3. The long tail – These are 4+ word keywords in a phrase. Searches such as Porsche 944 Turbo in Andover Mass or What kind of plasma TV should I get to watch football. These phrases provide quite a bit of information to both the search engine as well as the advertiser. These are typically used by the visitor when they are ready to buy or convert. Long tailed keywords are the best to advertise on because collectively they drive a lot of revenue. As with the example of the CD store – collectively they make up the majority of searches. In fact, they make up 20 – 50% of all search queries.

Why Do you Want To Use Long Tailed Keywords In PPC?

Long tailed keywords are great for PPC and there are a couple of reasons for that:

  • Long tailed keywords are cheaper. The way that Google Ads works is that every time you bid on a keyword you are entering into an auction with everyone else who has also bid on that keyword. Since long tailed keywords are individually so unique less advertisers bid on them. This means there is less competition in the auction and you pay less per click.
  • The Click-through rate is higher.  Long tailed keywords are unique and the user knows exactly what they are looking for. By matching the uniqueness of their search query with a unique ad you are almost guaranteed a higher click-through rate. In fact, PPC Hero has found that long tailed keywords can generate a 20% higher click through rate. A higher click-through rate means a higher quality score. A higher quality score means a lower cost per click which generally correlates to a higher return on ad spend.
  • The conversion rate is higher. These users are highly motivated and as we have seen they are ready to convert. They are typing in these longer phrases because they are no longer browsing and they know exactly what they want. Targeting long tailed keywords helps your conversion rate.

How to use Long Tailed Keywords for PPC:

1. Put Long Tailed Keyword in Your Display URL

Your text ads are constructed of 3 distinct parts – the headline, the description lines and the display URL as seen below:

Put Long Tailed Keyword In Your Display URL​

The display URL is a place to show the user how relevant your text ad is to their search query and win the click.

The rule with display URLs is the part before the .com has to be the actual site you send the user to when click on your ad.

However, the part after the URL can be whatever you want it to be.

As an example – if you are sending users to www.example.com/NewPage then you can list the display URL as example.com/longTailKeyword but you couldn’t list it as notmypage.com/longTailKeyword.

We suggest that you put the long tailed keyword in the description line.

Here is an example so you can see for yourself why this is so valuable:

Imagine that you have seen enough of the show Long Island Medium that you decide that you have to meet Theresa Caputo.

You know that you are going to have to book a hotel in Long Island so you perform the following long tailed search:

You see two ads – one of which has the long tailed keyword in the display URL (which Google bolds when it matches the search):

and one which does not:

Which seems to be the most relevant result to you? Which would you click on?

More than likely it would be the one that includes the long tailed keyword in the URL.

2. Create Single Keyword Ad Groups Around Long Tailed Keywords

One of the reasons that Google Ads is so successful (they made $66 billion last year from Google Ads) is their relentless focus on relevance.

They want the ad to be as relevant as possible to the searcher and for the visitor to the advertiser’s site to be as relevant as possible to the advertiser.

In fact, Google’s entire quality score system rewards advertisers with lower cost per clicks and higher ad positions is mainly based on click-through rate which is really just a proxy for relevance.

The higher the click-through rate – the higher the quality score and the higher the quality score the lower the cost per click.

Below is a great chart which shows this from our friends at WordStream which demonstrates this:

Quality Score affects your CPC

Much of this relevance comes down to the advertiser who most tailors their ads and landing pages to what the user searched for.

To maximize this we suggest creating single keyword ad Groups (SKAGs) around your long tailed keywords.

Here is why:

Google Ads chooses which ad in your account to display to the user based on the ads that match keywords in your specific adGroup. You want to make your entire adGroup as individually tailored to the long tail keywords as possible.

In these single keyword adGroups, you have one keyword which triggers four highly relevant ads (because you are always A/B testing two desktop ads vs. two mobile ads). This means that you can take the time to create:

  • Specialized ads with the specific long tailed keyword in the display URL (and description lines if you can)
  • Send the user to specialized landing pages, which include the long tailed keyword as well as any image which can specifically target that long tailed keyword.

If you create SKAGs around fathead searches, then you do not really know how to match what the user is looking for. For example, if they type in car are they looking for the movie or the mode of transportation.

3. Create Highly Tailored Landing Pages Around Long Tailed Keywords

The landing page is the page you send the user to after they click on your ad – and this is where you will typically “convert” your customer.

Use the long tail to send your user to the most tailored landing page possible, including the actual long tailed search in the title of the page and some images which specifically relate. We typically use UnBounce to send users to highly targeted landing pages based on what their long tailed search query was.

I will provide an example so you can see how vital it is to match your landing page to your long tailed keyword search. We will stick with our search for a hotel in Long Island. This time I decide to reward myself with a nice beach stay so I typed in:

I selected two ads and clicked on them – one sends me a landing page that is clearly tailored to my long tailed search and the other clearly targeting the fat head search of any searches that include the word hotel:

A. This is the first ad – clearly targeted at the fat head search of Hotels (you can do this by putting the search term in something called broad match modifier and it will match with any query with the word hotel in it):

Clearly, this is not targeted at my actual search – this is some sort of bluff and doesn’t look at all like Long Island (I grew up there). It also doesn’t have anything about Long Island anywhere on the page.

Now, here is the second landing page that I am taken to:

We can see the image of Long Island, the fields are already filled out for Long Island and there is even a map of Long Island.

As the user which would you find more relevant and which would you book your travel with?

Probably the one that took advantage of long tailed search in PPC!

How have you used long tailed keywords in your PPC efforts?

Image Credits:

Google text ad from Red Letter SPH

Long tail illustration from Moz

Adam Lundquist Black and White Headshot

About the Author

Adam Lundquist

Adam Lundquist is the founder of Nerds Do It Better. He is (reformed) radio morning show host and loves to talk marketing.

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