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The Really Long Tail

Saturday, November 8, 2008 by P.J. Hinton
The relevance of the Long Tail with respect to search is a recurring topic among the blogging employees of Compendium.  A Long Tail search marketing strategy attempts to win on niche keyword searches that are specific to the business rather than more generic phrases that may be more frequently targeted.

A recent post over at ReadWriteWeb, a popular read among us here in the Engineering team, reports on some new findings by SEO and web analytics specialist Dustin Woodward,   Using statistics collected by Hitwise, Woodward found that the Long Tail is a lot longer and more substantial than anticipated.  Quoting from the ReadWriteWeb post (emphasis mine):
The top 100 search terms account for 5.7% of all search traffic and include keywords like 'myspace,' 'google,' 'bank of america,' and ' yahoo mail.' Those numbers are not unexpected. However, the top 1,000 search terms only account for 10.6% of all search traffic, and even the top 10,000 search terms only drive 18.5% of all search traffic.
Note that these statistics filter out keywords that would refer to adult content, so that we're referring to searches that have a greater potential relevance to mainstream businesses.

What does this mean for a business trying to get found by potential customers?  It means that there is a very good likelihood that your potential customers are using  specialized keywords to find the products and services you're selling.

Another notable can be found at the end of the post:
Also, looking at this data is yet another good reminder of the fact that search has replaced bookmarks and memorizing URLs for a lot of people. Most of the top search terms like 'google,' or 'usps,' are, after all, identical to their URLs.
For many, search engines have become a web content database in which search terms are the primary key. 

A well done blog, keyword rich and frequently updated, will boost your profile in search engine results, and with Compendium's keyword blogs, your employee-created content is automatically organized across different search keywords, so you can get elevated search results on the Long Tail.

If this isn't a good reason to blog for your business, I don't know what is.

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