30 Second Review of the Long Tail

Due to lowered incremental distribution and delivery costs, the emergence of social filters, and better recommendation algorithms, the future of business is less about selling one key product and more about selling a wide array of products.

Chris Anderson refers to this phenomenon as the Long Tail. The Long Tail applies to search because search is a recommendation engine, and keywords act like roads leading to your website and your products. Most keywords, unlike physical inventory, have little to no incremental cost after your initial research and optimization.

Head Keywords: Some websites, like a niche focused affiliate site or a mortgage calculator, end up heavily reliant on core keyword phrases, whereas most healthy websites have a traffic distribution that is spread out over a much wider keyword net.

The core industry keywords may have a lot of value, but if a #2 ranking slips to #7 that can result in something like a 70% reduction in traffic and sales. And it gets even uglier if that page gets filtered out of the search results.

When Head is Good: Not all head keywords are risky. Having a high percentage of your traffic come from brand related keywords represents brand strength. Building brands and changing the way people search is a long-term process though.

Non-brand head keywords could pose significant risk if you are too reliant upon them and build a business model that assumes the rankings will stay. For income stability look to your keyword tail.

Capture the Keyword Tail: If your industry is ever-changing and/or complex there is a good chance there are hundreds of thousands of related keywords people search for to find sites like your site.

Ranking for a few thousand long tail keywords creates a much more stable revenue stream than trying to dominate the rankings for a core keyword. Rankings shift all the time, but losses on some keywords will likely be offset by gains from improved rankings on other keywords.

You can use Compete Search Analytics to compare your site to other similar sites in your niche to determine if you are doing a good job capturing the keyword tail. If not, look for themes covered in their keywords that you missed on your site.

I admit it, I am in favor of the small guy. The independent webmaster working exclusively in his underwear. For the tech savvy small guy life just got a lot easier.

Why Life Got Easier for the Tech Savvy

If you work for and by yourself market research can take days or weeks to perform. Free tools like SEO for Firefox aim to simplify the equation, but most competitive research stats are just estimates of potential and traffic. They are not granular enough to provide the actionable data needed to give you immediate solutions.

And at the end of the day, even if you look at competing sites and have many of their marketing stats in front of you - like site age, link counts, and page counts - you can’t be sure how well they are doing.

With Compete.com Search Analytics, you instantly know how well they are doing, and what keywords are their most important. Running a Search Analytics report tells you what keywords send them the most traffic, and a weighting of each word’s volume of their total traffic.

How to Use Compete Search Analytics to Dominate Competitors

Compare those traffic stats against the algorithmic criteria needed to rank for those keywords and you have a good idea how much effort is needed to rank and how much reward each keyword brings.

If you have an authoritative site you can look for top performing niche sites in your vertical and clone their success with little effort.

If your competitor has a large authoritative site you can still beat them by aligning your site to rank well for the most profitable keywords.

Why Life Just Got Harder for Lazy Publishers

All webmasters with a large pool of content have accidentally ranked for keywords that pay well. Your own stats are a great source of keywords, but now that services like Compete.com exist you need to be aware that others are going to find your hidden gold. It is going to get harder to stay profitable while staying hidden.

If someone else who has a more authoritative site finds those secret keywords that are easy to rank for they will take them from you.

Balancing Links vs Content

If you already have a lot of content but limited link equity work on deploying effective link building strategies. If you already have a lot of link authority, work at picking off top keywords from weaker competing sites and weave them into your site’s structure.

The Problem

Bloggers create large pools of relevant content, and due to the social nature of blogs many bloggers have built up significant trust with search engines. But, as mentioned in Brian Clark’s Teaching Sells report,
some bloggers get thousands of visitors a day, but can hardly afford a cup of coffee for their efforts.

The big problem with blogging is that there is an echo effect to it, and bloggers end up chasing the same keywords that other bloggers are targeting, and many of these have limited commercial viability.

The Solution

Instead of comparing your blog to other blogs, you can step outside of that echo chamber by comparing your site to commercially oriented sites in your field. Blogs have significant authority and Google’s algorithms tend to prefer to rank informational pages to commercial sites, so you should be able to outrank commercial sites for some of their most important keywords.

Continue reading “Guest Post by Aaron Wall: Why Most Bloggers Need a Day Job to Afford a Cup of Coffee” »