The Long Tail Approach
To keep you ahead of the competition!

New clients and friends often ask me about the term, long tail or long tail approach to marketing, especially if we are at the time working on there Pay Per Click (PPC) space or optimizing web pages. Even if you have not heard of the long tail approach, you've likely used it to some degree. In this post, we will explore a bit of the history behind the long tail approach and how the long tail approach can be applied to a business in different ways in order to build understanding on how you can use this approach to cash in as a PPC or organic ranking strategy.

 

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Witness, the tail

Search's Long Tail, is a phrase made popular in search marketing lore by Danny Sullivan in a March 2005 post to the Search Engine Watch blog. It has been adopted in the marketing world over, as Danny noted, due to a recent article from Wired editor Chris Anderson in October 2004 called The Long Tail, referring to low volume production entertainment, in aggregate, becoming larger than giant monoliths.

 

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A Short History of the Long Tail

The long tail approach to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) owes much of it's concept to traditional business and economics concepts. If you were to say it another way, it is niche marketing. Like early importers and exporters, if you can find many small under served niches, you can often bolster sales, sign-ups, lead conversions, etc. while your competitors go after the obvious, the more general, often most competitive of keywords and markets.

 

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Researching the Long Tail Keywords

The long tail is a method to help you cover many bases beyond the obvious ones. It can be quite costly to pay for top words like MP3 player, iPod, and other similar words.  If you sell these products, it can also be a long and uphill battle to compete for these terms in the organic/normal search engine rankings. So you will need to step outside of your normal mode of thought and think like a searcher. There are always serial numbers, model numbers, part numbers, industry terminology, slang, obvious terms, similar but less obvious terms, and other various other places including keyword research services to glean new keywords to work with. If you are trying to think like a searcher, check for any keyword searches that visitors perform on your own site. Ask a friend or family member to describe a product. Work with a local high school or college career counselor to temporarily hire students to describe products or write a few reviews. Go fishing in forums that are topically related to your products to see how people are describing and working with similar products.

 

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Long Tail Summary

The long tail approach helps you to extend your reach. When it comes to PPC and organic search rankings, you can market in such a way that you no longer have to rely solely on the most obvious and competitive of keywords and phrases. When it comes to the overall philosophy of your business, you can diversify your sights to hit niches that may be under utilized by your competition and gain a bit of mind share.