We at LeadGenerators are fanatical about keyword research and the concept of the long tail. As part of our Search Engine Optimisation and our Pay Per Click campaigns, we carry out keyword research to the N’th degree before we even start to work on a client. The question that we are always asked by our clients is how long should or could a keyword list be? We have always found this difficult to answer as the concept of the long tail talks of an almost infinite list of keywords and phrases.
It seems that Google has now answered this question for us. In a Google AdWords campaign that we recently submitted for a client we received an error message that we are very proud of!
The message read something to the effect of “Your campaign has too many keywords”
Music to my ears! My first thought was to wonder how many online marketing agencies can claim to have received such a wonderful message from Google. Knowing how so many of our competitors tend to rely on scant and limited keyword research for their clients, my guess is that we are now part of a very small elite. It feels like breaking the bank”.
I spoke to our Google account manager who told me that, as holding keywords in an account takes up space on their system, they felt that including keywords that have too few impressions will overload the system.
I agree and apologise to Google for overloading them by being so thorough and exhaustive with our keyword research. If you think about it, there is some logic to the fact that there are keywords that receive almost no impressions. However, surely the whole point of being thorough with keyword research and the point of the long tail is to make sure that clients have exposure also to the many tens of thousands of keywords and key phrases that have even just one impression every now and again. This is what we in the online marketing community refer to as the “low hanging gems” of search marketing. This is really what makes the long tail work not just for SEO but also for PPC.
Could it be that Google is giving us a message that we should be less thorough with our keyword research and not give our clients all of those low hanging gems?
No ways!
Frank Orman
Travel, Cat Litter and Infidelity
We're Sorry We Broke Google's Bank!
