Definition and History of the Long-Tail Keyword

The long-tail keyword is simply a combination of multiple words (usually 3 or more), that are specific and relevant to a product or service sold. In essence, long tails are considerably more definitive and often times used to refine the search process by the visitor.

Targeted buyers anyone?

The long-tail was first introduced by Chris Anderson, which later resulted in the popular book: “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More” in 2006.

The premise of the long-tail is a Pareto Distribution combined with web technology, to introduce the concept of a larger proportion of “buyers” exist in the tail of the distribution. We no longer need to target the head of the distribution scale to produce results, as we did in traditional marketing times. Keep in mind, the theory behind the long-tail is one of shifting away from a relatively smallnumber of searches at the head to a huge number of niches in the tail.

Right Church, Wrong Pew?

If long-tail keywords convert so well, why is there such a high degree of emphasis placed on the head keywords at the onset of a campaign? That’s simple, we’re human and want hard and fast results.

The intent from many organic campaigns is to rank for head or brand keywords in an effort to gain traction in a market. Initial keyword research will show that the head is “where the action is” and becomes too tempting to pass up.

There is one problem though.

Head keywords are often times, too broad and correspond only to people at the initial phase of a buying cycle or information-seeking mode. Hardly an equation for converting visitors. Normally, the long-tail becomes a force when content becomes ingrained in the site. When you look at the web analytics of a mature site with a multitude of tail niches, head keywords represent only a small piece of the overall traffic.

“Forget squeezing millions from a few mega hits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bit stream.” – Chris Anderson

Welcome to the World of the Long-Tail

Depending on market and site authority, there will be anywhere from 3 to 20 head keywords.

The Figure 1 shows a graph of how a head and tail keyword would look in a typical market. The dotted line represents where the head separates from the tail. This is also where the magic begins.

For illustration purposes, below is a recap of one of my sites for a recent 30- day period:

• 42,268 Total Visits
• 36,457 Visits from Search
• 17,424 Keywords from Search
• Top 10 keywords made up 2,727searches
• Top 10 keywords consisted of 7% of the total searches.
• Over 36,000 visits resulted from over 17,000 different keywords!

Lesson learned: you will receive a great deal of volume from the top 10 keywords. However, the numbers pale in comparison to the aggregate total of searches from the other 17,000 keywords.

Search Optimization: Achieving Power with SEO and SEM

Okay, so we know the long-tail keyword is powerful, how do we work a campaign to achieve long-tail and highly targeted results? Every word on your site is a potential keyword, therefore content is the answer.

If SEO execution is adequate at the beginning, companies should easily rank for their products or company name.

While the initial SEO campaign begins to pick up steam, Pay per Click (PPC) can work the tail and long-tail keywords. PPC can prove an invaluable and cost-effective tool to measure and test conversions. The results can then be used to ramp-up an aggressive and highly targeted organic campaign.

Leveraging SEO to brand and unleashing PPC for the long-tail, is a powerful combination that works very well at the onset of your campaign.

Producing tail-bias content is one of the most effective ways to increase the tail of your marketing campaign. Below, is one of many methods to “cherry pick” long-tail keywords and incorporate them naturally into your content to increase search volume over time:

Summary of the Long-tail Keyword Content Creation Method:

1. Using Google Adwords keyword tool, select your main targeted tail keywords (usually one or two main tail keywords) that have decent traffic.

2. Using the same tool, select 3-5 similar longer-tail keywords that have lower traffic volumes than the targeted keywords.

3. Write your content targeting the primary tail keywords, sprinkling the long-tail keywords into the content naturally.

Summary

Key Takeaways:

• Long-tail keywords reside toward the end of the Pareto Distribution channel.
• Many leaders of web strategies will want to focus only on head keywords for immediate results and branding.
• Leverage SEO and SEM strengths at the onset of your campaign for best results.
• Long-tail keywords from a healthy head and tail, will result in targeted buyers.
• As a site matures and content increases, tail keywords will increase as well.
• For a mature site, the majority of your traffic will come from long-tail keywords.
• Increase long-tail keywords by increasing content and targeting long-tails in your content.

The long-tail keyword is one of the best ways to target buyers of a market. People at the end of a tail keyword can also be at the end of the buying cycle.

A long term plan of consistently creating quality content using several long-tail keywords, will slowly add massive keyword substance to your site and increase conversions.

"Making sure well-written articles get found online involves continuous hard work and search engine knowledge," says Berger. "We know that in order to help our writers get their stories found, we need to increase our expertise in the area of search." That’s why the company just hired search strategist Aaron Bradley as its SEO Director to implement new SEO tactics across its articles.

Berger tells WebProNews Suite101 attracts over 25 million unique monthly visitors. The company’s revenue comes from advertising – mainly AdSense, but other networks have been integrated as well. They don’t charge writers fees, but they have a strict submission process. Only 20% of writers are accepted, with 80% being turned away. Writers are required to submit work samples and resumes before being accepted. The first article must be submitted before it goes live, but after that, articles go live and are then reviewed by editors.

Berger says "quality is key," and is the reason he doesn’t seem too worried about competition from big name brands like AOL. That, and he says most writers want to write for numerous publications, so even if a writer does work for AOL, there’s a good chance they’ll submit to Suite101 as well.

Presumably Berger is hoping the hiring of Bradley will help with the competition in terms of search engine traffic, the company’s biggest traffic source (though they do see spikes from social media as well). One writer for Suite101 achieved a monthly earnings record of $5,000 for articles published at the site, which splits revenue with its writers. It will be interesting to see how quickly that record is surpassed with the company’s new SEO efforts.

Naturally, the more quality articles the site is able to obtain, the more content it will have out there in the search engines, and if their SEO efforts are as effective as they hope, they will be getting a lot more eyeballs and clicks on their ads. Berger thinks writers like Suite101 because it’s the "closest" they can et to "actual professional editors in a lot of cases. Quality, he says, is the "key differentiator" between Suite101 and its competitors. 

There has been a lot of talk about how SEO practices can hinder quality, because you should write for people, and not search engines. Berger thinks they can achieve both.

Dustin Woodard, a Seattle-based SEO and Web analytics expert, tried to look at the top 10000 search terms recorded by Hitwise during a three-month period.  What he got was a very strange-looking graph, with data displayed in almost invisible amounts along great stretches of both axes.

"Top 10,000 Search Terms by Percentage of All Search Traffic" (Source: Hitwise)

So Woodard then examined just the top 100 terms, and this sample generated a graph more normal in appearance.  He writes, "However, this is just 100 search terms out of the more than 14 million."

It turns out that, at least in this particular three-month data set, the top 100 terms accounted for just 5.7 percent of all search traffic.  Expand to the top 500, 1000, and 10000 terms, and just 8.9 percent, 10.6 percent, and 18.5 percent of all search traffic is involved, respectively.

"Top 100 Search Terms by Percentage of All Search Traffic" (Source: Hitwise)

Woodard concludes, "This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic.  There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend.  To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles."

Lone bloggers, SEO professionals, and small businesses (among all other sorts of things) should be able to take comfort in this discovery.  Woodard’s analysis makes it look like there’s plenty of traffic for everyone, without a need for cutthroat behavior and the spending of huge sums of money over the top few search terms.

A better approach might be to optimize for a lot of truly niche terms and see what happens.  Be careful not to confuse increased holiday traffic for success – and also not to put your holiday income at risk in the event of failure – but some small-scale testing seems appropriate, at least.

Anyone wanting even more reasons to experiment should know that the Hitwise sample only included 10 million U.S. Internet users, adult search terms were removed by filters, and the three spotlighted months were relatively slow ones.

That means a lot to SEOers targeting that long tail of search. It also means (maybe) that, collectively, searchers are becoming a bit more sophisticated in their searching, or at least more specific.

Ussery says he and colleagues learned the news from Google’s Avinash Kaushik at a social gathering at Google Atlanta. Kaushik "beta tested" a presentation he’d put together during the flight over.

The story’s so boring it has to be true.

Hey, mind if I beta test a reading of Deuteronomy? Oh, wait, that’s what Leviticus was, wasn’t it?

I keed, I keed. Just sayin’ I don’t think he’s name-dropping.

Ussery also learned that 14% of Google clicks were from paid search, and 25% of user queries were unique queries. 

Hat tip to Search Engine Roundtable
 

“The Long Tail” author and Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson paints a picture of the standard CIO as a Dilbertian lump of pointy hair in a suit, clinging to a slippery rock while a rushing river of technology threatens to sweep the CIO away and drown him, unmourned and swiftly forgotten.

Anderson’s tail of speaking to a room of what he thought would be “technology innovators” instead proved to be a meeting of the Dead Weight Club. They obstruct employees from working more effectively using resources available from a number of providers online.

The users know these types well, Anderson related how these CIOs block connections to services like Skype or Second Life. People probably are more familiar with not being able to reach web-based email services, even at companies where Sarbanes-Oxley requirements for maintaining information integrity do not apply.

Instant messaging has been another bugaboo for CIO types. They see AIM or Yahoo Messenger or Meebo and their first thought is of hundreds of employees chatting away with people and not getting their work done.

They don’t see a customer service rep with a good contact via IM at a manufacturer getting a customer’s question answered in a fraction of the time it takes to navigate a menu on a relatively expensive long-distance call.

Control and trust are the big issues CIOs have. Anyone who has had the displeasure of working with or around some of the more glacial-moving throwbacks of the CIO species understand that paranoia, rather than efficiency, rules his office.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Companies can implement usage policies that permit more freedom in using technology while safeguarding corporate information. If a worker fulfills projects on time and as expected, but spends a lot of time on the big, bad Internet while doing so, has the company suffered any actual harm?

Probably not. Yet all over the U.S., workers will try to use something new, something different, and hit the firewall like a bug into an 18-wheeler’s windshield. The truth is, CIOs who stand in the way of their more innovative employees cost the company a lot more than the numbers on their fat paychecks.

They may be costing their employers a business edge, too.

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At the Search Engine Strategies Conference in London, Jennifer Slegg of JenSense.com provides a stellar guide to creating quality content that maximizes on the enduring long tail of search, which produces more traffic in the long run.

Her notes are relayed via WebProNews guest correspondent Deb Harrison. This is what became of them.

Why focus on the long tail? Well, to put it succinctly: "Long tail search is less competitive and it narrows the market." Without further ado, here’s what to look for and to look out for when generating quality content.

Unique Content

1. Takes care of duplicate content concerns
2. Creates exclusivity at your website
3. Is a source of organic (free) search engine traffic

But Free Content…

1. Often comes from free article databases and is published in thousands of other places
2. Often has required author links linking to low quality, or very spammy sites
3. Often have ulterior motives to sell products, services, or ebooks

If Buying Content, Rather Than Creating It, Remember:

1. You get what you pay for
2. Research to be sure content is original and not copied
3. Pay close attention from the third and fourth paragraph, where infringers often get lazy
4. Recheck three months later to see if authors are reselling the same content

Focus On the Long Tail

Maximizing on the long tail of search involves narrowing the topic, especially in broad competitive areas. Slegg provides examples:

Broad: Perfect gifts for Valentine’s Day

Narrow: Valentine’s Day gifts for mums-to-be

Narrow: What to get your child’s teacher for Valentine’s Day

Ask:

What search terms lead visitors to my site?

Referring keywords highlight words that may not be specifically targeted on your site. "If ‘dialiang from UK to Canada’ is a referral," but was only mentioned briefly, write a new article focusing on that specifically. Link to original article.

What are your visitors asking?

Write articles based on the most common questions asked via email or phone support.

What are the hot topics?

People are driven to search by hot topics in whatever category, so write copy about those hot topics. This is also great blogger link bait and keeps your site current.

Get A Head Start On Seasonal Content

Slegg recommends creating a file with articles you should have written before the most recent season was over. Plan to write them six months in advance of the next shopping season to get ranked by the search engines by the time people start searching for that content.

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The reasoning is that for an advertising application, websites in the meaty middle or the top part of the Long Tail provide way more business to us than all the very small sites and blogs down the Long Tail.

Sure, we want small quality sites as well, but if we get a client that does 10 million ad impressions a day, that’s 10,000 small sites or blogs doing 1000 impressions a day.

Even with a product that’s easy to support and an automated signup and sales process, the one larger client will not cause the same amount of work as 10,000 small ones.

Got Ads has a post pointing out that we’re not alone in this thinking, as he noticed with his ad network Texsy that the long tail blogs he was targeting basically had no traffic.

Does this mean the Long Tail concept is dead like he says? Well, I wouldn’t go that far. I think the same reasons Amazon, iTunes, and other similar businesses have been able to prosper against their offline rivals is due to their ability to serve the Long Tail thanks to technology and the web.

Although, I am quite curious to see data on what percentage of their sales are really attributed to the Long Tail, or if the Meaty Middle and the thick part of the curve are really providing the bulk of their business.

Fred Wilson theorized that the largest sites on the web were losing ground to the Long Tail, but Compete.com posts that their data shows the opposite to be true.

Got Ads uses this as data against the Long Tail, but as the Compete blog says if you take out the rise of the two social networking giants then it’s basically a wash between 2001 and 2006. And, as one commenter said on the Got Ads post, some of the top 10 sites are really sites that aggregate the Long Tail or make it searchable.

I’d summarize by saying I’d disagree the Long Tail is totally dead, but that business models need to be wise about what they’re going after and whether that really should be the Long Tail, or if they should be moving up the curve.

Related Posts:

More Meaty Middle

Is Advertising and Aggregation the Key to the Long Tail?

Long Tail? Or the Meaty Middle?

Make Your Blog Standout In The Crowd

Does Eric Schmidt Talk Through An API?

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Pat is the Director of Business Development at Right Media, the business unit owner for RMX Direct, and the author of the Conversion Rater blog.

Not familiar with the concept? Robert Young explains that The Fat Belly resides between the “head” and “long tail” of any market. Here’s the example he uses…

Take a look at Digg’s technology section. All the articles in the Big Head received about 250,000 votes in total vs. estimated 2.5 million votes for the ones in the Long Tail. As for the Fat Belly, those stories got a whopping 10 million votes! Now that’s what I call a healthy “middle class.”

Robert goes on to explain why The Fat Belly is key to the success of any industry. Just as in our economy – where we often talk about the ultra-poor and ultra-wealthy – it’s the middle class that keeps things moving along.

Via JBatt.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

“What happens when everything in the world becomes available to everyone? When the combined value of all the millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the value of the few items that sell millions each? When a bunch of kids with no profit motive can record a song or make a video and get the same electronic distribution for it as the most powerful corporation?

The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance, and entirely new model for business that is just starting to show its power as unlimited selection reveals new truths about that consumers want and how they want to get it.”

Overall a good, quick, solid read. However, while reading through the book, it triggered two primary questions for me:

• If what I am marketing is in a niche in the tail, how do prospective customers find me?
• Being in a niche is great and all, but it would be nice to be closer to the head of the curve…how do I move my niche to the left?

Some thoughts on those two questions in the following posts.

Related:

Getting found in the Long Tail: Direct

Getting found in the Long Tail: Recommendations

Moving Your Niche

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Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customers point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.

While I believe the long tail is an extremely significant concept, finding a clear and concise definition that helps me explain it is pretty tricky. The one I tend to use as the start point for some discussion is this one from the originator, Chris Anderson:

The Long Tail is about the economics of abundance-what happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.

I then sometimes add this anecdotal phrase from the Wikipedia definition page:

A former 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.”

All not really good enough, though. Maybe I don’t understand it well enough in order to explain the concept to others.

So I just ordered a copy of The Long Tail, the hardcover book that has just come out. Should be here in a couple of days, according to Amazon UK. Hopefully, enlightenment will be there.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.