Marketers Who Find the Keyword Research Tactic “Highly-Effective”

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Whether writing keyword-rich press-release copy that is likely to find its way into relevant organic search results, choosing long lists of keywords for PPC campaigns, or simply tweaking website copy, marketers need to identify, understand and speak the same language used by their target audience, and emphasize words that lead to the highest conversion levels.

According to surveyed marketers, site log files are rich sources of data for copywriters and keyword list makers to mine. Interestingly, marketers with bigger monthly PPC budgets are more likely to rate nearly all tactics as "highly effective" than their counterparts with smaller budgets. We can infer that expertise may play a role in how successfully a search marketer employs the tools at his or her disposal.

While 31% of big-budget search marketers find long keyword strings to be "highly effective" when looking for high-performance PPC keywords, we also learned that longer keyword strings tend to convert at a slightly higher rate than short strings.

But how long is "long"? 95% of all searches are six words or less. "Long", it seems, can safely be defined as four to six words. While longer keyword phrases may convert much better than shorter keyword phrases, the volume of searches for phrases over six words may be so small that it’s not worth the effort.