On the subject of buying ads against those "long-tail" search terms, I see a lot of times when I'm in the research-phase of a purchase cases where it looks like a company has bought the right search term, but they've completely failed to provide the information I was looking for. I scroll past the Google Ads not because I'm not interested in the bought-and-paid-for results, but because they suck.

If you're buying "best golf clubs for beginners" and you dumped me to golf clubs category page, I'm just going to close the tab and go back to the next result. Get me information specifically about the beginner golf clubs you offer. Put up a nice article describing what a beginner should look for and which of your products fit the bill best. If I walked into a store and asked "which set is best for beginners" and your salesman silently pointed me to the golf clubs aisle, I'd probably look around for a minute and then just walk out since I don't want to make a purchase flying blind.

Look how much google loves About.com. Everybody knows that site sucks - the information is half-assed and spammy, but they know how to create content that matches the search terms perfectly. If I ask Google a question, I'm pretty much guaranteed to get an About.com article that will provide a surface-level discussion directly pertaining to my issue. The fact that the article sucks is irrelevant, because most people are Googling these questions because they're too deep in the dark to know the article sucks.