If you’ve been reading about search engine optimization (SEO) in the last couple years, you’ve undoubtedly heard how you need to optimize for the “long tail” of search. What is the long tail, though, and why is it important to your online business?
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| What is the Long Tail of Search, and Why Does It Matter? |
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, first described the phenomenon in his book, The Long Tail. Anderson noticed that for big, popular search terms in any given market, the situation was winner-takes-most. The biggest names in the industry rank highly for these popular queries, and the cost and time required to compete with them for the big search terms is prohibitive.
However, across every industry, there is a huge, untapped market of more obscure search terms which make up about 70% of all searches. (In fact, according to research from SEOMoz, the top 10,000 keywords used in the search engine account for less than 20% of the traffic.) These queries may be obscure because they are long (3+ words, compared to about 1 for the “big” terms), phrased as a natural language question (e.g., “where do I find _____?”), or they may be “snowflake” queries which will never be repeated again! For these less common queries, there is much less competition—in many cases, a halfway decent article specifically targeting one of these queries will rank highly for it within days!
This insight gives way to the standard ways we talk about these queries—there’s the short (or “fat”) head (which contains the super-high volume, super-competitive search terms) and the long tail (which contains the non-competitive queries that take the lion’s share of the traffic).
Head search termLong tail analog
| Head search term | Long tail analog |
|---|---|
| blenders | single serve blenders |
| car repair | 1997 civic muffler repair |
| seo | do bold tags improve seo? |
| coffee | roasting coffee beans in the oven |
Examples of “head” queries and corresponding long tail queries
The lesson to learn here is that, if your business is breaking into a market, don’t bother trying to be “number 1” for the primary keyword.
Instead, you can focus on the long tail and get more search traffic, more qualified leads, and more ROI. It’s much easier to rank highly for 100 queries that each get 100 visitors/month than it is to rank highly for 1 query that gets 10,000 visitor/month.
If your business would be better off with more traffic, you need to be targeting the long tail!
The key to doing this is content. Your site needs pages (or blog posts) devoted to just 1 or 2 long tail search terms, and it needs a lot of them.
The biggest insight I can share with you is that you need to make the creation of this content a scalable process. If you’re a startup founder, for instance, you have no business writing 100 pages to rank for 100 long tail keywords—even if you’re qualified to write them, this is not the best use of your time.
Instead, put in place a system whereby you can treat long tail content creation just like an advertising venue: each month, you have a budget of $xxx, and your spending produces $xxxx in return. This system may come in the form of hiring a marketing intern at $10/hour to write the content based on a sparse outline you provide, or it might be something more complex, connecting you to hundreds of people contributing just a couple articles each.
By targeting the long tail, you’ll get the most return on your effort; likewise, by choosing carefully which long tail terms you target, you can focus on the traffic most qualified for your product. Plus, this content will keep generating revenue for years—what advertising campaign can promise that?
- “Measuring the effect of long-tail SEO,” here on the Conversion Insights blog. Once you’ve decided to target the long tail, it’s important to be able to measure how successful your efforts have been—as they say, you focus on what you measure.
- “Creating Content for the Long Tail,” here on the Conversion Insights blog. Learn how you can create a long-term strategy for content creation that will make the most of the long tail in your market.