Are Long-Tail Keywords Relevant For PPC in 2017?

It has been widely considered by search marketers that targeting long-tail keywords is a fundamental step to a successful PPC campaign, due to these being highly relevant with low competition and therefore low cost per click.

Long-tail keywords are keywords/phrases that contain 3 or more words, however this differs for different markets (Sometimes a controversial topic). These keywords can be used by business to target search queries that are super specific to their product or service. An example of a long-tail keyword can be ‘Specialist Digital Marketing Agency in Leeds’.

It has been accepted that the keyword curve in targeting different lengths of keywords looks like the one below:

This behaviour curve would suggest that although the majority of traffic comes from short-tail keywords, the long-tail keywords have a greater chance of converting.

 

So just target loads of long tail keywords in your PPC campaigns?

 Using long-tail keyword strategy with your Google AdWords PPC campaign sounds like a great way to gain a positive return on investment. As Long-tail keywords are highly specific to your products/services, and have a lower CPC, lower CPA.

When it comes down to it clients don’t care about a great amount of traffic for the sake of it, business’s exist to make money and care about brand awareness, impressions and clicks; only if this is going to equal more profit.

 

Nice try, AdWords is not that simple!

 In fact, it could be argued that you could not be further from the truth. Most people are pretty lazy when it comes to searching on Google, with the majority of searches being short-tail.

Hence why short-tail keywords gain such a large percentage of all searches, and why they attract greater competition. (because more people search for them).

Therefore, a campaign targeting long-tail keywords would have a low-cost metrics, however you would be losing out on targeting the majority of your potential customers with your paid-search ads!

 

Why should I target long-tail keywords?

 Long-tail keywords are useful to target, as generally if searching lengthy queries are further down the customer conversion funnel, and therefore have a greater chance of buying if your produce specifically what they are looking for. Either that, or they have not yet succeeded in finding what they are looking for with a short tail keyword, so have made their searches increasingly more specific until they have found what they are looking for.

 

Use a mix of short & long-tail keywords

 A balance of long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords is generally a recommended way to create and effective & efficient Google AdWords campaign, as this allows you to target the lazy searchers and acquire high quality traffic from customers further down the conversion channel.

However, the most important steps in using long and short tail keywords is to use the data to make decisions. If a short keyword is acquiring loads of clicks and no conversions, it might be targeting the wrong audience, and could be worth using a longer phrase etc.

It can massively depend on what market you are operating in, as it would not be good practice to target too many long-tail keywords in a niche industry as you can expect to not acquire many impressions anyway. This works the opposite way in large markets.

Google AdWords can either be a very effective method of digital advertising, but also very costly if done incorrectly. Therefore it is always best to contact the professionals! Luckily our experienced professionals at Ascensor are more than happy to help you optimise your Google AdWords account (or any other paid search PPC campaigns) and increase return on investment for your company.

Get in touch with Ascensor today if you are interested in setting up a Google AdWords campaign, or looking to optimise and existing one!

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