I don’t have a lot of long tail keyword domain names, but I do have some, and I really like them. Mike mentioned a statistic today that I think shows why long tail keyword strings .com domain names are valuable and will continue to grow in value – especially with a mini site built on it:
According to a Hitwise survey, “searches of five to more than eight words in length increased 7% from last year.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean that people are typing the full keyword into their browser, where many browsers like Safari automatically add a .com to the end. However, it does mean that when people type a long tail keyword phrase, there will generally be less competition for search results.I don’t advocate buying super long – long-tail keywords 5+, but if that segment is growing, I would bet 3-5 word searches are growing as well.
As I explained to someone who asked about the difference between long and short tail keyword phrases, if you look up the short tail phrase “Counseling Jobs” in Google, you will get 456,000 results. Now, if you look up the longer tail phrase, “Drug Counseling Jobs,” you only get 770 results.
Although a longer tail keyword is searched less times than the short keyword phrase, there is much less SERP competition. If you develop a mini site on your long tail keyword domain name, chances are very good that it will be in the top of the SERP (depending on the actual keywords of course), and if this happens, you are likely to increase your traffic.
Personally, I like the 3 word long-tail keywords best, but this Hitwise survey does seem to indicate that people do actually search for longer tail keyword strings.
