Traffic Building

The long tail is a term coined by Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine to refer to the internet’s effect on the demand for niche products and services. Contrary to well established hit-driven offline marketplace, Anderson posits that the real growth in commerce will involve being able to affordably reach niche audiences with niche products online.

From the Wired Magazine article:

To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks.

Chart Rhapsody’s monthly statistics and you get a “power law” demand curve that looks much like any record store’s, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don’t carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.

The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.

This is the Long Tail.

So how does this relate to search marketing?

Just as Anderson has found a long tail distribution in the demand for many physical products online, our search behavior follows a long tail distribution as well. While half our searches each month are for common 1 and 2 phrase terms (”landscaping”), the rest are for very specific 3+ phrase terms (”what trees grow best in wet soil”). What’s notable about these 3+ phrase terms is that they’re practically unique, especially as the search phrase gets longer.

For your business online, there’s as good a chance that someone looking for your product or service online will type “moving company” as there is they’ll type “how to move a grand piano” and there’s an an even better chance that the longer phrase will only be searched for a couple of times per month.

Fortunately, you can take advantage of the long tail of search by changing the way you think about offering content on your website.

The Long Tail - Part 2 will tell you how.