How Long is Your Blogging Tail?

“One of the most interesting phenomena to arise in the online marketing world was the labeling of the ‘long tail’,” Matt Bailey points out in Internet Marketing: An Hour a Day.

The long tail concept was initially presented by Wired editor Chris Anderson. What’s the general idea? Thousands of people are searching for things online, and they use thousands of different words in forming their questions. What that means is that trying to be #1 in Google rankings for just one set of words isn’t going to be the best strategy.

Typically, says Bailey, marketing managers look at website statistics and get the list of top referring terms.  However, he explains, this approach does not truly reflect the visitors who come to the website Bailey uses the example of a website whose top 10 keyword terms brought 2,000 visitors to the website.  But the next 4,600 keywords generated 9,400 visits!

Even more important, since the top ten terms tend to be the more general keywords, they bring in the fewest conversions.

Bailey has a theory about this: Buying decisions happen in stages:

General search terms are used in Stage 1, at the point of need, the very beginning of the buying cycle. From here, one of three things happens:

• The searcher buys the first thing they see from the website that ranks first. (This is NOT the most common result.)
• The searcher becomes overwhelmed with the amount of information available and realized that further research will be needed.
• The searcher begins to look through all the available products and information, sees strong opinions from other users, and decides there’s even more research needed.

The “long tail” consists of the millions of refined, deliberately more detailed phrases as searchers drill down during the decision-making process.

Understanding what types of searchers your business is likely to attract can be very important in keyword selection, Bailey explains.  Is your website an “impulse” site, where you can get a quick sale? Or, is it a content-based website where searchers can learn more, leading them gradually to the decision-making point?

What does all this mean for blog content writing?  Whether you’re writing a business-to-consumer blog or business-to-business, searchers come to the website to gather and evaluate information.  Through the blog, they learn about the basic benefits, the expected features, the typical service, and the experiences of others, Bailey explains. “Make sure your information is presented in a way that makes it easy for searchers to do side-by-side comparisons,” he cautions.

According to wordtracker.com, “Whenever a customers use highly specific search phrases, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy.”

How long is your blogging tail?