As you undoubtedly know, the term “long-tail content” describes those pages on your website which are optimized for keywords that don’t get searched for a lot - but for which there is even less competition.
In other words, even though a long-tail content page may not bring in a ton of visitors, it’s relatively easy to get it showing on page one of the Google search results.
The key here is to publish a LOT of pages optimized for long-tail keywords.
Here are some interesting figures from a post I found at the Junta42 blog.
- 18% of search traffic arrives through the fat head
- 11.5% of search traffic arrives through the chunky middle
- 70% of search traffic arrives through the long tail
Put simply, if your website doesn’t have a long tail, you are missing out on that 70%.
On top of that, long tail traffic almost always converts better.
Here are a couple more interesting tidbits from that post:
- The fastest growing type of keyword search is a length of eight words.
- The type of search that converts at the highest rate is the four-word search.
What’s the takeaway here?
The takeaway is that you need to be creating a lot more long-tail content, to maximize that 70%.
And if you’re not sure where you’re going to find enough ideas for all those new pages...
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Nick...thanks for the shout out.
The key is developing consistent valuable content targeted to your customers and prospects. The long-tail will come from that.
Posted by: Joe Pulizzi | March 25, 2011 at 07:48 AM