In terms of choosing keywords in Google AdWords, the long tail is very important, especially if you’re looking to find a niche for yourself to compete with competitors with larger budgets.

There are top level competitive keywords in any industry which will be expensive. I’ve run a successful AdWords campaign for a current client in the Interior Design market. The most popular keyword was ‘interior design’ but this word was very competitive and also very expensive. On a long term marketing spend this would burn through my budget for the day very quickly. Also the click-troughs that I was getting were not converting into sales.

The simple fact was that these visits were not converting into sales as the business I was running the campaign had a more niche market of the ‘Interior Design’ and the keywords that were not converting were broad and not specific.

The answer was to go niche and more specific and this increased higher click-through rates and this led to more conversions. Keywords like ‘lounge interior design advice’ attracted the right sort of customers, who were more clear of what they wanted and therefore closer to a creating a lead.

The obvious benefits of being more specific with keywords are clear. The more specific someone is with a search phrase the closer they are to making a decision if they are going to purchase or not. The keyword phrase should also be cheaper therefore allowing your AdWords campaign to convert more click-troughs. 56% of Internet searches also use three or more keywords while only 7% use one keyword.

Google offers keyword search as part of its AdWords setup however since the client knows the market well its worth getting them to produce a list of keywords. From this I use a number of tools to research and find those lucrative long tail keywords such as http://www.wordtracker.com & http://nichebot.com.