Short-Tail v Long-Tail… Who’s the winning cat?

Photo From Flickr. Copyright: Earnalot

What the heck is keyword research you ask, well I am still trying to figure out myself. I played around with Google AdWords, although I was a little lost, so I’ll just have to tell you about my findings and see if you can help sort it out for me. These things called SERPs (search engine results pages), or what you see when you look for something on Google or Bing, are the biggest role into what keywords you might want your company to put an ad on.

Using Google AdWords for my experiment, I was able to see first hand what keywords are most popular when I looked up my short-tail keyword: “television reporting” and my long-tail keyword: “jobs in television reporting” to go along with my interest in reporting and my website I would hope to someday create.

Down to the dirty business of comparison

So what exactly do all the numbers mean on the homepage? Well, from I understand, they are collected through what the user’s intent is when typing in those keywords into Google.

For my short-tail keyword, “television reporting,” the top five words to pop-up were:
1. Television
2.  Journalism Jobs
3. Career in TV
4. Consumer Reports
5. Broadcast Journalism

No surprise with any of those.  If someone used those exact words as part of  their search query, then they could expect to see ads and sites pop up that have to do with those certain words listed above. In parenthesis next to the words, there were prices listed, and although I am not for sure what those mean entirely, I do have a pretty good guess that it means that’s the price for some sort of advertising, maybe for each time someone searches that word, that’s how much money Google makes.  However, it was quite odd when I noticed that the ones that costed more money were the ones with a lower number of daily searches, so my guess could be very wrong.

Photo From Flickr. Copyright: sixaxis_mac

My long-tail top five search keyword results for “jobs in television reporting” were:
1. Job Sites
2. Journalism Jobs
3. Broadcast
4. Reporting
5. Media Jobs

Google you sneaky, sneaky!

It seems as though even Google has recognized that when people are searching for something, they tend to put in the shortest version of what they’re looking for, and I know this because the prices in the parenthesis were quite lower than my results for my short-tail searches.

While all queries don’t usually make money, these specific searches did, which is a plus if I ever do decide to include a website I make later on and I want it a part of Google searches.

Although I did all of this experimenting, Google did take away keywords. So where else can I invest my time? Maybe social media, since it is a rapidly growing market. It was kind of a bummer tackling the most simplistic idea of keywords like how they work, why they’re important, what people are searching for, and more. It was only a bummer because I felt like I could my knowledge to good use. Well, I guess I’ll leave you with this picture of Grumpy Cat because I’m sure we’re all thinking it… well minus the burring poop part.

Copyright: Google Images

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