Short piece on the Long Tail

The Long Tail How endless choice is creating unlimited demand. Chris Anderson

Back in 2006 Chris Anderson wrote The Long Tail - a history of the 'hit', a definition of the Long Tail, a look at the businesses already taking advantage of it and some predictions about the future effects of the Long Tail.

If you haven't come across the term before, here's a brief explanation.

Hit lists have been around for decades. Marketing focus has traditionally been on the big hits. That's where the volume and the money is. Well, that's where it was.
There will always be top ten listings and somebody has to come first. But today, the front runners aren't packing quite the punch they once did. And the expertise involved in creating, picking and promoting hits is increasingly redundant.

Today, the internet has largely removed geography and the physical storage of inventory from the equation while at the same time introducing even greater levels of choice. Brands still fight for shelf space on retailers shelves, but retailers on the internet have no concerns about the size of their inventory. They don't have to worry about the likely popularity of an individual line based on the size of their real-world cachement area or the physical limits of their expensive high street retail space. Global reach has made niche offerings that couldn't be supported within a physical location suddenly significant.

Six major themes emerge from the book:
1 In any sector, there are more niche goods/services than 'hits'.
2 The cost of accessing these niches has fallen dramatically.
3 Massive choice needs filtering to make sense of it all.
4 With expanded choice and granular search, the niche becomes more popular than the mainstream. All the niches adds up to more than all the hits.
5 Real demand is made transparent without being hidden behind artificial scarcity brought about by lack of information, shelfspace or distribution problems.

It's a quick and easy read and all the more powerful for that. Highly recommended. Just click on the link at the top of the post to buy it from Amazon.

But what if you aren't a web retailer with a vast virtual inventory? What if you are simply promoting a service through your web site? Well the Long Tail effect will still be evident. The distribution curve of the terms used to find your site will probably show that your top ten terms account for less than 20% of all search driven visits to your site. And if they count for more than 30% then you are almost certainly missing out on your fair share of niche traffic.

You say potato...

... and I say... Maris Piper... spud... mash... yam. On the web, more than anywhere, it's a case of 'one man's meat is another man's offal'; or words to that effect.

Chances are that many of the words your prospects are using to find your product or service are not the same as the ones you use on your web site to describe your business. And if the search engines don't recognise your site for the phrase being searched, then you won't be returned in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Consequently a percentage of your potential traffic will pass you by.

You will of course get some traffic. Everyone does. But are the words and phrases you've chosen the one's that are going to deliver lots of relevant traffic. And if they are terms that people are searching on in abundance, are you going to be fighting your way to the top of the search engine listings in the face of an impossible number of competing sites.

In an ideal world you would want to focus your attention on just those phrases that are searched on in volume and yet provide little in the way of competition from other sites.

Finding the right words to express yourself.

Google Adwords Suggestion Tool is free and a useful starting point for finding alternatives to phrases that naturally spring to mind. And it will give you approximate averages for the previous month as well as longer-term average search volumes. It also gives an indication of 'adword' competition. But this doesn't really help that much in determining keyword targeting for the organic search listings.

For this you'd be better off using something like Wordtracker. It's one of the many tools we use in helping our clients arrive at a useful pool of phrases to build their content around.

The benefit of a service like Wordtracker is that it allows you to measure search volume and organic competition for phrases across a number of search engines so that you can end up with a cluster of phrases for which you will have a good chance of ranking well in the SERPS.

What you do with the words once you have them is another story.

By this time next year we'll all be millionaires.

That includes you, me and everyone else in the English speaking world.

Growing at a rate of one word every 98 minutes, experts have predicted that the English language will include a million words by the 29th April 2009. So that makes us all word rich but possibly lost for exactly the right word at the right time.

Just think of all the new words people will be using to search the internet. Will your web site be found for any of them?

We've been working with a number of clients to review the language they use on their web sites and more importantly the language their prospects are using when searching for their services. Most can confidently expect to be found for their company name or domain name but for many that's about as good as it gets. Which means, at best, they're preaching to the converted and only attracting those who are using the search engines as a navigational aid.