A Guide To Long-Tail Content Strategy
Posted by John McNeilly on Mon, Jun 27, 2011
Heaped among the growing pile of jargon related to search engine optimization (SEO), so-called "long-tail" keywords and marketing approaches have become increasingly popular. First coined by Chris Anderson in a Wired Magazine article from 2004, this marketing term has got the online world thinking about the basic fundamentals of Internet business models.
But just what are long-tail keywords, and what are their practical applications to content strategy? The long-tail refers to a statistical illustration of occurrences of some event, in this case the results of a search query online. While many events may be generalized by a normal distribution (imagine a simple bell curve), long-tail events have a cluster of occurrences for a few x-values with a literal long-tail where there are many unique results that do not fit into one or two categories.
For someone developing a content strategy, this long tail represents a targeted group of searchers looking for a very specific product or service. These are the people who know exactly what they want and how to search for it.
For example, in a long-tail situation, if a group searches "Hawaii" on Google, it is safe to assume that a substantial portion will be searching for weather, hotel prices, airline fares, and where are the best beaches. However, this could only apply to maybe 30-40% of the searches, with the remaining 60-70% being intended for a much larger variety of topics such as public education, car insurance rates, and the local economy.
If a content manager does target the correct keywords, by utilizing specific "long tail" terms, it could mean that a site is missing out on a huge amount of web traffic.
In light of this, having a plan in place to deal with targeted, long-tail searches is crucial. The most common manifestation of marketing designed specifically for long-tail situations is for niche websites which choose to ignore the"fat head", or concentrated group of searches (such as people searching "Hawaii" and intending to vacation there). These niche sites focus on a topic which may only take up 10% of searches but is free from cutthroat competition.
Examples include websites that concentrate on "cheap Toyotas" instead of simply "Toyotas", since the latter term is too common and will attract other websites and useless traffic. Having a webpage dedicated to a sub-category or niche is a cost-effective way to draw in the right sort of web traffic and avoid hits from people who are looking for something vague, or something else entirely.
Specificity is the first step towards a content strategy that is able to take advantage of long-tails. As the number of searches continues to grow, more and more hits will fall into these tails, so having a well thought- out plan on hand now is an important step forward.