What is the Long Tail of Search?

Successful search engine optimisation campaigns are often born from extensive keyword research. There are always ultimate targets set like; “I want to rank for (1 or 2 keyword phrase)”. What about the longer phrases? These are the keyword phrases that aren’t as popular, with everybody in that industry not actively trying to rank for it as it doesn’t have a high search rate – this is referred to as long-tail search and can account for a high amount of traffic that a website receives.

A look at long and short keyword phrases

Website homepages are optimised to target specific keywords and achieve high rankings within search engines. For instance, a popular targeted keyword term like “credit card” is very competitive and returns several big brand websites or banks like Barclaycard, Halifax, and HSBC.

However, this may not be the term entered in a Google search as people generally type other words, phrases, and look for more specific questions & answers. For example, a person may type “what are the benefits of having a credit card” and this will bring up results from websites like ezinearticles.com, articlealley.com, ask.com, and ehow.com.

This is because there have been articles and discussions based around this keyword set providing good information. These websites have the ability to rank highly for such a phrase as long-tail searches are less competitive, even though it contains popular keywords.

Long doesn’t necessarily mean long-tail

It is important to note that long tail doesn’t simply relate to the number of keywords in a search, rather the actual traffic it brings. The confusion comes from long-tail keywords generally being 3 words or longer, however it is definitely possible to have a highly visited search term with 3 or more words in the phrase.

The below graph looks at a recent client, between 17^th July to 16^th August 2010, and shows the distribution of visits by the number of words in each search phrase.

Please note: I have tried to remove any company branding to reduce any swaying of the data that the brand name may produce.

The benefits of long-tail search for a website

A particular long tail search referral may only bring a handful of visits each month due to its low search volume but due to the vast amount of long tail queries available, it can be less competitive, and can actually account for a huge amount of traffic a website receives.

This often occurs naturally but actively targeting long tail phrases can drive a large amount of traffic to a website, for particular terms, which will have a higher conversion rate.

Short and long-tail search

Any website with a good SEO campaign will be looking to optimise for a certain phrase, often the shorter variety. These set of keywords will be targeted as individually they bring in a high amount of traffic due to the keywords high search volume. However, due to other factors like competition or a low conversion rate due to web design, they never really account for the large amount of traffic an established website receives.

The fact of search engine traffic is that you are likely to receive traffic for all sorts of terms which you hadn’t really thought about, as search engine users type in long phrases suited to their situation. It is also said that there are more long tail searches than the number of short keyword searches – it is a hard idea to grasp at first but think of the amount of different long tail searches available.

An image from SEOmoz illustrates the example of long tail rather perfectly:

Using the same data which I used previously to show the number of words in a phrase and the number of visits they brought, I was able to try and recreate the above for the client website.

I managed to do this through a long process which meant exporting data from Google Analytics, using some advanced segments and custom reporting which was first shown by Ben Gott from Search Engine Land.

It was then put into excel and advanced users will know you can do a lot with data in a spreadsheet. For instance, I came across this formula to count the number of words in a cell:

=IF(LEN(A2)=0,0,LEN(TRIM(A2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A2),” “,”"))+1)

I eventually managed to turn the raw table into a quick graph which illustrates it perfectly:

Please note: I have taken the effort to deliberately not display the various keywords and number of visits that the website received during the previous month to keep it anonymous.

The above graph and pie chart shows a high number of visits for a few popular keywords but it then goes on to show how the website receives a small number of visits from thousands of other keyword phrases – amounting to around 70% of the total search traffic excluding any phrases containing branding.

As you can imagine, this is a considerable number of visits entering through keywords you may not have initally optimised for or even thought about. This doesn’t mean you should stop targetting the popular keywords and start to chase some tail, just that you should be aware of all aspects of SEO and not limit yourself to competitive keywords.

Image Credits go to Dan Taylor’s long tail book photo from Flickr and the SEOmoz image (linked above).