Theory of the Long Tail: Term Search Results Reality

A web site is found based on certain terms, so typical SEO efforts focus on the most popular terms and optimizes a site for them. From a practical standpoint, an SEO professional chooses the most popular of those terms for tracking the results of any given SEO campaign. At NetSearch Direct, we generally choose 10-30 terms for a typical site to track month to month; we might track as many as 100 terms for a larger campaign.

What we have found in tracking this popular-term approach is that over 50% of searches to a website use terms that are not in the popular terms list.

As shown below, when looking at a typical site over a 1-month period, you can see that 45% of the traffic comes from less then 3% of the terms used to find a site.

Over a longer period the spread is even more pronounced. As shown below in viewing a site over a 9-month period, about 55% of the traffic comes from less then one half of 1 percent of the top 100 terms.

In this long-term example, over 24,000 terms could be used to find this site. With this many unique phrases, it provided a real challenge for tracking and gauging the quality of the terms used to attract visitors. And that’s where the Theory of the Long Tail came into being.

The Theory of the Long Tail

NetSearch Direct research clearly shows that it is nearly impossible to imagine all the terms a searcher might use to construct their query or reach a destination. The 55+% of searchers who locate web sites by means other than one of the popular terms must be finding sites by following a path from web site to web site. For example, a searcher enters the search term “eagle.” In the search results is a listing of a site with an article about an eagle sanctuary. The searcher selects the listing and goes to a web site that has not only information about the eagle sanctuary but a link to accommodations located nearby. The searcher selects the link to one of the accommodations and goes to the web site for that facility. Who would think to use “eagle” as one of the popular terms for that facility’s web site. The curious path these searchers follow is what I call the Long Tail.

We believe the goal for any web site is to have the content/terms, relevance, and linkage needed to attract good positioning in the search engine rankings. The content/terms come from the product, service, or information described on the web site. The relevance comes from having content that matches the terms being searched. The linkage comes from having content that is popular and/or controversial so that 1) you can build links to sites related to the content and 2) get people and other web sites to build links to your site.

To capture searchers through the Long Tail, a web site must include content that is consistently updated. And that content must go beyond the primary focus/purpose of the web site while also being (somehow) related. In the example above, the article about the eagle is related to the facility’s web site because it is one of the things to see while visiting the area in which the facility is located. If the content is also about a current topic, popular subject, or is controversial, all the better. To prove this point, consider the number of viewers who watch the nightly news vs. the number who watch Jerry Springer or the number of visits to a web site for Hillary Clinton vs. the number of visits to one for Jessica Simpson.

If a web site can not easily accommodate such content, then blog sites are the perfect vehicle to

get words linked through natural language that will, by the very nature of writing about topics related to the core of the web site, include terms not normally found in the web site’s popular term list
post articles about popular topics
post articles that stir up controversy

with, of course, a link to the workhorse web site!