Study: does it pay to invest your time in long tail keywords?

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Axandra news archive: 12 January 2010

Welcome to latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

How important are the long tail keywords in your search marketing campaign? Does it pay to invest your time in long tail keywords with little search volume? A new study has the answer.

In the news: How many clicks should a web page be away from the home page, Googlebot crawling fictional URLs, what people search for on Google and more.

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1. Study: does it pay to invest your time in long tail keywords?Last week, the Rimm-Kaufman Group published a study about long tail keywords. Does it pay to invest your time in long tail keywords?

What are long tail keywords?

Long tail keywords are long and specific keyword phrases that generate little traffic and few conversions each.

Long tail keywords usually consist of several words and they have a low monthly search volume.

What did the study find out?

Google AdWords advertisers with monthly expenses ranking from $15K to $750K per month were analyzed in the study. All of these advertisers had well managed Google AdWords accounts.

Here are the key findings:

The importance of long tail keywords varies. For one company, the long tail keywords generated only 8% of the sales. Another company received 83% of its sales through long tail keywords. It depends on the product. People search differently for different types of products. For one product group people might use more long tail keywords while they use fewer for another product group. The importance of long tail keywords does not depend on the paid search budget. Long tail keywords are most important for SKU-based commodity retailers. For some Google AdWords advertisers, long tail keywords are critically important. One company in the test generated more than 71% of its revenue from long tail keywords.

Long tail keywords are important to all AdWords advertisers. Even the company that received only 8% of its sales through the long tail keywords made a significant amount of money with them.

How can you find long tail keywords?

Use IBP's keyword tool to find and create long tail keywords for paid search marketing. IBP offers a sophisticated keyword tool that gets keyword suggestions from Google, KeywordIndex and other keyword resources:

IBP's keyword manager makes it very easy to create long tail keywords. Open IBP's keyword editor, select "Expand keywords", enter supplemental keywords (or choose from the supplemental keywords that IBP offers), click the "Generate keywords combinations" button and IBP does the rest.

IBP offers supplemental keywords in these categories: cities and regions of 27 countries, colors, industries, occupations, synonyms for bargain, big, complete, fast, great and smart. Of course, you can also enter your own supplemental keywords.

Long tail keywords are an important part in any search engine marketing campaign. IBP makes it as easy as possible to create targeted long tail keywords for your website.

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2. Search engine news and articles of the week

Is it okay if a web page is 6 clicks from the index page (discussion)?

Google's John Mueller says:

"Depending on your site's size and the business behind it, you may also want to look into the paid Google site-search solutions, which index all of your pages regardless of how they're linked (provided they're in a Sitemap file).

This does not guarantee indexing in the normal web-index, but may be a solution should you just need something to help existing users of your website find specific content. That said, personally speaking, I'd have no problem clicking through 5-6 links to get to highly specific content if I needed it and your site had it. [...]

I wouldn't worry too much about priorities in Sitemap files (I think your system would generally be fine) -- they won't make or break the crawling, indexing or ranking of your site, they're just additional hints."

Googlebot crawling fictional URLs in JavaScript

"With Google evidently trying to increase the amount of content stored in its index, the situation sounds ideal for many webmasters - however, others are not so enthusiastic.

Recently, it has been reported that Googlebot's intrusive crawling of JavaScript has resulted in the search engine creating fictional URLs - web addresses that do not exist. Analytics packages have been the single biggest contributors to this problem, including Google Analytics itself."

What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google

"You know how Google sometimes 'predicts' what you might be searching for by giving you a little drop down menu of suggested search queries? These suggestions, of course, are based on what other users frequently search. [...]

This shows Google’s remarkable power as a source of data on a range of human behaviors, emotions, and opinions. It gives us insights into what people might care the most about concerning a given topic."

Magazine on Google Goggle's face recognition and more

"Google has my name (their form asked for it), they got my bank account (Google Checkout), and certainly they got personal data (like my Gmail emails, which include passwords, or Google Docs texts and spreadsheets). All voluntarily, but saying it ain’t so doesn't make that data less existing. Or does Google suggest we should lie and register as Donald Duck to protect our privacy?"

Related: How Google collects data about you and the Internet

Fast Flip now available on Google News homepage

"Near the bottom, we're now displaying stories from Google Fast Flip, the article-reading service we launched in September. Fast Flip is still in Google Labs, so we'll continue to experiment with the format. But so far we've found that the speed and visual nature of the service encourages readers to look at many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers' websites."

Search engine newslets

Bing admits that their crawler MSNbot is slow.December paid search benchmarks.Google launches "near me now" feature for smartphones.Yahoo stops its Yahoo! Shopping API.Yahoo hires more social science experts.Bing bringing basketball to you.Facebook's Zuckerberg says the age of privacy is over.Google becoming "giant monopoly" - German minister.Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

"The small investment in IBP is now saving me more than $1500 per month."

"The best thing that I have done was to buy IBP, and only wish I had found it sooner.

I have a website for a dental clinic in Tijuana. As a short term solution, I started with pay per clicks. I have spent as much as $2000 a month, and justified it with the fact that the advertising was producing results that paid for itself.

However, there are seasons when the business drops off, and I would end up spending the same amount for fewer patients, thus eating up my profits.

I decided to start focusing on SEO. I hired a company to do the initial SEO on my home page. The cost for the optimization for that one page, plus the promise of building 100 back links per month was $4000.

The optimization immediately helped my rankings significantly. Then I found IBP. I decided to use it to optimize my other pages. Through this process, I realized that if I had had IBP in the beginning, I wouldn't have needed the SEO company.

Through IBP, I realized which keywords were truly the best ones, and started focusing on them. Now, several of my secondary pages rank higher than my home page.

As I have learned now how to build back links on my own. I believe that IBP has help me to better optimize my website, than the SEO company. I don't need them anymore, and will be cutting them loose as soon as they fulfill their contract.

Of 35 keyword phrases, I now rank on page one of Google on 24 of them. With Yahoo, I rank on page one on about 30 key word phrases. I have cut way back on my pay per clicks, to less than $500 a month, and I have doubled my business.

I can see that the small investment in IBP is now saving me more than $1500 per month, and even more in time."
Jim Crayne, www.goodsamdental.org

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