Here is recent response to an email that focused on “long tail keywords”
Hope your having a great week. I understand your thinking regarding the “long tail” keywords as it applies to SEO. My experience has been there are many debates regarding the value of these “keyword strings” know as “long tail keywords.” Although each of these words are not designed to receive the amount of traffic a shorter phrase keyword like “kitchen remodeling” would receive, these phrases should NOT be devalued. As you stated in your email; phone calls and lead generation ultimately is a measuring stick of how successful we are, but we need to account for the time in building an infrastructure that will provide not only short term benefits, but long term as well. Benefits of longer keyword phrases include the following:
- generally typed by the person that has done the majority of their research and is in the final stages of a buying process.
- long tail keywords created in mass can create significant search volume
- long tail keywords typically have less competition than generic keywords creating a better chance that your page will be clicked on
- long tail keywords are more specific so the page can be created to be more specific, thus providing a better destination and experience for the person doing the search (ultimately the goal of Google). This creates less waste of irrelevant searches, higher CTR and a higher quality score (for use in PPC).
- ability to deep link from other pages with your domain to other pages, thus creating a dependence on a bigger sample of pages and not relying on the home page solely.
As you can see in the chart below, this represents how keyword word length equals number of searches
![Long Tail Keyword Search Volume](https://snt125.mail.live.com/Handlers/ImageProxy.mvc?bicild=&canary=991gdpfyWr9dCghtTJHzqy4Ku8PCbNi8Fm2hMTHqLlA%3D0&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alanmitchell.com.au%2Fuploads%2F2009%2F08%2Flong-tail-searches.png)
Below is a graph that demonstrates the average CTR (click through rate) of searches with the different word counts.
![Long Tail Keywords Have Higher Click Through Rate (CTR)](https://snt125.mail.live.com/Handlers/ImageProxy.mvc?bicild=&canary=991gdpfyWr9dCghtTJHzqy4Ku8PCbNi8Fm2hMTHqLlA%3D0&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alanmitchell.com.au%2Fuploads%2F2009%2F08%2Flong-tail-CTR.png)
Below is a graph that demonstrates the average conversion rate based on the different word counts
![Long Tail Searches Have Higher Conversion Rate & Higher ROI](https://snt125.mail.live.com/Handlers/ImageProxy.mvc?bicild=&canary=991gdpfyWr9dCghtTJHzqy4Ku8PCbNi8Fm2hMTHqLlA%3D0&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alanmitchell.com.au%2Fuploads%2F2009%2F08%2Flong-tail-conversion-rate.png)
*All charts provided by Calculate Marketing