We’ve been teaching our clients engaged in search marketing how to select specific, long, key phrases for several years now.  Take, for example, an art gallery at the Port of Ilwaco, Washington.  Such a business could throw a lot of money at search optimization and marketing for the term “art gallery”.  They could show up #1 in the search results of all the top engines.  But would it net them any sales of art?  Not very likely, as the searcher was apt to be looking for a specific art gallery in a specific locale and/or a particular medium, style or piece. 

However, taking a more pragmatic (and less expensive) approach to do well for the long tail keyword phrase “Sol’s Art Gallery port of Ilwaco WA watercolors”, we hypothesized, would net perhaps fewer, but more interested parties.  The trick is to combine research of what terms are being searched with what long tail phrases are organic to the business itself so as to choose terms that are, in fact, searched, but very specifically. 

Bill Tancer of Hitwise presents recent research proving out what we’ve been teaching.  The truth is, the vast majority of searches are for what search optimizers call ‘long tail’ phrases.  These are phrases which are specific and include several words (ex. “Sol’s Art Gallery port of Ilwaco WA watercolors”).  It’s nice to have research backing up what we know to be true from first-hand experience. 

Bill Tancer’s post – Sizing Up the Long Tail - gives some stats using the great visual of a lizard representing all search traffic.  Imagine, if you will, the lizard:

…the head and body together only account for 3.25% of all search traffic! In fact, the top terms don’t account for much traffic:

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.

Rather stunning, isn’t it?  In this context, you could almost say that the tail is the only part of the lizard that small business owners should be concerned with.

But that’s what we’ve been telling you all along. 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  Enjoy your lizard!