Are Long Tail Keywords the Holy Grail of Search?
June 19th, 2008 by 
Amit
Before we get started let me define what a long tail keyword is. A long tail keywords is a highly specific keyword containing 4 words or more.
Here’s an example :
buy nike tennis shoes size 10
discount nike running sneakers
red leather high heeled shoes
As you can imagine someone typing in a keywords like : “buy nike tennis shoes size 10″ is READY TO BUY! In other words an effective long tail keywords will have a very high conversion rate.
But here’s the thing, a 4+ word keyword will not get a lot of traffic, maybe 1-2 clicks a month. So the trick is to bid on 30k,50k, even a 100k long tails. You can do the math, the traffic will add up.
These keywords have very little to no competition so you’ll get a very low cost per click. Heck, with a strong list of long tails you can launch a very effective direct linking campaign, and completely clean up.
Sounds pretty simple right?
Well I hate to burst your bubble, but coming up with huge ’smart’ list of long tails (like the examples above) that actually get traffic is NOT easy :
- Sure you could crack open KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker, but you’ll be disappointed with what you get back. They’re typically not the type of quality long tails that will generate massive amounts of traffic and high conversion rates. Plus everyone else in your market has access to these keywords.
- The other thing is that the long tail strategy really doesn’t work well in every niche. Niches like retail, travel, insurance, that have massive amounts of search volume, and people are often looking for something very specific, will work well with the long tail strategy.
- You could make a huge multiplier of terms related to your niche and generate 100k long tail keywords. However, unless you really understand your niche chances are you’ll get a huge list of junk keywords that don’t get any traffic.
- The long tails for different niches, say retail vs travel, will be very different, so that just one more layer of complexity added in!
So is it worth cracking the long tail strategy for ppc affiliate marketing. Are there really affiliates out there making a fortune bidding on 100k+ long tail keywords?
Every heard of Clicks2Customers (C2C)? They’re the biggest super affiliate company in the world, started by renowned PPC expert, Vinny Lingham. Clicks2Customers (which has now become more of a performance-based agency), specializes in the travel and retail markets with a direct to merchant long tail strategy.
When I mean long tail, I mean REALLY long tail. C2C bids on several million long tail keywords per merchant. And you thought managing your 10k keyword campaign was intimidating!?!
C2C brings tens of millions of dollars in affiliate commissions every year.
So I wouldn’t say long tails are the holy grail of search so much as developing a killer system for generating quality high converting long tails, now that’s THE Holy Grail of Search.
This is a research project I’ve started with a fellow super affiliate. We have some very good ideas, but we still need to test them.
clicks2customers direct to merchant long tail keywords vinny lingham
Posted in PPC Marketing, affiliate marketing | 
Interesting that’s funny you just brought that up becuase I got to thinking today a lot of the broad markets are getting more competitive as times goes on which granted there still easy to rank specially through organic search. The thing is though sooner or later ti will get super competitive, but then again there is a ton of long tail markets and other merchants to promote.
We just put up a few more affiliate sites we’re going to promote. One affiliate site we just put up we have already worked in that market and got our client ranking on very competitive keywords. I talked with the affiliate manager today and he said some of there top affiliates are making around 400k a month and most of them are doing it through organic search.
Super competitive market (that’s what people think) :).
I don’t get how they do this successfully. If you bid on a long tail keyword such as “buy nike tennis shoes size 10″ you are competing with people who are bidding on:
“buy nike tennis shoes”
“nike tennis shoes”
“tennis shoes size 10″
The only way to “one up” these people is to have a perfectly custom ad that talks about buying nike tennis shoes in size 10, otherwise there is no reason your ad will get a higher CTR than any of the other ads from people bidding on the terms above with slightly more generic ads.
And since it’s not realistic to think that anyone is going to write 100s of 1000s of millions of custom ads, I just don’t see the benefit to this type of strategy. What am I missing?
If only you could mine google search data for these keywords.
Patrick,
After time your AdRank will improve and your AVG CPC will keep going down. It takes time and sometimes a lot of money, but then other times there is markets you can jump right into and start profiting right off the bat.
Patrick,
sorry misread your message. There is a ton of market that use long tails. I’m not going to get into details, but that could be where your going wrong at you don’t know how to properly run a keyword research because there is market where you can use 100’s of keywords, and yes sometimes 1000’s.
@ Patrick: Your statement is right. However, if they’ve done it right and have a specific ad text for that keyword in it’s own individual adgroup than that keyword will have a higher quality score as it is exactmatch in opose to a phrasematch “tennis shoes size 10″ becoes that will also run on “buy reebok tennis shoes size 10″ which in addition, will also result in a lower CTR.
For that same reason, long tail keywords are better for optimizing your profits as well. Let’s say that the phrasematch for “nike tennis shoes” makes your ad apear for:
-nike tennis shoes outlet
-nike tennis shoes discount coupon
-nike tennis shoes online shop
-nike tennis shoes catalog
-buy nike tennis shoes
-order nike tennis shoes online
Now let’s give these keywords some fictional EPC’s
-nike tennis shoes outlet: 0.21 ePC
-nike tennis shoes discount coupon 0.11 ePC
-nike tennis shoes online shop 0.79 ePC
-nike tennis shoes catalog 0.43 ePC
-buy nike tennis shoes 1.59 ePC
-order nike tennis shoes online 1.91 ePC
The average ePC is: 0.84 so your bidding software, or if you’re doing it manually, your calculations will never give you the full potential for that keyword. To make a profit, you will set your CPC for the phrase match “nike tennis shoes” to 0.60 this will lower your position for the higher converting keywords as well. They might not even show at all. And if they do, the people that took the time out of their day to go into that kind of detail with their campaign. will have the advantage!
However: It might be wise to do add it as a phrase match, and use the search term reports to take a look at what search queries it showed on, and then add those as an exact later on.
I guess what I mean is that to do what Vinny’s company is doing (according to Amit) you need to bid on hunreds of thousands or even millions of keywords for each campaign - AND each and every single keyword needs a perfectly tailored ad - AND the destination URL for that ad will need to take them to exactly what they are looking for (i.e. size 10 nike tennis shoes). Doing this for 100s of 1000s or millions of keywords per niche seems impossible. You definitely can’t do it by hand, and I don’t see how it could be automated either (the ads wouldn’t make sense half the time, etc. and CTRs would suffer big time).
Is it also true that Google HATES accounts with nothing but 10s of 1000s of long tail keywords that get 1 click a month each? It makes sense that they would, as it must “waste” quite a bit of their resources.
Hey Amit,
Why dont you check your stats on your own affiliate sales. I am willing to bet over 50% of your conversions only come from 10 keywords or less.
Hi Patrick,
You wrote :
“I don’t get how they do this successfully. If you bid on a long tail keyword such as “buy nike tennis shoes size 10″ you are competing with people who are bidding on:
“buy nike tennis shoes”
“nike tennis shoes”
“tennis shoes size 10″”
That’s actually not necessarily the case, if you bid on broad and/or phrase you WILL NOT show up for every broad and phrase possible term, only ones that Google deems “relevant”.
The only way to guarantee you’ll show up on a long tail term is to bid on it.
-Amit
Hi Peter,
I do check the stats on my campaigns. I know for a fact that I make consistent sales from 1000s of keywords. And yes, 50% of my sales come from way more than 10 keywords.
-Amit
Wow, I’m surprised to be honest. In my niches, 80% of sales are made by top 15-ish keywords I bid on.
Amit said:
That’s actually not necessarily the case, if you bid on broad and/or phrase you WILL NOT show up for every broad and phrase possible term, only ones that Google deems “relevant”.
Patrick said:
Are you serious?! Wow I didn’t know that. I figured as much for broad match, but not phrase match too. I always thought if you bid on “nike tennis shoes” phrase match your ad would be eligible to show for EVERY search phrase that contains that term.
Well that makes a lot more sense to me if that’s the case. Thanks for the info, learn something new every day!
One of the biggest problems is maintaining QS with long tail keywords.
For example, if your landing page does not have the phrase “discount coupon”, you will very likely get a poor QS for “Nike Tennins Shoes Discount Coupon” although your landing page may have all the information about Nike Tennis Shoes. This happens to me all the time. The good thing is that if there is no competition on that keyword your CPC is still low despite of Poor QS
What about 50k keyword limit?
Or are you suggesting having one campaign per account?
I thought google allowed only one acct
Hey Amit,
Hi There, Amit as u said to do direct linking with such out-of-the bos long-tails.
Amit, do u really think that googlw will not penalise on QS? Coz for sure ur KW will not b on the Landing Page.
Amit then how to overcome this?
My idea is to make a simple landing page with a Poll then to direct visitor to merchant’s site.
But Amit if i could do direct Linking then nothing beats it. So what do u haev to say about the QS then?
Regards
Raj Mehta
Mumbai
Some of my best sites have revolved entirely around long-tailed keywords. I would definitely say, yes, they are worth it.
Ya, that is the problem I am having too. I am blocked by the limitations of Adwords. They have keyword limits and Ad group limits, so it would be pretty hard to have a custom ad per keyword which would be best for longtail. Any suggestions?
I am doing the “go two weeks and use high CTRs to get a great QS” stage right now.
For me when ever I venture into even the 50 Plus KWs range I get slapped by Google.
Even with a 4% CTR plus avgs I get slapped.
I think what we do is always relative to how well others do in a niche. I can get 60% CTRS and if other get 75% I will get slapped at some point. I hope I am wrong.
I feel the Mighty G culls every once in a while for the higher CTR’s. lower maintenance costs.
Don’t get me wrong I love this topic; I know yourguys know much more than I ever will.
PS
what software does the epc avegage and bidding adjustments for someone?
The “bid high to get a high CTR and QS” strategy hasn’t worked for a long time. Everything you do IS compared to averages. So even if you are in the #1 spot, if your CTR is 5% and the average CTR for the #1 spot is 7%, you’re still not going to “build up your QS”. It really doesn’t matter what position you start at, because everything you do is compared to other advertisers and their results.
As far as keyword and adgroup limits, just use the AdWords My Client Center - you can setup as many accounts as you want and manage them all from the MCC (even programatically using their API if you REALLY want to get fancy)
I still don’t understand how you can set up millions of long-tail keywords and get by the 50k keyword/account limit. Of course you could do that by starting zillions of adwords accounts, but that would be frustrating to manage (and you’d probably incur the big G’s wrath at some point and find yourself out of business overnight after alot of work setting them up…)
I’m going to hazard a guess that C2C has a special relationship with Google which allows them to sidestep the limitations on mere mortals. I know they had raised millions of dollars from VCs recently and opened an office in Silicon Valley. They had stated in the press release that a big motivation for doing so was to strengthen their relationship with their search partners (Google, Yahoo!).
Why not just buy a premium domain and build a business around it. Seems like you jump around toooo much f@#cking around with google this and google that.
You have the money, buy a domain like spyware.com , cheaphandbags.com and so on and build a business around it. I mean you already know how to send affiliate sales, go all netshop around the net.
Just my 2 cents.
your site has been hacked - just take a look at your meta description
@ Alex Buds— Google will lift the limit on your keywords once you’ve “proven” yourself to them. (I think Amit mentioned it a little while back).
@Small business Laptops “Why not just buy a premium domain and build a business around it. Seems like you jump around toooo much f@#cking around with google this and google that.
You have the money, buy a domain like spyware.com , cheaphandbags.com and so on and build a business around it. I mean you already know how to send affiliate sales, go all netshop around the net.”
Unfortunately, we’re all pretty much doomed to jump through hoops for google, half of the stuff on this site is about jumping through hoops for google.
It really doesn’t that much (it helps) what your domain is. Any domain can be the equivalent of a “premium” domain if you know how to use it. aalhaoqnsaf.com could be make you a lot of money if you used it right. i.e. jumped through some hoops for google.
db
Amit:
If you were going to build a campaign with tens of thousands of longtail keywords, what tools would you use to automate the entire process?
Efficient PPC? Anything else?
Thanks.
Jon
In Tyler’s comment he stated that there are affiliates that doing $400k a month using nothing but organic search. What are your thoughts on this, Amit? If these numbers are indeed accurate, I’m assuming they must be using some powerful tools like Jeff Johnson’s Traffic King Pro.
Do you have any recommendations where an aspiring affiliate marketer can learn the techniques and strategies of the $400k a month earner who is doing with with organic search.
I have to say, I’m a bit skeptical . . . but I am trying to be open minded on this one.
Jon
Hi Amit!
Your presentation on BIP was interesting, but the concept of going “wide” - how effective is it if you have a limited number of pages on your site, and every page is optimised for, say, name of product and 1 or 2 qualifiers.
How to exaclty understand the meaning of going wide? - finding synonyms of your main keywords (ex. laptop review -> notebook review -> portable computer review … etc) or this is something else?
I’d be glad if you clarify the point, thanks!