Long Tail. What is it?
Essentially, the long tail is the hundreds to thousands of keywords and key phrases that a site is found for, yet rarely noticed or exploited.
The principle of the Long Tail is the opposite of focusing on the top 10-20 keywords for marketing their sites. The "top keyword" concept is reinforced by agencies that contract to gain rankings for 10-20 terms, maybe 30. However, when studying the referrals from the search engines and the traffic they generate, those that focus on the top 10-20 terms may be missing the majority of their market.
People tend to focus on the thousands of visitors that come to the site for the most popular terms. Most site managers are very happy to see the numbers increase for those specific terms, and even happier to see those terms consistently ranking well. Conventional thinking applies the 80-20 rule that the top terms provide 80% of the business, but in evaluating multiple sites, this has proved to be the opposite.
In most cases, the top 10 terms provide a lot of traffic, but not nearly as much as the total terms after the top 10 or 20 most popular. Add up the terms that refer 1-3 visits during the month, and chances are, they will add up to more total visitors than the top terms. On closer examination, most sites will have the majority of their business (sales and leads) generated from these terms that are rarely tracked. This is the heart of the long tail -- the length, or total number of low-number referred terms outnumbers the height, or the total of top 10 terms.
Now you know....
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Great explanation of the long tail. There is a quality factor to focusing on this as well.
ReplyDeleteWhile every Toyota dealership would salivate at the opportunity to rank #1 on Google for 'new york Toyota dealership', this is a fairly generic term. While driving traffic to your website, the intent of the customer performing this search is all over the place. Currently, Millennium Toyota in Long Island is the top ranked dealer for this term. I have to wonder how many customers from Rochester, Albany, or Buffalo have stumbled upon their website looking to schedule a service appointment, only to quickly click the back button in their web browser? I'm not trying to say that ranking for this term isn't important, but a long tail searches are highly targeted and generate traffic had is of a higher quality.
According to Google, most consumers search for vehicles using 4 terms (make, model, city, state). Due to this, it is necessary to make sure that your inventory is indexed throughout the search engines to maximize exposure.
When your inventory is visible to the search engines, customers searching for very specific things will find you. While only a handful of customers in your market might be searching for 'used 2006 toyota camry new york new york', these prospects represent the most focused, highest quality sales opportunities available.
Great blog...keep up the effort!