The term Long Tail was first introduced to us by Chris Anderson back in October 2004 in a Wired magazine article. The term described the type of business model used by companies such as Amazon, stating that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.
An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.”
So how does this relate back to search engine optimisation? Well… the Long Tail of search targets all the keywords that are more precise and specific, and although being searched for less than the mainstream terms, they often yield a much greater return on investment - and the best part is that because they are so specific, they are often a lot easier to optimise for.
A recent interview with Udi Manber from Google’s Engineering department revealed that nearly 25% of searches done daily are completely unique and 5 - 6 Percent of Searches Spell Their Searches Wrong. This means that 1 in 4 people who do a search use keyword combinations that Google has NEVER seen before.
The SEOmoz site has some great articles on how you can Identify Long Tail Patterns and Uncovering the Invisible Long Tail… and once you can see these patterns, you can then incorporate some Long Tail Keyword Research.
So whether you are intentionally building content targeting the Long Tail or simply doing some updates to your website - the more quality content you add, the more chance you have of attracting the 1 in 4 unique searches done by people every day!
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Hey Pete,
top contribution, nothing like a long tail
Some god references in this post. The benefit of hitting some of these long tails is that they are often more targetted than your broader terms. My site rank’s for a broad term that brings us business and also ranks for an endless list of geographical variations of that term. These are the best conversions for us to get as we prefer dealing with poeple who aren’t on the other side of the county.
Each has their benefits though.
Hi Pete, really interesting article! From now on I won’t bother spell checking my content though, and claim it as targeted marketing at other people who can’t spell.