Revenue by keyword length. Is the money in the long tail?
We have always heard that big part of the money is in the long tail keywords. Is that true? If this is the case, how much the long tail is adding to the total revenue?
I'm getting pretty addicted to real numbers, charts and anything we can distill from them so I pulled figures from a bunch of e-commerce and booking sites, case scenario where we can truly talk about money, and cooked the numbers to see what was coming out of them.
Details of the analysis:
- Exactly 20 sites
- Time frame: 9 months
- Several languages, not only English
- Only organic non-branded traffic, of course
- Numbers in charts are average ones from the sites analyzed
Long tail definition and how to filter by words count
How many words should a key phrase include in a query to be considered long tail? A quick review of related articles and some answers from twitter mates (thanks guys) seems to establish the break point on 4. If a key phrase has four or more words it is commonly considered long tail and this is the criteria followed here.
The regular expressions used to filter traffic and revenue in GA were:
- ^\s*[^\s]+\s*$ one keyword
- ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1}\s*$ two keywords
- ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2}\s*$ three keywords
- ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){3}\s*$ four keywords
- ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){5}\s*$ six keywords
- ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){6,}\s*$ seven or more keywords
You can use them in your sites to analyze them, otherwise who knows what you are going to find there if you don't do dig it?
Visits by number of words in search query
As expected key phrases with four or more words, when combined, represent the highest percentage of traffic, 35.6%, compared to total visits from organic non-branded.
If we break down this 4+, just 4 words has higher percentage than one word queries but 2 and 3 are queen and king respectively.
Revenue by query length
Landscape changes when we look at revenue instead of visits. Money from one keyword queries tops close to 40% of the revenue of an e-commerce. In second position the 4+ bucket.
Broken down we see none of the 4+ stands out significantly and it decreases with query length. There is a nice 21.7% of the money in the long tail bag but not as much as I was expecting.
Revenue per visit by key phrase length
Three interesting facts here:
- The difference gets bigger between one keyword and the rest if the chart shows revenue per visit
- Difference reduces to minimum comparing the rest of key phrases lengths although 2 words pops up a bit from the 2+ gang
- No remarkable differences but 5 and 6 words in search query are almost as profitable per visit as 3 words while 4 words gets closer to 7+ ones
Comparing Visits and Revenue. Keywords performance
In order to have better perspective of how this works, next chart combines visits and revenue percentage compared to total.
- 3 words is the one bringing more visits but in terms of revenue it is the third
- 2 words queries have a nice balance on both metrics
- 1 keyword although fourth in visits it is the king of revenue
Trying to come up with a number that could represent performance of key phases by length the simpler formula I can think off is
performance = visits to total x revenue to total x revenue per visit
That's what comes out of it:
One keyword queries perform more than 3 times better than any other.
Not all key phrases are made equal
While collecting data from this post I didn't spend too much time observing the differences in types of keywords, this requires a complete different study but some similar characteristics were observed.
Single word queries
Some e-commerce sites sell technical products and more frequently their audience search by SKU number instead by product's name. This specific situation makes SKUs a highly converting keyword if you want to consider a bunch of letters and numbers with no meaning a real keyword.
This is what creates a big difference from one single word and the rest in terms of revenue per visit as we saw before.
If you are one of those e-commerce sites make sure, for money's shake, SKUs play an important role in the content optimization.
A second group of single word converting pretty well is the one with very generic terms like sunglasses, smartphones and such. A single word does not infer the intention of user is to buy anything but if this is what user has in mind and your site is there right at the top of SERPs, bingo!
Obviously fight for good rankings for very generic single keyword queries can be really expensive but seems ROI should be more than decent.
Long tail keywords
This is the kingdom of definitions, questions and advice
- Detailed explanations but roughly written: "spider bite on dog"
- How to [verb]: "how to clean your paintball gear"
- What is [noun]: "what is algaecide"
- -ing: "cleaning your paintball gear"
- a vs b (comparison): "iphnone vs android"
- How much…
- Best time to…
Harder to fit in corporate content or product copy optimization so, definitely, to have to take them into account in a more general content strategy involving blogs, FAQ and such.
Probably they don't represent as much as anybody could think before getting deep into data but they are more than 1/5 of the income. You have to be insane to disdain them.
BTW: I wish you all a happy new year crammed with SEO success.