It is typical for small to mid-size colleges that offer excellent programs to struggle as they compete against more prominent colleges to reach prospective student audiences online. There’s never a lot of marketing budget to invest in one single program, and the sheer momentum of a larger competitor’s website, SEO, PPC, and social media activities can easily overwhelm your program’s rankings, leaving you with minimal traffic, low leads, and even fewer registrations. So, what can you do to raise your program’s rankings and get your fair share of traffic, leads, and students without investing a fortune?
One effective strategy is to invest your time and money into “the long tail of search,” specifically developing Long Tail Keywords for Colleges tactics with PPC campaigns and SEO for your priority program. Let’s start by defining precisely what a long tail keyword phrase is in search engine marketing. 
Photo Credit: C 2007 Elliance, Inc. www.elliance.com
In this example, “logistics management software case studies” is a long tail keyword phrase in the curve’s green section. The position on the curve indicates it has low cost and medium search frequency. The farther a term appears to the right, the further out on the “ long tail” it moves, resulting in lower cost per click and search frequency. Here’s another way to look at it. The bottom row of this table represents a long tail keyword phrase. The competition for keywords in the MBA market is quite fierce, so you don’t get the same curve on the CPC, but you get the idea.
(This example was created using Google’s Keyword Research Tool. It also demonstrates the biggest problem with the tool: once the search volume drops too low, it no longer reports any of the data.)
As your keyword phrase gets longer and more specific, the phrase’s total search frequency drops, along with the competition for that phrase and the approximate cost per click. So, if the searches are so scarce and the numbers are so low, why should you pursue them? First, because not many others are targeting them, they’re generally more cost-effective to acquire (and remember, you have very little money to promote this specific program). And secondly, because these searches align more closely with your program, they generally turn out to be higher-quality prospects and convert at a much higher rate than the average. If we can agree that these are people that we would like to have visit our site, how can we improve the odds that they see us and that we hopefully get clicked on? So, how do we apply this in PPC and SEO?
Looking At PPC for Colleges
As you know, pay-per-click (PPC) ads are targeted at specific keyword phrases. You identify the keywords in your campaign settings and control which keyword searches see your ad. As you can see in the example above, the main variables affecting PPC campaigns are the specificity of keyword phrases, the volume of searches, and cost per click (CPC). Long tail keywords target traffic of well-aligned searchers that generally have lower CPC and will typically convert at a higher rate. So that sounds great, but if that is the case, why isn’t everyone doing this?
Well, the problem is related to the volume of search queries. Because of the deficient search volume on these terms, most people skip over them and concentrate on ones with higher volume, which are easier to manage. They can get a 2 or 3% conversion rate and be happy. It’s more work to run a long tail campaign because to make it successful, you need to research and find many more long tail phrases to get your volume up to a level where it starts to produce a reasonable number of conversions. Yes, it converts at a higher rate (approximately 4-6%), but you still need many searches to make the numbers work.
So the key to this strategy is to research, identify, and pull hundreds of long tail keyword phrases, drop them together into a campaign, monitor, maintain, cull, and add new ones continuously to get a great result. This takes time and patience, but in the end, you will have created a PPC campaign that will tap the best keyword phrases available for your program at the lowest cost and with the highest conversion rates.
So, how do you identify long-tail keyword phrases that might work for you? Here are a few strategies and sources to get you started;
- Start with your Adwords Search Query Report for any general campaigns you are running. Identify and extract the long-tail keyword terms.
- Use the AdWords Keyword Tool and research keyword volume and costs
- Add qualifying terms (i.e., part-time, full-time, online) to your keyword phrases
- Add localizing terms ( i.e., Toronto, Chicago) to your keyword phrases
- Identify keywords being used by your competitors and incorporate them into your keyword phrases
- Check your traffic reports in Google Analytics for new keywords
- Check your internal site search for new keywords
Because the Cost Per Click on your long tail keywords is generally low, you can entirely economically develop a campaign that you grow over a period that will become a valuable lead generation asset for your ongoing recruitment needs. It will take time and energy, but the results will be well worth it.
So, How Can Long Tail Keywords Be Applied?
As you know, search engines rank your pages highly if your content is of high quality and closely matches the search intent of the searcher. So, how do you get your priority program to rank highly? It will not happen if you produce a couple of static pages and wait for searches to find them, especially if your main competitors at the prominent colleges down the street are doing even a primary job with their competing pages. To set yourself apart, you must have a strategy to develop long tail SEO for colleges around the central topics of your priority program so that your competition won’t overshadow it. So how do you do that? The answer is relatively simple but not necessarily easy to implement.
You must incorporate content on your site that uses these long-tail keyword phrases. You must blog about it, publish questions and answers, or include a forum. It would help if you generated lively, engaged discussion about your program topics, and the long tail keywords you seek will end up on these pages. Your organic ranking for these long-tail keywords will naturally improve as your content grows and improves. But certainly don’t leave things to chance.
Now, take what you’ve learned from the keyword research you did to put your long-tail PPC campaign together and incorporate those keywords into more content on your site. The aggregate effect of this “organic” engagement with your audience and your use of targeted keywords gleaned from your PPC campaign experience will position you highly for the long tail terms you have prioritized.
Have you developed long-tail keyword phrase campaigns in the past? How successful have they been? What other strategies have you used to leverage your SEO and PPC activities best?
FAQ To Consider
What is the importance of long-tail keywords in a PPC?
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are targeted at specific keyword phrases. You identify the keywords in your campaign settings and control which keyword searches see your ad. As you can see in the example above, the main variables affecting PPC campaigns are the specificity of keyword phrases, the volume of searches, and cost per click (CPC).
