Maximising the Long Tail for Search Purposes
A lot of our PPC campaigns have over 1 million keywords in. Granted, this is for high spending clients, however it really important to maximise their appearance for the Long Tail.
What I mean by the long tail is really abstract searches, which, albeit have very low search volume, but have high relevance to the product or service sold by our clients. The long tail appears in many difference walks of life, be it business, sales, personal lives. It is very similar to the Pareto Law in essence, where 80% of the wealth is held by 20% of the population.
How this affects search:
With thousands of long tail keywords in a PPC campaign (where searches are very minimal but when they are searched they are very specific) we are able to drive lower CPCs, lower CPA and higher volumes of enquiries and sales for our clients. This is one reason why PPC is more advantageous than SEO, because SEO on thousands of
phrases would be far more expensive than PPC.
For example, I was in HMV the other day looking for ‘Battlestar Galactica’ series 2 on DVD box set. I watched the first series and as yet haven’t seen the second. As you may be aware, this was not a ‘hit’ and is not hugely sort-after. However, it does interest me. I couldn’t find it in HMV, nor in a number of other stores that I looked in – the reason being because it isn’t a ‘hit’, therefore is not going to sell huge volumes of them to justify them being on the shelves.
This paves the way for search to be fantastic. I went to the internet and typed in ‘battlestar galactica series 2 box set DVD’. This phrase is probably searched very rarely every month, and is known as a ‘long tail search term’. However, despite the lack of popularity in the search term, there are a number of advertisers advertising it. One in particular got my business. The benefit of PPC is that advertisers can capture these very infrequent searches. With many of them turning into business this is a staple business supply. This is the very basis of Amazon’s business success.
