What is a Long Tail and What Does It Have to Do with Keywords?
When it comes to researching and selecting keywords you will often hear the term “Long Tail” and it can be confusing. The name for “Long Tail” searches is credited to Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine.
The concept is fairly simple. When people search online they tend to type in not a single word but a series of words. In this grouping of words there is a main simple word, which is the head, and behind that are a few more words which are the tail of the search.
An example of this is: Software (head) Management Inventory (the tail)
When trying to optimize a website, companies tend to focus all their energy on the head words. But under the Long Tail theory, the tail words are actually the more useful and powerful words to focus on.
Tail words do not generate the large search volume that head words do, however the people searching with tail words tend to much more focused and easier to convert from a website visitor into a true customer. Long Tail keywords also allow for more unique products and services to be found because the searcher is not focusing on a single word but a series of words which can better describe niche items.
For example, Google says people search for the single word “software” an average of 550,000 times a month while “inventory management software” gets less than one-tenth of that. But which is the better search term?
Let’s look more closely at the above example. When I typed in the word “software” into Google, it found 1,340,000,000 pages (heavy competition) and the word is not specific enough to get a good quality of visitor. Even if you could get ranked high for “software” it would likely generate a very high bounce rate. Since there is a virtually unlimited combination of things the searcher could actually be looking for (different kinds of software, buying software, developing software, comparing software, etc) the majority of searchers are not going to be looking for any one specific thing.
However, when I added “management inventory” Google comes back with only 9,510,000. While this is still a lot of websites it is only a fraction of those for the single word “software” and we’ve narrowed the potential search target significantly. We can continue adding words (creating a longer tail) and improving the likelihood that the searcher is looking for us.
With the smaller search volumes for the Long Tails, the Pay-Per-Click advertising costs can be much lower because the competition is smaller. For the price of advertising on a major search word it is possible to have several different Long Tail PPC ads running at the same time.
Like all other Keywords decisions, Long Tail choices should not be picked out of thin air. Research should always be done to make sure that there is good traffic on these Long Tails.
Are Long Tails the right decision for your website? Perhaps. Every website is different based on what service or production they are providing. But Long Tails are definitely something that all websites owners should investigate when looking for the best way to reach potential customers on the internet.
Technorati Tags: keywords, long tail, search, volume, ppc, seo, search engine optimization
This article was first published March 11, 2009 on the Tatum Marketing blog
When it comes to researching and selecting keywords you will often hear the term “Long Tail” and it can be confusing. The name for “Long Tail” searches is credited to Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine.
The concept is fairly simple. When people search online they tend to type in not a single word but a series of words. In this grouping of words there is a main simple word, which is the head, and behind that are a few more words which are the tail of the search.
An example of this is: Software (head) Management Inventory (the tail)
When trying to optimize a website, companies tend to focus all their energy on the head words. But under the Long Tail theory, the tail words are actually the more useful and powerful words to focus on.
Tail words do not generate the large search volume that head words do, however the people searching with tail words tend to much more focused and easier to convert from a website visitor into a true customer. Long Tail keywords also allow for more unique products and services to be found because the searcher is not focusing on a single word but a series of words which can better describe niche items.
For example, Google says people search for the single word “software” an average of 550,000 times a month while “inventory management software” gets less than one-tenth of that. But which is the better search term?
Let’s look more closely at the above example. When I typed in the word “software” into Google, it found 1,340,000,000 pages (heavy competition) and the word is not specific enough to get a good quality of visitor. Even if you could get ranked high for “software” it would likely generate a very high bounce rate. Since there is a virtually unlimited combination of things the searcher could actually be looking for (different kinds of software, buying software, developing software, comparing software, etc) the majority of searchers are not going to be looking for any one specific thing.
However, when I added “management inventory” Google comes back with only 9,510,000. While this is still a lot of websites it is only a fraction of those for the single word “software” and we’ve narrowed the potential search target significantly. We can continue adding words (creating a longer tail) and improving the likelihood that the searcher is looking for us.
With the smaller search volumes for the Long Tails, the Pay-Per-Click advertising costs can be much lower because the competition is smaller. For the price of advertising on a major search word it is possible to have several different Long Tail PPC ads running at the same time.
Like all other Keywords decisions, Long Tail choices should not be picked out of thin air. Research should always be done to make sure that there is good traffic on these Long Tails.
Are Long Tails the right decision for your website? Perhaps. Every website is different based on what service or production they are providing. But Long Tails are definitely something that all websites owners should investigate when looking for the best way to reach potential customers on the internet.
Thu, Nov 5, 2009
Conversion Optimization, Traffic
Written by: Eric Gerds