Entering into the “Double Tail” of Keywords
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009The “double tail” is what I refer to when a search marketer enters such a specific keyword into their keyword list that it is unlikely to ever seen any impressions, let alone clicks or conversions.
First… what is considered a “tail keyword” in search marketing?
- Head Term: “apartment complex”
- Long Tail: “apartment complex listings” (modifier)
- Long Tail: “San Francisco apartment complex” (geographic modifier)
- Double Tail: “San Francisco apartment complex listings”
Going after the long tail of keywords means you have already identified your core keywords (for our example, let’s use “apartments”) in the city of San Francisco, California. For our core list we have “San Francisco apartments”, “San Francisco rentals”, “SF apartments” and so on… How do we turn these core keywords (head terms) into long tail keywords?
The most common method is adding modifiers. For example, let’s say we are one of the few apartment complexes that allows pets and want to make sure if someone searches for us can find us; so we might have “San Francisco pet friendly apartments” – this is pretty exact because we know three things about our user: they are living (or looking to live) in San Francisco, they are interested in renting an apartment and they also have a pet or in the processing of getting a pet.
Now how do we take the long tail keyword “San Francisco pet friendly apartments” and go into the “double tail” of keywords? We change our target of San Francisco into a more precise geographic modifier such as a major cross-street, landmark, or neighborhood. For example, someone might want to live by China Town, so we have “China Town pet friendly apartments” (or worse: “San Francisco China Town pet friendly apartments”) – now this is really precise and exact. Instead of knowing that a user is looking in or around San Francisco, we can pinpoint within several blocks where they want to live.
The chance that you will get sufficient search volume (impressions) is unlikely for the above mentioned double tail keyword. First, if a user is interested in a specific neighborhood of San Francisco, they are probably within 10 miles of the city… so instead of the hundreds of thousands of people who are looking to move to San Francisco, we are dealing with maybe a few thousand. Second, we also know that this Internet user is looking for pet-friendly apartments, which means it is a small sub-set of our already several thousand visitors (let’s say 10%) which means we are dealing with a few hundred people every month looking for an apartment online. Third, we have to remember that an average click through rate of your ad might be between 1% - 2% (let’s ignore that whenever a user gets this specific with a term, there is a slim chance that they will click on a paid search listing so 2% is pretty optimistic). After doing some math, we can say that out of 2% of maybe 300 – 400 (given that San Francisco has about a million residents) might be looking for this type of apartment during a 30-day period; which translates to about 3 – 8 visitors a month to our website. What type of conversion rate should we expect for an online “contact us” form? If your contact form is well optimized you can squeeze out 6% - 8% of your visitors to convert into a lead. 8% of 8 visitors is approximately half a conversion a month – so you might be able to get 1 conversion every two months.
Ok, so this isn’t bad. With our double tail keywords we might have paid $0.20 a click which makes our leads cost around $2.50/lead. Now how many “contact us” forms will have accurate contact information – this is another story. Will you follow up with every contact form? That is up to you. How many other contact forms did this user already fill out? In real estate I have seen about 3 – 4 (not including all of the emailing with Craigslist posts).
One thing to note – is that we assumed that all of the people who searched for “China Town pet friendly apartments” were not looking perhaps to buy an apartment, look for a cheap apartment, perhaps look for a room share (remember: the keyword might have been “China Town pet friendly apartments to share” and Google triggered our ad to show because we have a close match keyword). Imagine how long it would take to accurately decide what you want to bid for this keyword, which ad shows (let’s assume you are running three ads – which one triggered the conversion/click and which one just got lucky with a stray click/conversion?) – this amount of data might take up to several years to accumulate which by then Google most likely will have changed guidelines, operations, and new competitors may have entered into the arena.
The double tail of keywords does not work. When companies and advertisers boost to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of keywords – I wonder how many of them actually drive any of your traffic and can be properly optimized to deliver you revenue.
I have included a chart of the double tail in action and what you need to do in order to improve your campaign optimization.
Now this is a very long tail of keywords – over 75% in this example generates no revenue – maybe a few clicks here and there and if there is any revenue generated – it is so minimal and spread out that it is just considered as noise.
If we consolidate our keywords – and instead of having double tail keywords such as “China Town pet friendly apartments” and just use “China Town apartments” for our San Francisco apartment rental website, we have greatly decreased the number of double tail terms (cat friendly, dog friendly, animal friendly, dog ok, dog allowed, dogs allowed, etc…) and we have made our keyword list a lot more manageable as well as making it easier to optimize.
By eliminating a lot of the keywords in our apartment rental website, we managed to spread the keyword revenue share across fewer keywords through simple consolidation of terms that would never have received the volume to be optimized on their own.
)which requires hours upon hours of brainstorming, designing, developing, testing, and measuring.
