What is the SEO long tail effect and its relevance to SEO
The long tail effect and its importance to search engine optimisation explained
If someone wants to find out about widgets on the web, they type 'widgets' into google and generally find something interesting in the first 10 results. However if they are particularly interested in Belgian hand-crafted antique widgets they don't just keep browsing through all 50 gazillion results till they find the information. Instead they do a new search using the phrase "Belgian hand crafted antique widgets."
That sounds obvious, but its importance to Search Engine Optimisation is massive. When people look for specific information they type long key phrases. If we can optimise our sites for these longer phrases we will not get the massive volumes of visitors who are looking for run of the mill widgets, but we can catch pretty much every one of the people who search for our niche product. These people know what they are looking for and are therefore much more likely to actually buy a widget.
To use a different example, there are millions of searches on the term "SEO" everyday and millions of relevant pages, of which this is only one. However, there are not too many pages on the subject of what the SEO long tail effect might be and fewer still with the title "What is the SEO long tail effect?" Since I have optimised this page for that particular phrase, I find that people who want to know about the long tail and its relationship to search engine optimisation end up here and are able to have their questions answered.
The reason it is called a long tail is that if you draw a graph of number of words in a search phrase relevant to any particular topic, you get something like this
| Key Phrase | Number of searches per year |
| Widgets | 20,000,000 |
| Blue Widgets | 5,000,000 |
| Big Widgets | 4,000,000 |
| Cheap Widgets | 4,000,000 |
| New Widgets | 3,000,000 |
| Antique Widgets | 980,000 |
| Belgian Widgets | 460,000 |
| Big Blue Widgets | 440,000 |
| Belgian Blue Widgets | 390,000 |
| What is a Widget? | 200,000 |
| Fancy widgets and accessories | 100,000 |
| Antique Widgets for Sale | 98,000 |
| Widgets for Sale New York | 90,000 |
| Widgets for Sale in New York | 88,000 |
This table continues down a very long way. the number of searches for each phrase get smaller but there are so very many phrases being typed in. This is what is called "the long tail effect". It would be more accurate to call it 'the very long tail effect' or even ' the almost infinitely long tail effect'. Added to all the potential phrases are the variants in word order ("belgian blue widgets" vs "blue belgian widgets"), the plurals, the misspellings and so on. If you think about it the long tail really is practically endless.
So instead of worrying about the short phrases, we can look to optimise for a much larger number of longer phrases. It is a little more work, but in SEO terms can be far more rewarding in the longer term.
Call us and ask about how we can help you discover the phrases in your particular long tails and how to use this information to boost visitor numbers and sale conversions on your website.
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