The Long Tail is Overrated
Filed Under (the PPC Book) by Jeff Hudson on 19-11-2007
No, I don’t want you to take that title literally, however, here’s the underlying hypothesis behind the title above:
If you can’t get your site to turn a positive ROI with the most competitive short tail terms in your niche, there is a very good chance that your problem isn’t KEYWORD related.
Meaning, if you can’t play the game with the best, then you will never scale to the major leagues. If you are in the insurance business and someone searches ‘INSURANCE QUOTE’, clicks on your ad, and doesn’t fill out your form, then don’t tell me that person wasn’t qualified. They told you what they wanted, you just didn’t give it to them.
Of course, there’s a lot of room in the land of mediocrity. Competitive webmasters the world over will continue to turn out profits off long tail terms as long as search engines exist. The problem is, the search landscape is not flattening out. It’s going the other way. You need to have the ability to convert with the best of them. You need to aspire to be as good as anyone out there. Complain all you want about the bid prices of broad match competitive keywords. Do you think Lending Tree is losing money on ‘mortgage’ broad matched? I doubt it. (look at these 3 ads by the way - they are TIGHT. look how much information they convey in such a small space)
My point is simply this:
If you are grinding out very little or negative ROI day after day and you can’t for the life of you figure out how to make it work then it’s time to stop and have your site look itself in the proverbial mirror. It’s time to humble up and look at why your site isn’t converting enough to make a decent net profit. If that doesn’t sound like an attractive course of action, don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything.
It’s ok to be mediocre. It’s part of our culture to blame everyone else for your current predicament. Let me help. Here are some things you can blame:
1. It’s Google’s fault. The bids are too high because they are greedy and bad.
2. It’s my competitors fault. They are bad marketers and bid too much for the best keywords. They can’t be making money, can they?
3. It’s the content networks fault. They send me bad traffic because they are greedy and bad. They should filter my traffic for me so I make the most amount of money without ever doing anything myself.
4. It’s my search agency’s fault. The targeted keyword traffic they are sending me isn’t converting.
5. It’s the industry’s fault. I spend hours everyday reading search engine marketing blogs and nothing is happening!
Think about it…what if I gave you these choices:
Scenario 1: You have a team of copywriters and programmers/designers at your disposal, but you can ONLY bid on the word ‘mortgage’ or ‘mortgage quote’ or ‘mortgage rate’.
OR
Scenario 2: You can bid only on phrases that get 10 or less queries per month and you can’t make any changes onsite.
The problem with scenario 2 is, long tail traffic is so disparate and unpredictable that it’s very difficult to optimize for. Meaning, query reinforcement, quality score optimization, etc.
Here are the 3 downsides to focusing on the long tail:
1. Hard to segment due to high percentage of unique queries
2. Hard to optimize for, due to the same reason
3. Low quality score, for the same reason
12 months from now, in order to really optimize your site for a long tail adwords campaign, you’ll need a landing page for every single nuanced search query. That level of customization is not practical for the majority of advertisers out there. Nor is it feasible for the search marketing agencies.
What is realistic then?
To focus heavily on your core competency at the root level. Take your biggest keyword, and optimize the bejusus out of your landing page. Make your landing page better than the biggest player in your industry. Focus on your message, your offer, you price, your product. Everything. If you can convert on that term, you can convert on anything. Think of it like the Sinatra song, ‘If I can make it there, I can make it, anywhere…New York’.
Why not try to hang with the best? Set your sights a little higher. If you can’t make it work, your site will still be better off than the guy who never tried.
You raise some good points. I don’t do PPC, but longtail searches are my bread and butter. I must agree though. The user DOES tell you what they want. Typically, for shady sites, I read in their search, and run it through a list of legit keyterms and products. If it doesn’t match, I boot the search out to a PPC page. The PPC company I use has a searchable XML feed, so the ads that return contain exactly the keyphrase they searched for, or the general topic. 20% ctr
[...] The long tail is overrated (everything’s overrated this week). At least that’s what The PPC Book is telling us. “If you can’t… turn a positive ROI with the most competitive short tail terms… there is a very good change that your problem isn’t keyword related.” This post suggests that in order to get the most bang for your buck, you’ve got to aim for the big league, competitive keywords. [...]
[...] The Long Tail is Overrated - I wholeheartedly agree with this post, an excellent read. [...]