You’ll find plenty of advice on how to chase the long tail of search scattered across the Web. Curiously, most of those articles appear to be chasing head terms in the “long tail SEO” query space. That’s kind of a weird disconnect, don’t you think? Why are all these long-tail strategists afraid to chase the tail if they know so much about it? Let’s quickly review the basics so we’re all on the same page, shall we?
What often gets lost in the shuffle of competitive long tail of search discussions is the fact that most search traffic is found in the long tail. We pay lip service to the fact that even though 100,000 people a month search for “goofy head terms” 1,000,000 people are searching for “ridiculously easy to rank for long tail search terms”, but we don’t seem to practice what we preach when it comes to composing our long tail of search study guides and tutorials.
So let’s look at a few facts about the long tail of search…
There Are Two Pathways Into the Long Tail of Search
Most Long Tail of Search Pundits show you keyword tables and graphs that are rooted in head terms. They start spinning out longer and longer expressions to illustrate how the long tail of search supposedly grows. Of course what they’re really doing is dragging you through the muck and mire of so-called “body terms” — that mid-range of queries that are moderately common and often competitive. The expression “body terms” is misleading because, technically, both the head and the tail are part of the body. Maybe whomever coined “body terms” should have said “torso terms” instead, but now we’re stuck with an oxymoron as a metaphor. Ah, the power of the English language reveals itself once again — but I digress….
If you dutifully follow the advice of your average Long Tail of Search Wizard you’ll descend into Competitive Terminology Hell and chase a mix of head terms and body terms, ignoring the majority of available search traffic. Ironically, numerous case studies published through the years have argued that head term traffic rarely converts as well as long tail traffic, but people continue to focus on head terms in their “long tail strategies”. We sometimes call this “Vanity Term SEO” because you’re chasing these head terms for purely vain reasons. Playing King of the Hill in the SERPs is a pretty stupid strategy when you’re trying to make money, but then again some people do so well in the long tail that sooner or later they have to move up toward the head to compete for more traffic.
My point is that if you want to develop a long tail of search traffic strategy then you’ll get into the tail much sooner if you ignore those fabulous head term-based tables and just start angling for the really weird, off-the-wall expressions people use to search on. Finding them is relatively easy — you just write a huge honking article without targeting any keywords and then wait for the analytics data to reveal all the queries that lead people to your content.
The Visits-to-Query Ratio in the Long Tail is SUPPOSED To Be Small
People sometimes freak out when I tell them to ignore keyword research and focus on content first. After all, aren’t you supposed to learn what expressions consumers use to search with? Don’t the keyword tools tell you that stuff? Sure they do — they tell you all sorts of head terms. Getting long tail terms out of the keyword tools is kind of a pain. I don’t have time to sit there and twist the knobs, push the buttons, and pull the levers on these dinosaurian technologies. I just want to get into the long tail of search.
So, yes, I’m looking for query expressions that produce relatively few visits per month. The fewer the better. It’s easier to rank for this stuff than it is to rank for competitive terms. It’s a rare highly competitive Website that gets most of its traffic from head terms. I’ve never seen the analytics for such a site, and I’ve looked at analytics for many, many Websites that draw millions of monthly visitors. There just isn’t enough head traffic to sustain that kind of traffic for everyone, and I’ve never met the privileged few who only feed off the head.
Hence, why worry about highly competitive expressions when you can scarf up reams of traffic from random terms that you never imagined someone would use as a query? It’s not like you have to do anything other than sit around and write articles all day long. Naturally, some people are intimidated by writing and it’s true that poorly written articles don’t perform as well as well-written articles. But there is also such a thing as writing too well for the long tail of search.
The best long tail articles meander along aimlessly, touching on as many points as the writer can think of. They can be scannable or not — it doesn’t matter. You can embed images, videos, and widgets or just fill out a huge long page of boring old text. You can use Hx headers, bold, or just publish a list of paragraphs. As far as the long tail of search is concerned none of that stuff matters.
But Of Course We Want Some Conversions, Monsieur
Before you start hitting me over the head with your El Kabong guitar, yes, you want well-structured articles that produce good conversions. The point, however, is that the long tail of search doesn’t care about structure. It’s looking at precision and granularity, two isolates in the myriad of factors that search engineers have to cope with when looking for just the right documents to satisfy really weird odd-ball queries.
So as you sit there and nod your head and say, “Sure, I can write 3,000 word articles — IN A WEEK!” keep in mind that I’m not asking you to craft the world’s next literary masterpiece. But neither am I suggesting you spit out some low-life crap no one would care to read. As a rule of thumb a 1,000-word article should draw traffic for about 100 queries (not referrals, unique queries) per year. That’s a goal, not a requirement. You don’t win if you surpass 100 queries and you don’t fail if you only draw traffic from 50 queries for your 1,000 words.
Once you have published 100-200 true long tail articles you can, if you wish, compute average number of queries per article, standard deviations, track the movement of loci points along the trajectory of your referral volume, etc. You can do all that statistical stuff AFTER you have collected a lot of data. But if you’re impatient to do that statistical stuff then keep in mind that the fastest way to collect that much data is to publish a LOT of content.
Stay Focused on Your Topic, Not Your Keywords
Although really long tail search strategy doesn’t have anything to do with keywords you DO want to stay focused on a topic. For example, if you start a blog about cleaning out horse stalls it won’t help you much to venture into random topics like kitty litter, dog pooper scoopers, veterinary services, or the meaning of real love between a pet and its master. Your topic is cleaning out horse stalls. There are plenty of random, tangential topics you can write about such as the ways horse stalls are constructed, materials used in the construction of horse stalls, the best types of hay to lay down in horse stalls, when to buy hay for a horse stall, what kinds of buckets are best suited for cleaning horse stalls, what time of day you should clean horse stalls, funny things that happened when you cleaned horse stalls, how you and your girlfriend made out while cleaning horse stalls — but I digress.
My point is that if you have TRULY cleaned out a few horse stalls, you probably have a LOT to say on the subject. You can write about the day you let some redneck you never met before all but burn out the engine on your 1972 Ford Torino as he rocked it out of the mud beside the stable, or you could write about the time you chased a horse through the pasture at 2:00 AM in the morning after you spent the evening drinking with your friends, or you could talk about the way sweaty saddles smell after a group of horses have come back from a 10-mile ride, or you could write about how cute your girlfriend looked as she stood on a stool to curry her horse and — but I digress.
Do y’git my point? D’ya see where I’m goin’ with this? There are a million topics bound up with every topic you want to focus on. You can endlessly write about stuff that is connected to the stuff you’re trying to make money from. You’re wallowing in the long tail of search. You have no idea of what is going to bring people to your Website, so don’t waste your time trying to figure that out in advance. That is what real long tail strategy is all about.
There Is Interesting Content and Crap Content: Know the Difference
The funny thing about long tail content is that it is exactly the kind of stuff you would enjoy reading in an old-fashioned 20th century magazine. Imagine sitting in a barber shop or hair salon, waiting to get your hair cut or styled or whatever, so you rifle through the tattered old magazines looking for an article that is long enough to keep your attention and actually entertain you. That’s what you should be writing for your ecommerce Website that is so unknown it MUST compete for long tail traffic. Every product description should tell an interesting, funny, entertaining, engaging story.
You go to the dentist at least once a year. You’re sitting there in the waiting room and you pick up the latest issue of DENTISTRY FOR THE FAMILY. There in the middle of the magazine is a story about how someone’s life was changed because they trusted their dentist to do something cosmetic (this stuff actually happens, you know). That’s the kind of story that is written to be both informative and engaging. It’s also written without a care in the world for search engines, keyword matrices, head terms, tail terms, or all that SEO stuff.
If your long tail content strategy depends on “writing content for SEO” you’re doing it wrong. SEO doesn’t type queries into search engines. PEOPLE type queries into search engines. Hence, you should be writing for PEOPLE rather than SEO. Google doesn’t want to know how to pack a tack box but the guy whose sister just got a horse for her birthday and he knows he’s going to have to help take care of the critter — he’s going to type whole paragraphs of crazy stuff into Google and Bing until he finds an article that really talks about “how to pack a tack box” rather than some keyword-targeted, advertising-laden piece of garbage that was written for the corporate bottom line.
You don’t have to write Pullitzer Prize-winning prose for your Website, but if whatever you write isn’t serving a purpose for something other than SEO the odds are highly in favor of your ending up in some Web forum somewhere asking for help because you “read on a blog that you should write good content for SEO”. Real content has nothing to do with search engine optimization. The search engine optimization is there for the content, not the other way around.
Content comes first. Long tail SEO comes after Content.
Long Tail Search Optimization Strategy Focuses on the Content
That is really the whole point. In “traditional” or “spreadsheet” SEO you go looking for keywords, build out some “content” that targets those keywords, get your damn keyword-rich link anchor text, and then you start tracking your keyword-specific traffic in your analytics. You’re a dismal failure if most of your search traffic doesn’t match the keywords you targeted, aren’t you?
Long Tail Content Strategy doesn’t distract you with all those artificial mechanisms. It’s not obsessed with keywords and links and trying to plug numbers into matrices. Long Tail Content Strategy simply creates real content that someone will care about, even if it’s only once, and then they move on. Eventually someone else will care about the content.
If you publish the equivalent of 250 2,000 word articles on your Website each year you will not lack for traffic. I have never seen a Website fail to draw in a lot of interested, converting visitors that followed that one simple formula for success. I’m saying you cannot possibly match the search optimization efficiency of 500,000 words of randomly composed content with all the targeted link building campaigns in the world. I have never seen anyone do that, and I have looked at a LOT of case studies, a LOT of analytics.
If you publish 500,000 words of content every year — and you’re not just bullshitting people by “writing content for SEO” — you WILL get links. You will get LOTS of links. You’ll get so many links you won’t know what to do with the damned things (which is good because, technically, you can’t do anything with natural links anyway).
This Takes Discipline, Dedication, and Professionalism
Real Long Tail SEO is not for the faint of heart. Most people lack the confidence to do it right. It’s not quite a “set it and forget it” strategy but long tail content SEO comes as close to that as any real SEO strategy does. The more robust and “evergreen” (I hate that word) your articles are the longer they’ll draw traffic to your site. Eventually you’ll get to the point where you can actually write a random article for a highly competitive term such as “How to Do An SEO Audit” and it will continue to be one of your most popular articles even more than a year after you wrote it.
In short, you have to have faith in the content you create. You have to believe in it. You don’t have to believe it’s the Best Thing Man Has Ever Composed — you just have to know deep down in your soul that you wrote for the sake of your readers and not to satisfy some idiotic SEO formula that says “Plug Your Keywords In Here”. If you believe that what you’re composing is interesting or useful or in some way compelling to at least one other person, then you’re done and you just move on to the next composition.
It’s that simple. The acid test is always “Will at least ONE person be interested in this?” As long as you avoid truthfully saying “NO ONE is going to like this crap — let’s bury it in advertising!” you’ll be fine. You’ll get traffic. You’ll build a Website that accrues value. You’ll create something people want to search for and you won’t have to spend your nights writing psychotic rantings about how the search engines are out to get you.
You may need to go back and read this article again, maybe even 2-3 times before what I’m saying sinks in. Notice I spent very little time discussing what the long tail is or how to measure it or how to find it. You don’t, technically, “chase the long tail” — it finds you. There is no changing that part of the process because the Long Tail of Search is a natural consequence of how the Searchable Web Ecosystem works. It’s not some artificial construction that you can define in corporate reporting targets.
Only a damned fool or some corporate vice president thinks he can chart a course through the long tail of search any more accurately than this. I’ve been optimizing for the long tail of search since before I learned about search engine optimization almost 14 years ago. I’ve gotten much, much better at it but the rules really haven’t changed.
It begins with content and it ends only when people lose interest in what you have to say. It’s your responsibility to keep their interest, or to keep them coming back for more. No search engine or keyword matrix is going to do that for you.
See also:
- Promote Your Website: How to Do It for Free (May 2012)
- How to Get Traffic to Your Website for Free (February 2012)
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