What is the Long Tail of Search? - Finding and Tapping the Tail
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So how do you reach that long tail and make it wag right for your business? There are a couple of easy things to keep in mind. First, if you're doing sponsored links, go with broad matching on both Google and Yahoo, since that will automatically tap into both the broad and the specific queries. If you're doing organic SEO (and who isn't?), make sure that you have lots of good, quality content that naturally pops up when long tail queries are made.
Let's go back to the example of those boots. If you have a website and you sell that kind of boot, how will someone searching for it know? You need to have a good description of your products on your site. This way, when the spiders come by for indexing, and someone puts in those terms, your site will show up in the SERPs as highly relevant. And that's how people make money off the long tail.
This isn't the only way the long tail is used; not by a long shot! A little less than a year ago, Matt Bailey wrote an article that specifically covered keyword strategies and the long tail. In it, he pointed out that "the terms that refer 1-3 visits during the month...will add up to more total visitors than the top terms." He then talked about his company's clients fitting the long tail principle, and gave a particularly vivid example of this.
One of his clients wanted to rank very highly for only two terms, and believed that all of his customers came to him from searching on those two terms. While it was true that the client's top 10 terms brought in over half his search traffic, actual sales told another story. Bailey said that "when looking at sales generated by search terms, 18.6% of conversions were from top 10 keywords. Conversely, 81.2% percent of the conversions were from hundreds of other search terms outside of the top 10. The 80/20 rule works in reverse, providing a 'sweet spot' of opportunity."
This suggests, at the very least, that you should be tracking the sales your site is generating by keyword. If you aren't, there are good stats programs that will do it for you. You may find that the long tail of search is already working for you -- and get some clues as to how to make it work even better.
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