Lessons From The Long Tail

So I picked up the book The Long Tail last week; something I’d been meaning to do for a long time as I’ve seen it recommended on so many blogs it was becoming ridiculous.

Needless to say there was good reason for the incessant recommendations.

The book is a fascinating read, and a powerful lesson for all online marketers.

For those of you who haven’t read it…

The long tail is the principle that in all economies, samples of data, and many things there is a pattern that emerges called a long tail.

If we take the example of a niche market and all it’s keywords it’s easier to understand.

So you’ve got your main keyword and it gets 20 000 searches per month. Say the keyword is… Dog Training.

The next most popular keyword gets 18 000 searches per month, and so on down the list of all possible keywords in this niche, right down to the least popular keywords that only receive 5 or 10 searches per month.

The number of keywords that bring in high numbers of searches is small. There might only be 5 keywords that have more than 5000 searches per month, and that’s called the HEAD of the market.

The other end however is called the Long Tail. This is where there are hundreds, maybe thousands of keywords that bring in just a few searches per month.

The theory of the long tail is that the thousands of keywords in the long tail, when combined, can add up to a number of searches (potential traffic) very high relative to the searches of the “head”.

For example, 1000 keywords that only bring in 5 searches each is the same percentage of traffic as that one big keyword that bring in 5000 searches per month.

While the “long tail” of most businesses gets ignored or forgotten, we as web marketers need to capture it and find the extremely profitability it represents for what it is.

Because the thing is, not only is there potentially a high amount of traffic in those long tail keywords, they are

1. Far less competitive and hence easier to target.

2. Often more profitable because they are more highly targeted and relevant to our content.

3. Cheaper if we’re using Adwords or outsourcing articles or something else.

Why would we NOT look to the long tail?

I’m thinking of starting an experiment too.

Going to the Adwords Keyword Tool and searching in ANY niche, say it’s dog training.

Going to the very bottom of the keyword list and picking 20 phrases that get a low number of searches, say 100-500 – the keywords I wouldn’t normally include on my keyword lists…

And publishing articles on a site optimized for all those words.

I have a suspicion that a few things would happen…

1. I’d get ranked without doing anything but blogging and pinging for many of the phrases.

2. I’d get alot of traffic for keywords that were even lower than I’d picked from, that I didn’t make posts on and didn’t optimize any piece of content for.

3. And I MIGHT even get more traffic doing so than if I got 20 articles written on 20 more popular keywords higher up the list…

But of course that’s all speculation. If I actually start the experiment I’ll let you know.

In any case the principle of the Long Tail is a vital one for anyone who’s doing any kind of search marketing to understand and if you haven’t read the book yet, I highly recommend it.