Conversational Keywords in PPC

Updated March 3, 2025

Looking for Longtails

If you cast your mind back to the early days of the internet (pre-AdWords domination) you probably used conversational keywords when you were looking for something online. Asking Jeeves “What time is Mission Impossible showing at the Cinema on Main Street?” was the natural thing to do when using a search engine, so that’s what you did.

Moving Forward By Going Backward in Time

Then, as people became more ‘internet savvy’ search terms and keywords were better understood, search habits changed and people started to use shorthand style keyword searches. So the above would be “mission impossible, cinema, main street.” Now, as technology has improved, our search habits are going changing again.

With searchers expecting a higher level of understanding from search engines and with the additional technological advances of voice search, conversational keywords are making a comeback. And this is good news for PPC advertisers.

As you already know,  especially if you’re in a high competition industry, getting a keyword that’s effective at a low cost is often difficult. For us, if we want to advertise for “AdWords” then we can’t just use the word AdWords as a keyword because the cost per click is simply too high. However, if we were to use “AdWords consultants based in Sunnyvale” — a much longer tail keyword — it’s priced much more affordably.

Conversational Keywords in PPC

The reason for the lower price is clear. Obviously “Adwords” alone will receive a lot more searches than “AdWords consultants based in Sunnyvale.” But which is the better match for our business? When we recently ran “AdWords” as a keyword. we quickly got a number of matches. Here are some examples: 

• “google adwords certification”
• “adwords for commercial printers best practices”
• “google preview adwords tool”

Now, some of the above could be relevant. But any link is tenuous. However, if someone matches for “AdWords agency based in Sunnyvale,” we know exactly what they’re looking for. As a result, we can craft ads and landing pages specifically providing information about our AdWords management services and that we’re conveniently located near Sunnyvale.

More Productivity With Longer Tails

So, as searchers move back to using more conversational keywords, using longer tail keywords will become more productive. The difficult part of this approach is finding the right phrases to use. To get traffic initially, you will need to experiment with a large number of variations of different keyword combinations. Instead of just adding “AdWords” with a broad match, you will have to A/B test lots of different sentences until you find your version of “AdWords agency based in Sunnyvale.”

How many long conversational or longer tail keywords do you have in your AdWords account?