Long Tail misconceived
Finding the right search terms to target with your website isn’t just about finding the most popular queries. “The Long Tail” in search is all about finding large amounts of search terms with little or no competition. The importance of the long tail is known to many search engine marketeers, but what do they really know? In this article I will unvail some misconceptions that exist on the long tail.
What is the long tail?
If you order search queries by the amount of searches they recieve, you would get a curve like the one below.
As you can see, the curve drops quickly after a few very popular seach terms and after a steep drop it levels out. This indicates that there are a few thousand top search terms that recieve millions of searches each month. It also shows that the curve doesn’t drop to zero. If you would continue the curve further to the right you will find that it doesn’t reach zero at all. There are millions and millions of search queries that recieve at least one request and most of them recieve multiple requests each month. The millions of search terms below the drop in the search curve are called “The Long Tail”.
What does this mean?
The problem with popular search terms is that they are just that; popular. They are not only popular with searchers, but also with search engine marketeers. This way the competition gets fiercer because there is a limited amount of top positions with high exposure in the search engines.
This causes higher costs per click for the sponsored results and more tricks and spam tactics for the organic results. Both increase the cost of reaching the top spots and decrease the return on your investment (ROI). This is why search engine marketeers are now aiming for the long tail.
Further down the search funnel
The long tail consists mostly of more specific search terms than queries from the top of the curve. This means the searchers need to know more about what they are really trying to find, are further down the decision making process (AIDA) and are closer to the action.
Long tail search terms will most likely convert better to sales because they are further down the funnel. But you will need much more search terms to get the same amount of visitors than from terms higher up in the funnel.
Ad matching
The long tail is not only defined by what query the searcher uses. Targeting specific characteristics of the searcher gets you further down the curve and decreases competition. Ad systems like Google Adwords allow you to target specific languages, locations, times and much more. Keyword matching options allow you to further specify when your ad needs to show and when not to. But does that mean costs per click wil drop if you match better?
Better targeting of your audience gives you a better conversion and ROI. But many websites target as broad as possible because they don’t have this insight. This causes costs per click to rise for all searches included in that match.
If a search engine bids five dollars on the broad match “search” he automatically bids the same amount on the search query “house search in templeton virginia”, which is not exactly relevant to their services. But it might be to your realty website. To beat the search engine on this query you will need to bid at least the same amount.
Because of bad matching by irrelated websites, the long tail isn’t as cheap as it could be. Long tail ads are cheaper, but not cheap enough to focus on them entirely. How is this with organic search?
Organic long tail
The long tail in organic results is mainly targeted unintentionally. Especially when the search query contains more than three words it is unlikely that someone has intentionally focussed on it in the text of their website. This makes the organic long tail still something that can be targeted with little effort. The only hard part of organic long tailing is incorporating every search term variaty (singular, plural, verb, noun, adjective, superlative, etc.) and every combination in the text on your website. When you include all these variaties of the same text onto separate pages, these pages need to have a viable reason (for your visitors) to exist.
The other hard part of organic long tailing is link point distribution. You need to get every page indexed and search terms with more competition need more linkpoints then others. The internal link structure needs to distribute linkpoints, but also needs to group related topics in the right way. Targeting the organic long tail is something you can do with every website, but targeting large amounts of long tail search terms is something that needs some SEO expertise.
Long tail misconception
The long tail is not by definition cheap or easy to achieve. It isn’t always converting better than other search terms. Depending on the competition in your branche most long tail targeting is accidental, but that doesn’t always make it easier to achieve better rankings.
It is possible to target every search term you can think of. Even if every used term is only queried once a year, they are still worth integrating in your texts or ads. The shear numbers have a much bigger potential than any top search term you can think of. Just make sure you offer services that are related to the possible queries.
Top search terms (so called Hits) aren’t always a good investment. Not because they don’t get visitors or don’t convert to sales, but because most of them have a short life span. If you’re one of the first to enter a hyped search category, it can be relatively cheap to target it for a while. But once the hype has started it might be a bad investment for the long run. Choose your search terms (both hits and long tails) based on competition (effort), visitor count and popularity lifetime.
February 4th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Hi Peter,
Good article! Most of the time the Long Tail is referred to as something great and promising, but it’s good to look at it more critical and see it from a different angle.
February 5th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Hi Peter,
With your nice ways to measure adwords clicks thru analytics it’s a lot easier to get insight into the long tail.
It sometimes does convert better…but sometimes it doesn’t.
I think it always will be connected to the part of business.
March 16th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
[…] De laatste paar jaren hoor je continu verhalen over de long tail. Als je niet meedoet met de long tail dan mis je de boot. Is dit wel zo? Als je de ‘head’ van long tail in Organic Search goed te pakken hebt, dan rankt de long tail bijna automatisch mee. Geloof dus niet klakkeloos elk long tail verhaal wat je leest en hoort, maar pas het toe op je eigen situatie door middel van een juiste analyse. De Long tail. Het principe van de long tail is eigenlijk ook een oude boeren wijsheid: ‘Vele kleintjes maken 1 grote’. De long tail houdt kortweg in dat er een hele grote hoeveelheid vraag is die verdeeld is in heel veel niches. Gezamenlijk hebben deze een groter marktpotentieel dan de marktleider op zich. Er zijn veel misvattingen hierover en Peter heeft dan ook een prima stuk hierover geschreven: long tail misconceived (engels) […]