Open Source Affiliate

Guide: Choosing keywords: long tail keywords and the buying phase

Choosing keywords: long tail keywords and the buying phase

Find the right keyword to promote in an online marketing campaign can be difficult. Here I will cover two important aspects: long tail keywords and the customer buying phase.

Long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are specific keywords. For example, suppose your main keyword was “blog”. A more specific keyword would be “money blog”, or blogs about money. A long tail keyword would be “affiliate marketing money blog”, which would only include blogs about making money with affiliate marketing. Even more specific would be “open source affiliate marketing money blog”.

The purpose of long tail keywords is focused targeting as well as beating the competition. You may be trying to target a certain segment of blog readers, not just any blog readers. For example, you want blog readers who are interested in affiliate marketing. In addition, there are more competitors for a search term like “blog” rather than the specific term “open source affiliate marketing money blog”. In terms of targeted users and competition, you win with long tail keywords.

The only drawback with long tail keywords is that they do suffer from smaller search volumes. The principle of the long tail, though, is that the sum of all the many long tail keywords, often neglected by the big-name competitors, will actually provide more total traffic than the simple, main keyword. Using the previous example, we could also target “six figure yearly review affiliate blog”. If we kept doing this, we could bring in more traffic than simply targeting only the phrase “money blog”.

However, it is important to strike a balance between too specific and too broad. As you pick more specific long tail keywords, your overall search traffic may decrease. Let’s say you are trying to promote an affiliate offer for shoes. Your long tail keyword could be “pink rubber men’s dancing shoes”. I don’t think too many people search for this. Picking a long tail keyword with no traffic is a common mistake among beginners.

Buying phase keywords

If you want to promote an offer or sell something, it can be helpful to target people who are already thinking about spending money. Suppose that I was trying to promote the Clickbank program, Six Figure Yearly. I might target keywords like “Six Figure Yearly Review”, “Six Figure Yearly Scam”, “Six Figure Yearly Price”. The keywords like review, scam, and price reflect potential searches of people who are looking to buy a product. These people will convert at a much higher rate than an average reader who is just browsing around. Ideally, you are looking for people who surf the net with their credit card in their hand, looking for that last nudge of information before making a purchasing decision.