The Long Tail Tale – More Traffic for Less
Unless you have built the better mousetrap, or you are the web developer for Apple, directing traffic to your web site can be a daunting task. Internet search engines are the primary source of traffic. Every day, an ever-increasing number of consumers use search engines to find what they seek on the internet.
If you want more web traffic, get your site listed high in the results a surfer receives when he/she searches for companies or products like yours. The two main tactics for higher search engine rankings are SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click) ads.
However, if you want to get high search rankings for a popular search term, like “real estate”, you will pay high PPC fees, or need extensive and time consuming SEO.
For each industry sector or product category, there are a few search terms that are very popular and many that are less so. If you graphed the popularity of search terms, from most popular to least, the graph line would be very high for the few search terms that are very popular, then it would quickly drop down and level off for the far more numerous search terms that are not as popular.
That long low line that trails off the end of the graph is called the “long tail”.
The “long tail” strategy of generating web traffic means getting your site to rank highly for the many “long tail” terms instead of the few “short tail” terms.
Using our “real estate” example, a recent search produced 589,000,000 results for a Google search of the term “real estate”. That means, if a company wanted its site to be listed in the first page of results for “real estate”, it would have to out-rank over half of a billion competitors.
Conversely, a search of “real estate homes” produced 49,800,000 results, or less than 10% of the volume for “real estate” – and less than 10% of the competition for “real estate”. Other long tail terms are even less competitive, but just as appropriate to your business.
In many cases, you will get a better return on your internet marketing investment by being ranked on a wide selection of long tail terms than being ranked on a few short tail terms.
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