I recently noticed this comment in AR...
"... I know that I also rank for most long tail searches."
I don't buy this argument at all. I'm not suggesting this person is a liar; I just don't believe that anyone can know what the long tail comprises for any subject, even the narrowest of subjects.
My research indicates that the long tail is as fleeting as the conversation you are likely to have at a dinner on Route 66 in Santa Fe New Mexico five years from now. It is virtually unpredictable and when inspected (in hindsight) it can be both shocking and surprising. This is the feeling many of you have commented about when inspecting the hundreds of unique phrases that caused people to be referred to your web sites.
I've learned that long tail search queries are typically formulated much like impulse buyers make purchases. You're sitting in front of a television and you see a story about distressed sail boats because of a recent hurricane. The news reporter indicates that every marina in Tampa has an excess of damaged boats at very cheap salvage prices. You jump on Google and you type "sail boats hurricane damage sale tampa". You get some really good hits not because anyone [knowingly or purposefully] optimized their website for this - indeed the storm just passed - SEO doesn't work that quickly. Instead, a marina in Tampa that sells sail boats had written many articles about avoiding hurricane damage - they rank #1 and they get first crack at the business.
I recently wrote about Blogging for Organic Visibility vs PPC Campaigns and I was surprised at some of the calls and emails I recieved. Here's a small sample of the ways this post ranks - almost all of which were completely unexpected. I found these phrase by simply experimenting with some of the words in the post.
- Hidden Side of PPC - #1
- Google Blogging vs PPC - #5
- MSN Blogging vs PPC - #3
- AOL Blogging vs PPC - #1
- AOL Blog Visibility vs PPC - #1
- Blogging for Organic Visibility - #1
- PPC Campaigns Freakonomics - #1
- PPC Freakonomics - #3
- organic vs ppc ranking opportunities - #5
- blog vs ppc ROI - #8
Of all these terms that I was able to find by experimentation, the next few took me totally by surprise. How did I find them? They are sitting in my server stats plain as day. ;-) These long tail terms actually caused new visitors to discover what I had to say on the subject in the first half of October 2006 and all related to the one blog post mentioned above.
- click percentage organic results vs ppc - #2, #3 (2 clicks)
- organic vs ppc percentage google - #2 (1 click)
- check google visibility - #3 (1 click)
- comscore AOL - #3 (1 click)
- Blog Commercial Real Estate (1 click)
- real estate training (5 clicks)
The strangest ones I happened to notice while scanning the tail -
- why is it not smart to take out an interest only home mortgage? (1 click)
- related:www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/mortgage_fraud/report_Kansas.asp (1 click)
- internet visibility - #1, #2 (3 clicks)
If I really looked at 100% of the tail, I estimate I could find about 30 clicks for 15 days related to this one post. Imagine how many clicks I get from the tail with 350 posts in this blog channel alone. Do the math - it's more than 20,000 search referral clicks [alone] per month from the long tail. But what's really interesting -- short tail clicks amount to less than 10% of the long tail clicks. That number is determined by removing all search referrals on phrases that generated five clicks or less - i.e, the more "popular" terms which total less than 2,000 referrals per month.
With data like this, should we continue to focus 90% of our SEO energy on 10% of the attainable target? This is somewhat of a rhetorical question of course - there are many reasons the answer should be yes, but I'd like to hear yours.
If you believe you have a way to know exactly what the long tail will be for any point in the future, please share. In the meantime, I'm going to continue to attack the long tail of things that relate to my business by simply publishing good domain expertise. ;-)
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