Long Tail (Last edited: Thursday, 2 August 2007, 06:12 PM)
A marketing phenomenon that gets a lot of public mention these days. From an Internet perspective, you often hear 'long tail' referred to as keyword phrases that tend to be a bit long (4 words or more is common) and new sites are continually urged by self proclaimed gurus to set their sites on long tail keywords becuase these gurus either believe in the Google Sandbox or think that the average Joe is simply incapable of mastering the techniques needed to get top placements on competitive 2 or 3 keyword phrases.
GIVE ME A BREAK!
Chasing long tail would bring you nothing but grief. To understand why, consider the true nature of long tail. The 'long tail' occurs in large, aggregation markets. Amazon made book buying a large aggregation market by amassing an enormous number of titles (books) that could be purchased online. It's 'long tail' are all the numerous books that are not the top sellers but which account for the majority of it's sales.
Chris Anderson wrote the book that coined the long tail term and folks have been chattering away about the phenomenon ever since. But the long tail only exists in large markets like what Amazon did for online book sales or Netflix did for DVD rentals.
Chasing 'long tail' in a small market does not make sense. Most sites don't have more than a thousand or so products and some have only a couple hundred. That means you don't have enough products to be an aggreator and use a long tail aggregator model. And, while I am not disputing the data Chris Anderson has to share with us, my experience and that of my clients is that sales come from the 'head' (competitive keywords) not the 'tail'. Below is a graph of search activity on two sites over a couple weeks. See how few of the search terms converted? But almost all search terms were relevant to the sites' themes so it was not a matter of phrases not matching the web page. Most of these phrases were 4 words long or longer.
The converting search terms were less than 2% of all search terms used to get to the site. And of those terms that converted, the majority of sales came from a handful of competitive keyword phrases.
Long tail is not worth active pursuit. Now if we can naturally rank for long tail along with our competitive keywords, all the better, we just won't make it a focus.
