Let’s pretend you own a business that sells home furniture, and your mission is to dramatically increase the number of couches you unload. You’re looking to generate most of your business promoting your company online. How do you do it? Just a little bit a research will tell you that millions of people type the search query “couch” into Google alone every single month, and presumably most of them are at least starting to think about buying one. If you do the search yourself, you’ll also find that the keyword phrase is heavily targeted organically and in paid listings by some of the world’s biggest companies and organizations.
Now you could invest a lot of money into showing up prominently for that search and, yes, doing so would probably increase your sales figures provided your website is designed well and your products are worthwhile. But if you’re looking for a more affordable and quicker way to go about it, you’ll go after the terms that have significantly lower search volumes but, when added up, will account for most of your business. Instead of concentrating on a few big terms like “couch,” “couches” and “leather couch,” you could go after more targeted terms like “green sofa couch,” “couch for living room” and “white couch living room” and see a bigger return on your investment.
Why’s that? Any SEO who knows what she’s talking about will tell you that most of a site’s traffic – usually around 75 percent – comes from long-tail terms that alone may only have a handful of searches each per month. They also tend to be searched for by consumers who have a pretty good idea of what they want, and if they find you during the buying cycle, you’re in a great position to close them. Someone typing just “couch” is likely at the beginning of the cycle, while someone who searches for “black leather couch living room” is probably a lot closer to making a purchase.
The term “long tail,” when applied to search, comes from Chris Anderson, who documented in an October 2004 edition of Wired Magazine that Netflix and Amazon.com got most of their revenues not from blockbusters and bestsellers, but from lesser-known movies and literature. Anderson expanded on his concept in the book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.” In short, he found, it’s more effective to sell smaller quantities of many low-demand items than larger quantities of a few extremely popular ones.
So, how can you apply this theory to your SEO campaign? Create lots and lots of pages of relevant content about your products and services targeting keywords phrases that don’t have a lot of search volume. Long-tail search phrases typically take less effort to rank on and they also tend to convert better than ones with high search volumes. As long as your site is structured properly and you have quality links pointing back to your site, you’ll be in good shape.
