Study: does it pay to invest your time in long-tail keywords?

Here is a study documenting the value of long tail keywords ("LTKW"). These are "... long and specific keyword phrases that generate little traffic and few conversions each" as defined in the study.The are really referred to as "long tail" because of the shape of the curve on a graph of frequency of use of a set of keywords. These are the phrases less often searched for, and the graph shows a "long tail" going out to as far as there are phrases being graphed.

This study was done using data from AdWords campaigns, but the principle pertains to optimizing your web pages just the same.

The study revealed that the impact of  LTKW is different for different businesses. Some receive a large percentage of their total traffic from these phrases, while others receive only a small percentage. These phrases appear to be more important to SKU-based commodity retailers. That seems to me to make sense.

The author of the posting also pointed out that a company in the study that received "... only 8% of its sales through the long tail keywords made a significant amount of money with them." That got my attention! Even when the percentage is smaller, there can still be real money involved. Who wants to leave money on the table when doing business?

In the clinic, we always emphasize the value of paying attention to LTKW. It is nice to see some documentation of that concept.