What is the Long Tail?
The Long Tail of Search is the myriad of unique searches done daily that add up to the vast majority of search engine activity. The top 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000 or even 1 million searches done each day are but a tiny, tiny fraction of the total.
The sum of the obscure, esoteric and often quirky makes up the majority and is known as the Long Tail of Search.
Part of your role as an internet marketer is to market your web pages to people doing searches on line so you need to understand the implications of the Long Tail and how you can use it to get free targeted traffic and clicks if you are to maximize your AdSense, affiliate or direct income.
For example, one effective way of capturing traffic from unusual searches is to create niche content that targets a huge range of similar search phrases or keywords. There are tools available right now that can automate this for you. They essentially take single articles or web pages and generate thousands of permutations by replacing words with synonyms and phrases with other phrases with the same meaning. You then publish these different versions of your articles on your site.
In this way, you can capture a much larger volume of search engine traffic whilst still delivering the same informational value to your site’s visitors.
Here’s a quick example scenario.
Suppose you have an article that ranks well for the keyword “bicycling in France”. What if someone searches for “cycling in France”, “bicycling across France” or “bicycling around France” instead? Will you rank as well for those?
The answer is that you probably won’t but you might if you replaced the phrase “bicycling in France” in your article with the phrase “cycling in France”, “bicycling across France”
etc. and published those versions of your article too.
That is what chasing the Long Tail is all about and don’t forget, it is where the majority of your potential free traffic lies.
But don’t forget other languages too. If you create content in English, why not get it translated too so that you can attract searchers who are using different search terms altogether. So The Long Tail Of Search could just as easily become
- La longue queue de la recherche
- La larga cola de la búsqueda
- Der lange Schwanz der Suche
- La lunga coda di ricerca
- A longa cauda de pesquisa