The Evolution of the Long Tail

Most of you have heard the words ‘long tail’ andmay have varying ideas about what exactly it means. The long tail consists of all the search terms that account for 80% of searches on Google for a particular thing. Usually you will have ten or twenty top search terms for something which accounts for only twenty percent of the actual search done for that particular thing. The other eighty percent is spread out among all of these increasingly more specific terms, and THIS is solid gold.

Why? because this is as targeted as it gets, and where the niche websites make their bread and butter.

Lets say you sell wooden rocking horses, handcrafted by your Amish grandpa and painted with al natural organic paints made by your Amish grandma. You could try to rank for ‘rocking horse’, or even ‘wooden rocking horse’, where there are 2000 searches a month. Maybe you’ll fight your way up to the top ten and manage to garner 1% of the search clicks – making a whopping twenty clicks a month – and maybe, just maybe you’ll have a five to ten percent conversion rate and get a couple of sales a month for all your trouble.

But suppose there are fifteen clicks per month for ‘wooden rocking horse handmade’, and another fifteen for ‘Amish rocking horse’, and yet another fifteen for ‘wooden rocking horse painted’ and another fifteen for ‘painted wooden rocking horse Amish’. Suppose you could corral nearly 100% of those. thats’ 60 clicks per month, and these people aren’t just looking for a ‘rocking horse’ or even a ‘wooden rocking horse’. They are looking for EXACTLY what your dear grandma and grandpa make on their little farm in Pennsylvania. Your conversion rates will probably be wayyyy more than five or ten percent.

Do you get the picture? The long tail has evolved, as people have learned to use the web more effeciently. This makes the number of highly targeted long tail searches even more productive – why shouldn’t you get a piece of the pie?