What’s the difference between the “long tail and the “short tail”, and why should you care?
When clients first become aware of Search Engine Optimisation their first question is “how do I get on the first page of Google for [insert common keyword here]“.
Eg #1: A bed and breakfast wants page one on Google for “bed and breakfast”
Eg #2: A real estate agent wants page one on Google for “real estate”
This is the short tail.
A page one placement for a generic keyword is nice (here’s one of mine: hot pools), but it’s really really hard to get.
The real money is in the long tail
The long tail is about getting first page placements for hundreds of long search phrases. This is much easier to do. (And that’s where I can help.)
Imagine for a moment that you own a Bed and Breakfast in Papamoa, Tauranga. Which would you rather have:
- 20 visits a day from searches for “bed and breakfast”
- Or hundreds of visits a day from a diverse range of phrases such as “where can I find a bed and breakfast near papamoa?”, or “bnb in the bay of plenty with views of the beach”
My recommendation is to go with #2.
Mainly because you probably can’t have #1, and if a Search Engine Optimisation company promises it to you, they are lying.
The “Keyword” report in Google Analytics
One of my favourite reports in Google Analytics is “Keywords”, so you can see exactly what phrases people have used in Google to find you.
Keywords that you keep getting found for appear at the top, and they are great, but the real magic is lower on the list for very long phrases that only one person has used only once.
What we want to do is grow the length of this list from 500 (for example) to 1000 a month. Because that represents 500 extra visitors to your website that your top performing keywords would never generate on their own.