By Dane Christensen, Search Engine Marketing Manager at Lyris, Inc
Countless articles have been written about the importance of focusing on long-tail keywords for both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. It’s generally agreed that long-tail keywords produce higher quality traffic at a lower cost.
It’s a great theory. But there is the small matter of generating the massive number of long-tail keywords needed to build a significant amount of traffic. By its very nature, long-tail keyword traffic is scattered across a very wide landscape.
Using the Lyris HQ demo website “Top 5 Flicks” (www.top5flicks.com) as an example, a very small list of possible long-tail keywords could be:
• ”action flick starring orlando bloom”
• ”horror movie without blood”
• ”buy romantic comedy movie”
• ”war movie about macarther in Japan”
• “directed by martin scorsese”
When you factor in all the possible movie genres, subjects, settings, actors, directors, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc. can you imagine how many possible permutations of long-tail phrases there could be? Oh, and then there are misspellings (yes, I spelled “macarther” wrong on purpose above) meaning that keyword phrases could easily go into the millions. Some of those keywords will get a handful of searches each month; many of them will just get a single random search here and there. But that’s the long-tail. Individually, the keywords probably aren’t worth the effort of researching and plugging them in to your system. But collectively it can account for a significant amount of high-quality traffic.
To go after the lucrative long-tail, you must have an effective way to harness massive numbers of keywords.
Following are five techniques that will allow you to do just that:
Website Content Mining
You know all of those websites that marketers have been working hard to optimize for years? They can serve as a great source of valuable long-tail keywords. But how do you scoop up the keywords that are just floating out there amongst all those websites? Some people have created screen scraper bots—applications that scour the web extracting keywords from websites.
But this method has been rendered obsolete by Google’s (relatively) new Search-based Keyword Tool . Using the SK Tool, you can specify a particular website address and it will instantly produce a list of keywords found on that site. Click on any of those words to go straight to a search results page where you can find other websites to enter into the tool. In no time you’ll find a plethora of long-tail keywords.
The tool also provides a way for you to organize these keywords into categories. If you have an AdWords account you’ll also have the ability to store keyword sets so you can build lists over time. Once you’ve got a big enough list you can easily export the list for import back into Google or any other search engine. It’s a great tool. And it’s completely free.
Search Engine Query Analysis
While the above method focuses on pulling keywords from content, this method involves analyzing what people are actually searching for in the search engines. While there is undoubtedly a great deal of overlap between these two sources, analyzing what people are looking for may be a way of getting the jump on all those websites that have not yet picked up on the latest trends.
The Keyword Discovery tool in Lyris HQ mines query data from over 200 search engines world-wide, compiling nearly 38 billion searches. When used with the Lyris HQ Search Marketing tool, researched keywords can be automatically dropped into your PPC campaigns with no export/import required. The Keyword Discovery tool is included in the Lyris HQ fee structure, allowing Lyris HQ users the ability to easily tap into the most extensive database of keyword data on the planet.
PPC Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence tools take yet another approach to keyword research, focusing on the keywords on which PPC advertisers are bidding. The idea here is that if companies are actually spending money on these keywords, they must be the most important keywords. Two such “spying” tools are Keyword Spy and Spy Fu, with service fees ranging from $59 to $139 per month.
These services allow you to input the domain of your competitors’ websites, and it will return a list of all the keywords on which they are bidding. In addition to the keywords, there is information such as how many searches are done on the keywords, how many companies are bidding on them, and what the cost is for the top bid position. This allows you to easily focus on the least competitive keywords.
Permutation
If you want to bid on the keywords that no one else has even thought of, the tool for that job is permutation. Permutation means assembling words together in various combinations form different sets of words. Using the “Top 5 Flicks” example, our permutation may look like the three lists below:
List 1 List 2 List 3
movie starring keanu reeves
dvd featuring russell crowe
flick with harrison ford
These three small lists can be combined into 27 (3×3x3) different keywords such as:
* movie featuring harrison ford
* dvd with russell crowe
* flick starring keanu reaves
* Etc.
Add just one more three-item list like genres (e.g. action, comedy, drama) and you’re talking about 81 long-tail phrases (e.g. “comedy flick with harrison ford”). Adding more items to each list can grow the list to massive proportions very rapidly.
The key here is to save the energy of researching what people are bidding on, searching on, or putting on their website and just pump out the keywords programmatically. Using this method you’re bound to generate a lot of phrases that nobody every searches on, but you’ll also catch a lot of those very low-volume searches that are missed with the previous methods–or even those that haven’t even been searched on yet.
Unless you have unlimited time and patience, you’ll need a tool to pull this off. The leader in the field is Boxer Software’s “The Permutator,” an installed software that cost about $50.
Web Analytics
If permutation is like casting a very wide net in order to scoop up all the stragglers, using your web analytics data is more like using a fishing pole with the perfect bait to catch exactly the right keywords. Any respectable web analytics application has some form of keyword report that will show you what keywords visitors searched on in order to reach your site. That is your prime list.
Some keyword reports are more sophisticated than others. The keyword report in Lyris HQ allows you to segment visitors and the keywords they searched on using a wide range of criteria, allowing you to focus on the highest value keywords.
You can even take it a step further and capture the data from a search form on your own website. This way you not only know what people searched on to reach your site, but what they are searching for after they reach your site. Now that is targeted!
Summary
Implement all five of these techniques and you won’t miss any high-value long-tail keywords. And you may actually find that you have no more use for the big-head keywords at all.
***************************************
Dane Christensen is the Search Engine Marketing Manager at Lyris, Inc. where he uses the company’s integrated online marketing suite to manage a six digit monthly marketing budget over seven different search engines. He has been involved in the Internet industry as a trainer, web developer, webmaster, online marketer, web analytics specialist, product manager, and entrepreneur since 1994.
[...] This post was Twitted by chris_rainey [...]
Nice article Dane, and some great tips. I recently did some research on long-tail searches and came to similar conclusions to yourself: that long-tails are often cheaper and have a higher conversion rate. Since there is less competition for long-tail keywords, and people making long-tail searches are often further along in the buying cycle and therefore more willing to part with their cash, this makes perfect sense.
http://www.alanmitchell.com.au/techniques/benefits-of-long-tail-keywords/
I also found that since long-tail searches are usually more specific and qualified in their nature, long-tail keywords provide a great opportunity to write highly relevant ads and achieve a strong CTR.
Good old permutation mixed with a basic understanding of what people tend to search for is my favourite method of generating long-tail keywords. A bit of experience and common sense is also needed though to avoid creating a bloated account with over 1,000,000 keywords, most of which will never be searched.
Once the campaign is up and running and search query data has been generated, that’s usually more than enough for any avid search marketer to utilise. I’m not sure expensive keyword research tools are really needed at all.