The New Long Tail of SEO

In traditional manufacturing and publishing, there wasn't much you could do to capitalize on the "long tail." A music label couldn't afford to produce ten thousand records by obscure bands that might have only a few dozen fans each. Book publishers couldn't afford to print, store, and market books by millions of "maybe somebody will like them" authors. Publishers and studios targeted the big, popular, sure-fire hits that they hoped would have a market.

Pre-Long Tail (a hypothetical example):

Q: What kind of movies should we make that are guaranteed to sell tons of tickets?
A:  

Automation, technology and the internet lowered the cost of production, storage, and distribution. Just as significantly, computerized record-keeping let producers identify and monitor demand in less-popular niches. Amazon and Netflix (the DVD-shipping model) capitalized on this fact. The "Long Tail" let these businesses began to take off: they could afford to offer thousands of less popular products which collectively outnumbered all the popular ones.

The Medium Long Tail (a hypothetical example):

Q: Now that I've got more efficient ways to identify consumer tastes, gather and distribute products, what's a niche that has a fair number of customers and not too much competition?

A:  

Search engine optimization means using methods that attract traffic from search engines, which are looking for the best web pages that match the searches their users type in.

Rather than competing for the most popular web searches, which thousands of websites already rank for, "chasing the long tail" means identifying more specific search phrases that still get a fair amount of traffic (web users searching for them), but have a lot less competition (web pages which rank for them).

For example, when discussing the "Long Tail" in early '07, I plugged the phrase "hot dog" into Wordtracker.com to discover how many searches had been made that day using "Hot Dog." The results were:



You can see the classic long tail pattern even in a day's worth of results: lots of searches for "hot dog" and "hot dogs," but all the other more obscure "hot dog" phrases get more searches, total, than those two most popular ones.

Here's how I used to chase the long tail. It still works...but it's not the most effective technique. Still, it's something to build on, and I still use it to help settle on a URL.

Step one: find out what people search for.

A single day of search traffic isn't much of a sample size. So rather than use Wordtracker, nowadays I'd go with the Google Keywords Tool or a paid SEO tool that tracks search traffic over a span of time. I punch in "hot dogs" to find how many people were searching for each "hot dog" phrase.

Step two: check the competition for each phrase.

Professional SEO experts use paid tools for this, but you can do a rough check by searching Google for each search phrase prefixed by allinurl: or allintitle: For example, I might search allintitle: what's in a hot dog to find out how many pages have "What's in a hot dog?" in the title. Those are the existing web pages my page has to outrank, in order to show up at the top of search results.

Step three: find the popularity-to-competition ratio for each search phrase.

A lot of professional SEO experts use a mathematical formula to calculate keyword effectiveness: search popularity squared, then divided by competition. I sometimes use this formula, but I take it with a large grain of salt. 50,000 searches with 10,000 competing webpages might have the highest ratio of searches-to-competition, but that's still 10,000 pages you'd have to outrank. So I use these numbers as a rough guide to help me identify which phrases are the best balance between search and competitors, and then ask myself, "can I beat that many competitors?" until I find one that looks like a happy medium.

Step four: optimize on-page text and off-page links with that keyword.

Before, I would work the keyword phrase into the page title, URL, image file name, a module header (h2) or two, at least one link, and body text. Off-page, I'd build links pointing to my page using that keyword in the clickable text (my favored method of backlinks: my own blog posts). This tells search engines, "hey, here's what this page is about!"

Sounds easy, doesn't it? And it can work: I've gotten traffic this way for years. However, there are two limitations with this method of "chasing the long tail."

Photo Credit: Ring-tailed lemur by Ayla on Stock xchnge

Search engines have gotten smarter. They know about Long Tail SEO. Over time, they have downgraded the importance of "signals" that are clearly attempts to manipulate them, such as repetitive use of "long tail" phrases like "what's in a hot dog" in backlinks, page titles, and page URLs. They can still be tricked, but it takes a lot more signals to convince them...and a lot more money.

More importantly, search engines have begun to understand word meanings, or at least which phrases are related to each other. They know that "what's in a hot dog" is the same thing as "hot dog ingredients." This is easy to spot in the Google Keywords Tool, in which similar or related search phrases often have exactly the same number of search results. Obviously, Google is treating them as the same query.

Also, search engines know they're both part of the "hot dog" cluster of search terms. They may choose to ignore our carefully-crafted long-tail phrase and lump it in under "hot dogs." Then we're competing with the popular phrase, and we're back to square one.

Or are we?



If you think about it, that keyword research method I outlined above is NOT chasing the long tail. It's a way to chase the "middle tail," that "sweet spot" where there's still a fair number of searches. It ignores all those rare phrases which only a handful, or even one person, might ever search for. That "long tail" is a huge amount of untapped traffic potential.

Print-on-demand sites like Zazzle know this. They have an almost unlimited inventory of designs; they print one only when someone purchases it. They really do operate in the Long Tail space. But how can we optimize a page like that? We can't put every possible search phrase on it; it'll be relevant to none of them.

Here's last week's traffic stats for one of my web pages. The Y-axis shows number of visitors. The X-axis shows each search query that brought some visitors.



There's a few popular search phrases (including the keyword the page was originally optimized for), but by far and away, nearly all the search traffic consists of unique searches which brought one visitor per search query.

The SEO strategy I used to achieve this is almost the opposite of the first long tail strategy. Instead of optimizing for one long-tail keyword phrase, I used many phrases and terms that were related to my topic in module headers, image names, text and links.

I start out using the old "middle tail" strategy. Usually, I research a long tail phrase in the way I outlined above -- 2-4 words -- for the page URL and title. One has to pick something for those two spots, and one might as well use them to target one search that definitely gets traffic. I may also emphasis this "primary keyword" in one or two other places, such as an image filename (on Squidoo, the lens logo) with hyphens as word separators. For the rest of the page, however, I focus on related search terms instead.

The Long Tail According to Google: Related Search Terms



When I did my initial keyword research, I found not just one keyword, but a whole list of more or less popular searches people are using to look up my topic. These are my related terms. I may also venture outside of Google's Keywords tool onto Google's main search page (above) to discover additional related terms. Instant search (those words which pop up when you start typing) are related, according to Google. There are also tools like the Wonder Wheel hidden in Google's sidebar which tells you some of the words and phrases it thinks are related. If I'm being really careful (which I'm usually not), I'll check the competition on all of them, using allintitle and allinurl.

So I wind up with a list of 10 to 20 phrases related to my topic that get some traffic. Then I begin to write, keeping this list of related terms in mind. If one of those phrases fits what I'm talking about, I use it. I may use them in subheadings, image file names, or link text. Notice that I'm not trying to trick people; rather, I'm trying to use the same language web users use when looking for what I'm talking about.

Google (and hopefully some of the other search engines) know that these terms are related, so this helps boost my page's relevance for that whole topic or cluster of phrases, not just for one particular phrase. But this is still only targeting search phrases based on past search history of Google users. You also want to target the long tail (unique, one time only) searches that Google -- or any particular tool -- can't predict.

I try to write in what I call a "nouny" style. People can figure out what we mean even if we're poetic, avoiding repetition and using words that suggest what we're not saying. Computers, however, need us to speak clearly and say exactly what we mean.

So I use pronouns less often than I used to. When I refer to something, I try to be specific. When I write about Mykonos, I say "Mykonos Island," for example.

Jsut as importantly, I express relationships between words. For example: the height of the Empire State Building is such-and-such, and the father of Queen Elizabeth II is Edward VI. When I mentioned Mykonos, I introduced it by mentioning things related to it, such as "Cyclades" (the island group to which it belongs), "honeymoon destination" and "Greek." Hopefully, those related terms will help reinforce the page's relevance for "Mykonos."

State relationships between words. Use specific phrases like "jack russell terrier" not just "dog" (or, as the caption for that photo says on the page where I found it, "Curious Zoe," which is adorable, but search engines need help in identifying what a "Zoe" is). The more specific your vocabulary, the more likely you are to target one of those unique search phrases that neither you nor your keyword research tools could have predicted. Then you are chasing the full length of the long tail.

Just don't use such a dense wall of words that you bore your readers. People are still your audience, not search engines.

Photo Credit: "Curious Zoe" (the jack russell terrier) by jamie on Stock .Xchng