
The Long Tail Keyword Myth - Clicteq
http://clicteq.com/the-long-tail-keyword-myth-a-data-driven-argument/
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the_watcher
The optimization of time is by far the best argument. That said, this leaves
out that there is a relatively easy way to generate long tail keywords in a
part of your workflow that absolutely should exist: mining the search query
report. You should be doing so anyway to make sure you are using negatives
effectively, and it's very easy to add long tail queries you notice from there
without adding a bunch of time.

~~~
T2_t2
> mining the search query report

You haven't even got to do that!

It takes very little time, in many industries, to build 100,000s of keywords.
It is just string concatenation:

{modifier} {Size} {Colour} {Clothing item}

Adjective: buy, cheap, buy cheap, cheapest, best, quality Size: large, small,
extra large, petite Colour: .... Clothing item: t-shirt, tshirt, hoodie

That's hundreds of keywords quickly.

Keyword research is something I think people overdo. You know the sorts of
keywords that exist, you need to get them all into the system, and then
optimise en masse.

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Clicteq
If you are going to use keyword multipliers or concatenation then I would
suggest that you go into Google Keyword planner and then use the find search
volume option. Once you've done this use the filters and set it to monthly
impressions greater than 10 and this should weed out all of the low search
volume keywords that clutter your account.

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diziet
This is a start, but the underlying data is something like $200k of SEM spend
across what looks like a couple of campaigns. How confident are you that this
is not specific to the campaigns/industry/clients/etc?

Also, Wesley, the scrolling on the site seems to be broken/hijacked.

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oneloop
His results are very general. They depend only only on the fact that keywords
with more words have lower search volume. For any industry for which this is
true (i.e. any), you will find qualitatively similar results.

If you think about it, it's a trivial result. In any other industry if I tell
you "I'm going to focus on increasing the ROI of 10% of our sales", you'd
laugh. Why not focus on increasing the ROI of the other 90% of the sales?

However, it does depend on the account. On an account where you have the same
number of 2 word keywords as 5 word keywords, of course the 5 word keywords
will have a tiny tiny percentage of the impressions (say 1%). But obviously a
marketer who goes for the long term strategy will tell you that you need 100x
more 5 word keywords, in which case the 5 word keywords would have the same
number of impressions as the 2 word keywords. But in comes the author's
argument that you can do virtually nothing to manage that many keywords (we'd
be talking millions here).

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Clicteq
It is certainly correct that in any other industry you would focus on the 90%
of sales not the 10% however when it comes to Adwords many marketer seems to
completely overlook this in my experience.

I would disagree with your second point though. If you take a look at the
search query data you will see that over 80% of the searches come from where
users have typed less than 2 words in length. Only a small number of
impressions are coming from searches that are 5 words or more in length so
even if you had 1 million 5+ word keywords you would never be able to get the
same number of impressions as you would with 2 word keywords if that makes
sense.

By all means it is possible to manage accounts with huge numbers of keywords
and we regally do at Clicteq through using things tools such as Adwords Editor
and Adwords Scripts, however I would argue that for doing this with 5+ words
keywords is probably not an effective use of your time

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oneloop
> I would disagree with your second point though. If you take a look at the
> search query data you will see that over 80% of the searches come from where
> users have typed less than 2 words in length. Only a small number of
> impressions are coming from searches that are 5 words or more in length so
> even if you had 1 million 5+ word keywords you would never be able to get
> the same number of impressions as you would with 2 word keywords if that
> makes sense.

No, it doesn't make sense.

10k 2-word keywords: 1M impressions/day

10k 5-word keywords: 100k impressions/days

If I now increase the number of 5-word keywords to 100k, what do you expect
will happen? I expect to get abobut 1M impressions/day

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Clicteq
If you look at our data that shows how long each search that users are making
is you will see that 94% of searches made by users are 4 or less words long.

Short tail keywords will still catch long tail phrases with BMM for example
the two word keywords +ppc +agency will still catch a search like "ppc
management agency prices in york" which is along tail search query.

If you add 1000000000 million long tail keywords to capture that 6% of long
tail searches that will never = the 94% of searchers that are shorter than 4
words in length.

So 100K 5-word phrases = 6K impressions and 10K 2-word phrases = 94K
impressions

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soared
No mention of brand v. generic in the entire article. If you're going to
analyze keywords and ctr, you separate brand and generic no matter what.

Obviously two/three word keywords bring in more volume and have a higher ctr..
They include your brand name. Brand ctr is always 25% or above, and non-brand
fathead keywords have much much lower ctr and impressions.

IMO all the data is suspect if you leave brand in their. As it stands its a
better comparison of brand v. generic rather than fathead v. longtail.

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Clicteq
Great point about Brand v Non brand. This is a relevantly new company with
very very few brand searches (less than 10 per month) so is unlikely to have
skewed the results. I may add that as a point within the articles if thats
okay?

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soared
Yeah I definitely would, that lends a lot more reliability to the data.

