There are many elements that make up a solid PPC strategy (Pay Per Click) for a financial advisor advertising campaign. That includes choosing the right keywords for your financial advisor firm that are based on your ideal type(s) of clients. Which involves more than just simply choosing a relevant list of words that could lead a potential lead to your website.
If you want to reach a specific audience and don’t have deep pockets like some of your competitors, utilizing a Long Tail Keyword strategy in your financial advisor paid advertising campaigns is a great way to achieve your goals.
What Are Long Tail Keywords?
Long Tail Keywords are most commonly defined as keywords or phrases that are typically longer and more specific than short tail keywords. For example, if someone is searching for a financial advisor in Dallas Texas, an example of a Short Tail Keyword would be “Financial Advisor.”
There is also a middle ground, known as a Middle Tail Keyword: “Financial Advisor Dallas.” And finally, a Long Tail Keyword example would be “Find Local Financial Advisor Dallas Texas Investment Management”. The difference between these types of keywords—besides their length of course—is how specific the long tail search terms are.
Why Use Long Tail Keywords?
Less Competitive
When looking at the example above for Financial Advisors in Dallas, the Short Tail Keyword is very general, and will likely have plenty of competition for bids on the Google Ads platform. In theory, every financial advisory firm (local, regional, national) could be bidding for those same keywords and making it very expensive for your firm to show up anywhere in the search results.
With the Middle Tail Keyword, you’re getting a little more specific and the competition will be less aggressive. However, you could still be getting national competitors who have offices or serve clients in the Dallas area and still have much larger budgets and can afford to outbid you most of the time. Which leaves the Long Tail Keyword Strategy. By adding in specific keywords such as “local,” and “investment management” you’re getting very detailed with your targeting and will experience less competition for the terms.
Higher Intent = Higher Quality Leads
If someone is searching for a financial advisor in their local area who specializes in investment management, they will likely have a very specific intent behind their search. They’re clearly looking for a specific type of financial advisor and you likely have a higher chance of converting them from a seeker into a lead than someone who just searched for a financial advisor.
The latter search (using a Short Tail Keyword) could have been made by the user for any number of reasons, including a general search for information about financial advisors.
Lower Cost
Because Google Ads is a PPC platform that runs on bidding, the less competition for a keyword means the less money it will cost for ad placements. It’s simply a matter of supply and demand. If there are 1,000 advertisers bidding on the “Financial Advisor” Short Tail Keyword and only 100 bidding on the “Financial Advisor Dallas Texas Local Investment manager” Long Tail Keyword, you’re likely going to have a significantly lower CPC (Cost-Per-Click).
Voice Search
With more and more search queries coming via mobile devices, voice search is becoming more prominent and having a bigger and bigger impact on how people search for service providers and information. For example, a user on a mobile device speaking their search query is going to sound more conversational than keyword based and will likely be longer than if they were to physically type keywords on the search bar. For this reason, Long Tail Keywords are well-suited for mobile devices.
Tips and Tricks for Finding the Best Long Tail Keywords
Google Keyword Planner
This free tool from Google allows you to discover and refine keywords for your Google Ads campaigns. You can customize them based on any number of factors, and even tell Google irrelevant search terms you want excluded (negative keywords) and receive suggestions for keywords based on your criteria. It’s important that you take your time when using this tool and give Google the correct information so it can give you the best, most effective keyword recommendations.
Check Your Organic Traffic in Google Analytics
If you’re not already utilizing Google Analytics for your financial advisor website – start now! This free tool from Google not only gives you in-depth analytics about your website’s performance and information on visitors, it can also be a source for finding Long Tail keywords. Within Google Analytics, you can pull up the Search Queries Report, which tells you which search terms are leading visitors to your page.
Google’s Autofill
If you have ever started to type a search in Google and saw it add the remaining words as potential searches, that’s the autofill feature. This tool is pulling data from relevant past searches to anticipate what you’re searching for. By taking a look at some of those searches with each keyword you add, you can get some examples of real searches being performed.
Related Searches
Yet another way Google can help you choose effective Long Tail Keywords is through related searches. If you go to Google right now and type in any search term, you’ll also see a box that says, “People also ask” and has some similar search terms.
This is Google’s way of helping searchers better find the information they’re looking for. On the flip side, as a financial advisor who wants their keywords to bring in the right visitors, you can utilize this tool to also see the search terms Google is suggesting for those visitors and implement them as part of your Long Tail Keyword strategy.
Keyword Multiplier Tools
A keyword multiplier tool allows for many combinations of the same keywords to be produced in an effort to come up with every possible combination for SEO/PPC purposes. This tool can be especially helpful for Long Tail Keyword campaigns, as there are many many more combinations possible with so many words in one search term. These tools can show you all of the combinations, and then you can choose which ones to include in your campaign.
