Selling small quantities each of many products or services, niche advertising and marketing to an excellent many niches, is sometimes called “long tail advertising.” It calls for search engine optimization using “long tail keywords.” Where does the term “long tail” come from?
Chris Anderson popularized the “long tail” in an October 2004 Wired magazine article. Long tail keywords and niche advertising go together on the Web. To see the long tail, get a spreadsheet of related keywords with their monthly searches, sort the keywords in decreasing order by searches and make a graph of the searches. You should find a very few keywords with many searches and a long tail of the distribution with few.
Unless you are a large corporation, you can only compete effectively for keywords in the tail of the distribution. The questions is, “How?”
You can divide the keywords four search bands: the super, the high, the medium, and the low search keywords. The border between low and medium searches can be set to somewhere around 500 searches per month; between medium and high around 1000; and between high and super around 10,000.
You can divide the keywords into four competition bands as well: the super, the high, the middle, and the low competition keywords. The border between low and medium competing pages — pages containing the exact keyword phrase — can be set to somewhere around 10,000 searches per month; between medium and high around 20,000; and between high and super around 35,000.
To use a metaphor, the number of searches is the quality of the fruit — the higher the number of searches, the more ripe, plump, and tasty it is. The level of competition is where the fruit is on the tree. The super competitive keywords are on the tip top branches. The low competition keywords don’t even require you stretch. There are two not perfectly consistent principles for harvesting the fruit: (1) harvest the best fruit you can, and (2) pick the low-lying fruit first. Here are some suggestions on how to do that:
1) Remove the super high competition keywords from your list. You will not get that traffic.
2) Remove keywords with too high a level of competition for the number of searches. Why bother competing for them?
3) Target lower competition keywords first. You will get quicker results.
4) Usually it is worth optimizing web pages by hand only for middle- or higher-band keywords. An exception might be for selling products with a high profit per sale — provided also the searcher is intending to buy.
5) You could generate web pages for low band keywords — write the template once and use it many times.
6) You can use the high end of the low band keywords in alternative titles of ezine articles. When you submit the articles by way of a submission service such as Submit Your Article or Unique Article Wizard, those services submit randomized variations of a your article to hundreds or thousands of article directories and blogs. They permit many alternate titles. You can have many articles spread around the web with titles including the low band keywords, all with less than twice the effort of submitting a single article. All these articles invite interested people to come to your web site. For the low competition keywords, appearance in a page title and page name (both of which you typically get in an article directory) may be enough to get the article listed on page one of the search results. Many page-one listings with few searches apiece is in the spirit of long-tail marketing.
7) You can also devote one page with a couple of thousand words of text to gathering up the very low frequency searches. Fill the text with semantically-related terms to make the page look like a good default for those many searches that do not have exact matches on pages. Here can be a good place to put some of the low-competition, low-search keywords. They contribute to the collection of semantically-related terms and they may attract a few searches directly.
Dividing up keywords into bands by search frequency and by competition can simplify long-tail marketing and advertising.
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