Whilst running online marketing campaigns for our clients in the travel sector over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that long tail keyphrases are becoming much less important sources of both traffic and conversions than they used to be.  What once used to be an essential part of our initial keyword research is now often not researched at all or the long tail Ad Groups are allowed to run for a few months before being unceremoniously dumped for simply not converting. At the same time, we have been bidding on our client’s Brand name (and other competitors’ brand names) and found this to be a much more effective means of generating conversions.

For example, at least one of our client campaigns relies heavily on own brand terms. These searches act as a barometer of the campaign’s performance – we often see that when conversions for the brand terms are good, the overall stats for the rest of the campaign are good too. Brand terms are extremely cheap but, unlike traditional long tail phrases, are much easier to find, group, get online and generate resultant conversions.  Which begs the questions is long tail search dead?

Yes:

Many of our recent clients’ most important phrases, in terms of search volumes, search traffic and conversions are extremely generic by PPC standards. For example, we have discovered after a year of running a PPC campaign for a luxury holiday client, that the most important terms have been country names and the names of the biggest cities. This seems totally at odds with everything I thought I knew about PPC!  Not only are these phrases not particularly targeted (so do not have the best quality score or the most specific landing pages), they are also expensive and very competitive.  However, the bottom line is that these generic terms have huge search volumes and generate traffic and conversion volumes that long tail phrases can’t possibly compete with. Generic keywords don’t seem to rise and fall in search volume in the same way that long tail phrases do, and if your keywords are set to broad match (and you have a decent list of negatives) they will pick up any straggly little long tail searches without maxing out your budget. After all, there’s no point of being there for a 10p keyword that nobody is looking for.

No:

Deciding whether or not to incorporate long tail phrases depends on the relationship between benefit versus effort. According to Search Marketing Now’s recent webcast , if a client has a large budget and long tail keywords make up for 10% of that profit, it still makes sense to spend time investing in that 10%. For some sectors it’s essential to have a full list of keywords for all the possible searches. For example a drugstore may want to have keywords covering all the products on its site. There are also other benefits such as the sheer price and CPA difference between a long tail conversion and a generic conversion. For example, in one of our luxury holiday campaigns, a third of all conversions come from specific hotel names, but yet these terms account for only a small fraction of the total spend. The average cost per conversion for this campaign is over £16, while for hotel terms the cost is in the region of £5-£10.

Conclusion

While it is true that long tail keyphrases do appear to have declined in importance over the last few years, maybe the death of long tail is a bit extreme.  What’s important is to understand your client’s products in order to decide whether it is worth spending a few extra hours discovering those elusive long tail keywords and being very selective on which key terms you are looking for. It’s also worth noting that although Brand terms may generate cheap traffic and conversions for established companies, they are not effective at generating new business or awareness of a new brand, as they rely on the customer already having prior knowledge of your company.  Therefore, taking into account the limitations of brand terms and the expense of more generic phrases, sometimes having a few very specific long tail keywords can attract customers who are looking for exactly what you offer and will help to boost your conversions and keep your cost per conversion down.