Long-Tail Search Strategies

As a web analyst for your company, you've completed the search budget distribution below.  Does the search traffic appear to match the budget?  What recommendations do you have?

From this image I believe that the search traffic does match the budget. The SEM stats are the ones related to money paid to draw in search results and as can be seen the majority of that money (three quarters) is being put into tail key phrases. Within the tail key phrases you can see 90% of the results come from SEM so the fact the tail key phrases make a third of the visits is reasonable.

As for recommendations, that depends on the current goal of the organization. If they are looking for new visitors then investing into the tail makes sense. The head is typically key phrases from users who are already familiar with the site so they already likely know the organization. The tail however is generated from more generic terms which is more typical of people who haven't already picked a product manufacturer or service provider. If the organization is trying to stay ahead in the head key phrases then they need to invest some more into that area, 25% not appearing to be enough.