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Embracing the long tail

In 2004, Chris Anderson wrote an influential article called "The Long Tail". In the physical world, so much is limited by physical distribution. On the internet, those restrictions don't apply. That's lead to a lot of interesting ideas, one being the long tail of search engine marketing.

A lot of people focus on the big keywords. This is not only difficult, particularly in the short term, but in some ways quite risky.

I run a site which was third in Google for a highly competitive term. That one term generated around 80% of my traffic. Note that I said generated - past tense. I slipped from three to five, and in doing so lost about 30% of my traffic, and 30% of my revenue at the same time.

If you get addicted to the big keywords you are vulnerable to the whims of the search engines. I advise clients in general to not get more than 10% of their traffic from any one keyword, and no more than 20% from the top 10. Your search engine traffic should come from hundreds, probably thousands of keywords.

For an example, a client of mine in the last week received 6.8% of their traffic from their "generic" keyword, 7.2% from 2 - 10, and the remaining 86% from another 512 search terms. That's pretty healthy.

How do you get the long tail working for you? Your products! You need to make sure all your product pages are very SEO friendly. Ensure the product name is in the title tags of all the product pages. Try and get the brand name in there as well. Getting the product name in <h1> tags on the page will help. Lastly, make sure your homepage and other key pages link deep into the site whenever possible, to give your deep pages credibility with Google. If you can get external links directly to products, then all the better. A good sitemap will also help, as will a Google sitemap. Of course your site needs to be fundamentally SEO friendly in the first place.

Try these simple steps, and get more and better quality traffic. If you need any help, our ecommerce consulting services can help.