SEM promotion: 10 ways to find long-tail words!

I believe that most SEMers are familiar with the Long Tail Theory and have become its practitioners. It is still applicable today.

The topic I’m going to share with you in this article is “ The Long Tail ”. In fact, the topic of the long tail is not unfamiliar to me personally, because I have talked about it too many times. The long tail methodology won the Golden Investment Award in 2013 or 2014. This is the first methodology that I have recognized.

The origin of this methodology is also very interesting. Before sharing, let me first share with you how this methodology came about.

I think any method or any case has a history, or it has its origin. This was me before I joined 360, when I was working at another small company. The company's consumption share in the entire industry does not exceed 5%. Then the leader said that we only have this much money left, so you decide what to do.

I am a very competitive person, the kind of person who has little money and is fat. I just said I don’t want to be at the bottom of the industry, I want to become stronger. Then I tried to make the account better in various ways. Later, I used 8% of the budget and took 21% of the clicks in the entire market. After seeing this case, the leader of 360 invited me to 360, and I had the honor to work at 360. This is where this method comes from.

Next, I will share with you some screenshots of the PPT. Let’s first look at this picture, which shows the three major benefits of the long tail. Now let me explain to you what these three benefits are.

1. Three benefits of long tail

1. Stabilize account data

Let’s first talk about why we need to stabilize account data. We who do SEM, I believe everyone should have some work experience, that is, when doing SEM, we are not actually worried about today's data being bad, what we worry about is data fluctuations .

If Xiao Liu brings in a total of 100 conversions for this account today, as a leader I think Xiao Liu is doing a good job, so you continue tomorrow. As a result, there are only 60 conversions left tomorrow, and on the third day it becomes 120, and on the fourth day it becomes 30. All SEM, SEMleaders, or those of us who work with data or look at data, particularly hate this kind of data fluctuation. This kind of data fluctuation will seriously affect our work enthusiasm and the leader's recognition of your work attitude, making him feel that you are unstable and your data is unstable. Then the long tail can solve this problem.

Let me give you an example that is not quite appropriate but particularly interesting.

Suppose I have 100 yuan in my hand now, and I want to give it to Xiao Liu. I said, Xiao Liu, I'm going to give you 100 yuan now. I think of a number in my mind, between 1 and 100. If you, Xiao Liu, can guess the number I am thinking of in the first try, I will give you 100 yuan. If you guess incorrectly, I will not give you the money, but you can guess 100 times. That is to say, during these 100 guesses, he may guess it right the first time, or he may guess it right the last time, but he will definitely guess it right. His ultimate goal is to get the 100 yuan. However, if it is made into a line graph, its data will be represented as 0.0.0.0.100.0.0.0.0…all the way to 100 times. Looking at the line chart, it shows huge fluctuations.

So why can the long tail make the data stable? The reason is, Xiao Liu, I still have 100 yuan. Now you say a number to me between 1 and 100. I will give you 1 yuan for each number you say. I will give you 100 times. That is to say, Xiao Liu just says a number, if it is 10, I will give him 1 yuan, if it is 20, I will give him another yuan. He kept counting from 1 to 100, and then gave him 1 dollar 100 times. Then his ultimate goal is also to get 100 yuan. But its data is just a line, a straight line, and it is flat.

In other words, when we don't have too much hope for too many words, the long-tail data will stabilize. That is to say, when we don’t have such high expectations for each keyword, it will not disappoint us. This is an important reason for the stability of the long tail.

I believe that many of you here have just started working in this industry, or have only been in this industry for a short time. So, data stability is very, very important to you at this stage, especially in your first two years of work. The importance of this far exceeds your KPI, whether you have achieved your performance goals this month, etc.

Maintaining the stability of data is very, very important, no matter you are on the client side, in the media, or in various industries. Data stability is what every boss or manager uses to assess whether employees’ abilities have improved, high or low. One of the important assessment criteria is data stability, so the long tail actually has such an effect.

2. Reduce work intensity

Reducing work intensity is actually very simple. Let’s take a look at this page of PPT first. This line graph is actually a very interesting data. I can use this data to prove that it can reduce work intensity.

The white line is a core account. What does a core account look like? These are the words we usually see, with the main consumption being thirty to fifty words, and the words between these three words. The number of times it logs into the account every day is the number of times the account password is entered every day. The white line is the number of times the account was logged in. This orange line is the number of times the long-tail accounts logged into the account. From this perspective, long-tail accounts log in relatively few times a day, so from this perspective we can prove that it can reduce work intensity. It’s actually not particularly difficult to understand.

I used to work in the investment promotion industry, then I worked in the medical industry for a while, and now I work in the financial industry. I have worked in all the most dangerous industries. In the investment promotion and medical industries, there is a very serious problem, especially in the medical industry. Their core words are very, very expensive, one word may cost hundreds of dollars, nine hundred and ninety-nine. They need to monitor these words every minute and every hour, and if there is any problem with this word, they will make adjustments immediately.

This is a torment and very painful for those who operate the account. Just like buying stocks, you need to keep an eye on these words to see if they have increased in price, if they have any rankings, if they have dropped in price, if their quality has been affected, and so on. So we know that the bidding is 24 hours a day, and the stock trading ends at a certain time in the morning or afternoon. For us, the operation of this core account is very, very painful. The medical industry generally works in three shifts. Although the investment promotion and financial industries do not have such high work intensity, it is also very painful. So long-tail accounts can help us reduce a certain amount of work intensity.

One of the main reasons why it can reduce work intensity is that, going back to the previous topic, the desire for each word is not so great. For example, if I have 100,000 long-tail words in my account, then on average, it can bring me 10 to 20 conversions every day. So among these 100,000 words, do you care about the ranking of certain words and whether these words bring you conversions today? Generally we don’t really care. Generally, when your long-tail keywords add up to 100,000 to 200,000, you won’t be able to see them all. It’s like casting a wide net, which is equivalent to taking the bait.

3. Deep effect

I have done a case before. Let’s take Taobao as an example. We know that Taobao is actually a kind of search, but it is a vertical search . He can only search his own things, unlike 360 ​​search and Baidu search, which are a way to crawl the entire Internet.

Under normal circumstances, if we search for a word on Taobao, for example, "basketball shoes", a large number of links will appear, about 100 pages, 300 pages, 500 pages or so. In fact, Taobao also has rankings. When you click on one of the pages of basketball shoes and then the basketball configuration page is displayed, for us, it is actually just a click, right?

So before you place an order to buy something, we all have a habit or a method or a habit that you will communicate with him through Wangwang. For example, I want to buy basketball shoes. I usually wear size 40 leather shoes. Will the basketball shoes I buy from you be too big or too small? What size should I buy? Is there this color? Can you provide free shipping? How many days will it take to arrive? You can communicate with him through Wangwang. In fact, this communication process has already ended for us SEMers.

The process of communication is transformation. For example, the medical industry needs to obtain customer information, the investment promotion industry needs to obtain customer messages, and the financial industry needs to obtain customer mobile phone numbers or bank numbers. These methods have already completed our work. That is to say, after communicating through Wangwang, we have completed our conversion work, but there is one thing, whether it is the medical industry, the investment promotion industry, the financial industry, or all industries, after we communicate and obtain the customer information, we do not know whether the customer actually goes to your hospital for treatment or goes to your store to buy a certain product. In other words, we do not know the final result of his conversion.

However, I did an experiment and found that after searching for the word "basketball shoes" and entering the Wangwang communication, the proportion of people who eventually bought basketball shoes and the proportion of people who actually bought shoes after searching for the word "2014 new men's basketball shoes" and communicating with Wangwang were 16% higher.

In other words, his need to buy these shoes is very clear. He searches for a certain number. For example, if he wants to buy a car, he has already searched for the engine model. He has already searched for the specific detailed model. He has already decided to buy it. And searching for "basketball shoes" may be a scenario where a girl is buying for her boyfriend. His birthday is coming soon, and she wants to buy it for him. After talking and watching it, I may not buy it. Maybe it’s because I broke up with my boyfriend, so I won’t buy it. This kind of variable is very, very large. That is to say, the long-tail word has such a characteristic, that is, it is down-to-earth and closer to the bottom layer of user purchasing behavior.

But what are the disadvantages? That is, if “basketball shoes” needs 100 conversions, it may only take 3 hours, but “2014 new men’s basketball shoes” may take 3 months, 5 months or even 10 months to get this number. This is the advantage and disadvantage of long tail words. The advantage is that its final conversion rate is really high. What I want to emphasize here is the final conversion rate. The final conversion rate means that it actually brings something to you, rather than just completing a task.

Then there are some very interesting things here. The conversion rate of people who search for this new men's basketball shoe is high. In addition to being closer to the bottom, another point is that they are very clear about their goals and they will not deviate to the left or right. In this method, I would like to explain a concept to you: long-tail words are not just longer words, they are called long-tail words. There are also very short long-tail words.

For example, when I was doing investment promotion, we wanted to do project franchising. I invested in words like "campus network IP investment" and "campus network IP", which brought a lot of investment to the investment promotion project. Then these customers, these audiences, were actually about to graduate from school or they just wanted to make some pocket money. They wanted to bring some IP and sell it to classmates to make some pocket money. As a result, they found that for the investment promotion project, they could buy something like a small cart for 5,000 yuan, and they could sell some breakfast and make some money. As a result, although they searched for words like "campus network IP", they ultimately brought conversions to my investment promotion and franchising project. This is the essential issue of the target audience. But these words are very short. But for the investment promotion industry, it is a long-tail word, that is, its audience is relatively marginal, that is, the number of searches for this word is very small, but it has nothing to do with the length. Although most long-tail words are relatively long, it has nothing to do with the actual essence and length.

We just talked about the benefits of long-tail words and three methods. Now let me share ten ways to find long-tail words . Since I used to work at 360 Media, I will use the 360 ​​tool to share with you.

2. Find ten ways to find long-tail words

1. Media support

Media support is a very important way, I believe you all know it very well. We all have corresponding media customer service staff, and they have such a vocabulary package in their hands.

If you have just opened a new account and don't know anything, you can find the person or media company that opened the account for you and ask them to give you the latest word package. Then the media will give you a word package. Let me first talk about some of the advantages of this word package given to you by the media. The advantage is that the scale is very large . Generally speaking, the scale is very large. Hundreds of thousands to millions. This is the advantage, and it is also very easy to get. Basically, if you ask for it at 10 o'clock, it will usually be sent to you at 10:05.

Because this is very simple. Once you add words and complete the consumption, they can make money and gain benefits. This is also the reason provided by the media. This is the benefit of media word packs.

After talking about the advantages, let’s talk about the disadvantages. The downside is that as a media, to put it simply, it must be fair, just and open. That is, if I give it to Xiao Liu's family, I have to give it to Xiao Huang's family as well, so the competitiveness of this word package will be very high . That is to say, he shared it with a lot of people, and maybe 30, 40 or even 100 media companies would buy the 100,000 words in this package, which would lead to high bidding costs.

2. Keyword recommendation tool

First, let me tell you about the media’s attitude behind the keyword recommendation tool.

First of all, I personally work in the media, and the media serves as a platform, selling traffic in various ways such as C or T, and it has an essential core. I hope that before you operate a media account or launch a new product, you will have a clear understanding of why the media is doing this.

The purpose of what he does is to maximize his own interests . This is a fundamental point. Any media is like this. There is no Lei Feng. The purpose of starting a company is to make money. Therefore, any media company will have a keyword recommendation tool in the background. The words he recommends are not based on our account operation assessment RIO and CPA assessment. What he considers is that the competitiveness of this word is very high, the CPC is very high, but you didn’t add it, so I recommend it to you. This is the logic of the product.

I think I am being frank enough. So according to this logic, the meaning of the word he recommended is not that great, but it is also very great. The reason why it is not that great is that first of all, his word is very expensive, that is, he is a media, and he needs to make money.

On the other hand, it will help your car not to go astray. That is to say, let's assume that there is an education account now, and the core words invested every day are these 10 words. These 10 words help me spend 80% or 90% of the money every day. Then after a year, you still invest in these 10 words, and after another year, you still invest in these 10 words. Then, are these 10 words really unchanged?

It will definitely change, so in the keyword recommendation tool, it will help you verify the dimension and tell you that you need to update and iterate. Because the bidding for these words is very fierce, why are other companies in these industries desperately using these words, but you are not? Then we have to consider the reason. Is your direction a little biased? This is a very important dimension. The significance of his finding of words is far less significant than what I just told you.

I have read a book called "The Mystery of Silicon Valley" before. It mentioned that Internet thinking is about constant revision, which is different from the previous approach of pointing and hitting. The author said that Germany bombed Britain during World War II using point-to-point missiles, which means I would shoot from point A to point B, and then fire one shot over. If I hit it, I would hit it, and if I missed, then so be it. The hit rate was very low. Later, the Americans used another method to launch rockets into space. They used a correction launch, that is, I fired in the general direction first, and in the process of firing, I rescanned and repositioned at regular intervals, constantly repositioning and rescanning, so that I finally hit the target completely.

What I want to say by giving you this example is that there is no longer a one-trick pony to rule them all. The only way to survive is by constantly changing and transforming.

For example, in the search term report released by Google in 2013, 30% of the search terms within 6 months had never appeared before, which means that 30% of the search terms within 6 months were new terms. You can recall how long it has been since you deleted or added keywords in your account. This is a very important point.

3. Product knowledge words

This product knowledge term is very interesting. You can look at this screenshot carefully. This screenshot is actually not SEM, but SEO.

I once attended a conference, and I realized that the SEO environment is really not optimistic. Many people have begun to shift from SEO to SEM. There is no way, the media needs to change. But one thing is that SEO word selection should be much more cautious than SEM word selection.

SEM word selection can be added directly, but SEO word selection requires hard optimization for half a year, or even one or two years before there may be results. So when they are doing the word selection, they are very cautious. In other words, the consequences of their word selection are much more serious than ours.

When we search for a word, we may have 20, 30, or 50 pages of SEO content. You can pick these words from the popular posts or the titles or creative titles that you think are meaningful. They have spent a lot of effort and tried every possible way to optimize these words. The traffic and quality of these words are very high, much better than the words we add based on our imagination. Therefore, SEO keyword search is a method I often use.

4. Real-time words

This word is called drop-down box word . I believe many colleagues in the medical industry have used it.

I have consulted my product manager before, and he told me this: When a word is repeated too many times within a certain period of time, it will enter the hot word box . I asked him how long, and he said he couldn't say. I told him many times, but he said he couldn't tell me. So how often is the hot word box updated? He said, just look at it a few times a day.

By the way, we try to avoid posting hot word boxes on the 360 ​​platform. After all, 360 is a security company and they are very disgusted with this thing. If they find someone posting hot word boxes, they may even block your SEO traffic.

When is the best time to look at the words in this hot word box? First, 8 to 10 in the morning is a suitable point, 12 to 2 in the afternoon is another point, and between 5 to 8 in the afternoon is another point.

So if your words are really in demand, or if you have never seen this word, I suggest you look at this word separately in these three time periods every day, which will have a very good effect. In fact, this word is not that fierce or important for the long tail, because it is a word in the hot word box. Hot words mean that the bidding for this word is very high, which means it is more expensive. However, there is a very interesting phenomenon, that is, where are the words that are no longer hot in the hot word box?

5. Related Searches

Baidu search also has such a recommendation. What is the related search word? To put it simply, this related search means that when the words in this hot word box are no longer hot, they will go here .

I assume that the words in the hot word box meet this condition on the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th and 8th, and appear in the hot word box every day within these four (five) days, and then they will no longer appear in the hot word box. Then these words have a chance to be thrown into the related searches. Do you understand? It was very popular before, but not anymore, so it is placed here, a bit like a past star. However, these out-of-date stars are very useful.

The long-tail words we are looking for are those that used to be very cool and expensive, and we wanted to pay 10, 20, 500, or 300 yuan for them. But now they are worthless, and 30 cents is enough. These are the words we are looking for deliberately, so we must definitely look at the related search terms. And this is very simple. You only need to look at it once a week, or half a month or one month. It is just that it is not updated that fast. It must meet many conditions before it will be included. This is the role of the hot word box and related searches.

6. Related recommendations

This is the ad on the right side of 360 search. This ad is called related recommendation. First of all, let me explain to you that this advertisement is not very effective. But one very interesting thing about it is that it can teach newbies a lot.

For example, if I am a person who knows nothing about basketball, then what feeling will I have after seeing this interface? You can see that it says Peak, Anta, Nike, Adidas, football shoes, Jordan basketball shoes and so on. Then there are James' 8th generation basketball shoes, James' 6th generation basketball shoes, and Durant's 5th generation. These actually gave me a very clear understanding of the industry. I don’t understand the basketball shoe industry, but after looking at these things, I have an understanding of the industry. For example, if you know nothing about basketball shoes, you definitely don’t know who Durant is, so what the hell is Durant 5? We definitely don’t know, right? So you can get some industry knowledge from this.

When I come into contact with a completely new industry but have no idea what to do, I will look for some industry knowledge through these corners. These industry insights are not boring, but reading industry reports will be very boring and useless. After reading them, you will feel that, great, I have read the industry report but it is meaningless. But you see, this is very interesting, because it can tell you some words that will not appear in industry reports, and things that industry reports will not tell you. This is a very important thing to supplement our industry knowledge and professional knowledge. And you can find some long-tail words, such as Durant 5th generation, which has nothing to do with the word basketball shoes, but it really is a basketball shoe. Well, if you don’t understand this industry, you definitely don’t know this word.

Given that our current SEM industry is very impetuous, the talent gap is very large, and the industry-changing rate is very exaggerated, I know that many people need to change industries almost every six months. They certainly cannot understand everything about this industry, so this thing is very, very important.

7. Question and answer page

This needs to be emphasized. Some friends know it, but some friends are not very clear about it. The CVR of the words in the Q&A page is the highest.

I have conducted surveys on four industries respectively, and the words found in the Q&A page have the highest CVR. If you don’t believe me, you can try it. The same is true for the Q&A page. It is closer to the next level of user purchasing behavior, which is the bottom level. When users have already started to decide whether to buy, their conversion rate is the highest.

So you can look for some words in this regard on the Q&A page, 360 Q&A page, Baidu Q&A page, Sogou, etc., and try to see if you can find some useful words and put them into your account. Although the CVR is very high, its disadvantage is that there are only a few in a year. Sometimes, whether you can get performance bonus this month, whether you can get married, right? Whether you can afford a car or a house depends on these few words, right?

8. Video Words

The effect of video words is to help us expand our knowledge of new industries, which is the same as SEO. However, it is not as scary as SEO, which requires half a year or a year to optimize. As long as the content is correct and the title is OK, it may rise faster. You can also supplement your knowledge in this area as needed.

9. Taobao

Taobao is the same as the words in the video just now, which is to help us expand our knowledge of this industry.

Let me share with you a rather embarrassing example. I have been doing this for seven or eight years, and I boasted to others at the dinner table that there would definitely be no problem. Then a friend of mine gave me a Taobao account and said, "Please help me with it. You are quite awesome, right? Can you show me if there is any problem with the traffic?" Then I said no problem, I took a look, I looked for a long time but I couldn't see anything, you know, I just brag, I was half drunk, slightly tipsy, then I started to change the names of some of his products. You can see, the first pair of basketball shoes was sold for 599, it was written as Nike-nikekd and then something in English, English, English, then king of outfield, and then a number of the basketball shoes. Then I seemed to have deleted a word, or changed something, and the next day, the number of clicks on this basketball shoe dropped by more than half, haha.

In other words, the names of these words are very, very important. You can learn from the content of these words and then help us expand the content of our SEM. This is very important. In other words, we have to gather the wisdom of all other people into one, put it into our own account, and then do it once and for all. We have to do the work ourselves, first see what others have, build up other people's things, then stand on the shoulders of giants, and then see what innovations we can make. This is also a most basic process.

10. Search term report

The last very important thing is the search term report, I believe everyone has no doubt about this.

The search platform conceals some things in the search term reports. What do these concealments mean? Let me take the financial industry as an example. For example, the word "loan financial management". Let me just give an example, the word "loan financial management". If I open the highest matching mode, broad matching, then the word "loan financial management" may match 150 relatives. Under normal circumstances, it should be displayed in my search term report, that is, my background data, search term report. However, it will be rounded off, that is, out of these 150 words, it may only display 100 words, or 50 words, or 80 words.

It deletes all the words with very low traffic. I believe everyone is clear about the reason for deleting them. Because these words with low traffic have a lower CPC, I believe everyone can understand this. It deletes some long-tail words, which have very low search volume, but it deletes them. But these words are useful to us, we spend money on them, and we need to add these words to our account, but we can't see them.

So you can try it and compare it on different platforms to see if there is anything new.

Well, let me share one more thing with you. Regarding the 10 methods we just talked about, if you are really busy but you still want to do the long tail, then you can do it based on the scores. The first thing you need to do is the 10-point search term report, which you may need to do every day. Secondly, there are eight, five, and six items for you to sort, and then according to your needs and the range of your abilities, you should adjust your work intensity to carry out this process one by one, but this process is very important.

That’s all I can say about long-tail content. Finally, I hope everyone can go further and further in the SEM industry.

Author: Aiqi SEM

Source: Aichi SEM