| There's no debate; the long tail of search is clearly where your most passionate and profitable customers will come from. SEO is a complex matter. Many people think that the most important aspect of search is found in popular terms, also known as the short tail of search. While there are millions of searches every day for "Brittany Spears", few commerce transactions actually occur from this query. But the misguided concept of popularity also extends to business queries. If you watch yourself or others as they search Google, you'll notice a pattern. They start with a few keywords and over time, they add more terms to try to zero in on exactly what they're looking for. Rarely do a few terms satisfy the desired search outcome or lead to actionable events. Two important things can be learned by observation: - Popular search terms are defined (mostly) by failed search attempts. Google counts all searches and the data used to determine what people are searching for is based on millions of searches that were used only as the beginning of a search session. As such, the data is heavily biased with first query attempts (FQAs) is misleading.
- The most important aspect of search behavior is the search terms that were present in the search field when the searcher stopped searching. When this moment occurs, the query in the search string represents the data that matters most because it resulted in one of two possible outcomes involving the search session; (i) the searcher found exactly what he/she was looking for or, (ii) the searcher gave up.
The last query attempt (LQA) is the "actionable" query because it represents an outcome. Popular search terms are not highly representative of outcomes; rather, they represent a search journey. Making business decisions for paid campaign and SEO based on "search journeys" is not a sound marketing practice. Only fleeting benefits form brand impressions are possible by appearing in the results of search journeys. Furthermore, predicting LQAs is also considered largely impossible by enlightened search experts. All search companies have [quietly] published data about long tail search terms. The most shocking aspects of this data is that more about 97% of all queries are unique. This means that for every million queries, about 970,000 of them are different and completely unpredictable. We know from Pareto curves that every activity on this planet follows a general pattern; popularity represents a very small fraction of overall activity. In the case of the long tail of search, there are millions of markets of dozens looking for very specific information. Attacking these markets through short tail search strategies (i.e., popularity) is futile if you hope to attract key buyers that are qualified prospects. What's the answer? There's no debate; the long tail of search is clearly where your most passionate and profitable customers will come from. But how do you sculpt you content to attract these important buyers through organic search? This answer is simple - write. Write about your domain expertise. Write about your industry, products, services, successes, and failures. Wrap this information around your digital marketing assets that cannot be easily indexed such as PDFs, videos, and PowerPoint slides. An abundance of written content about your products and services, written specifically from your perspective, will ultimately create many of the variants of search phrases necessary to dominate your market segment in organic search. Strategically, this is wise. Imagine a site that has 1,000 articles and each article gets two visitors per day from search engine referrals; 60,000 new visitors per month through search. I gain a similar site designed to achieve traffic through short tail search with 10 key phrases on 10 website pages, each producing 6000 new visitors per month. If competition pushes you out of the top ten for just one of the terms, your traffic will likely drop by about ten percent. Loss of just two highly ranked popular terms is likely to push you out of the profitability envelope. In contrast to the long tail strategy, no single competitive pressure point exists; your dominance across hundreds or thousands of long tail terms is both sustainable and naturally defensible. There's nothing inherently wrong with top rankings for short tail terms, but the data suggests this is not how you dominate organic search or achieve pervasive visibility. Short tail SEO strategies also require great attention, lots of effort to maintain, and continual monitoring. You might think a premium content strategy is costly, but a short tail SEO program is as well. With specific regard to Supercourse, the SEO benefits of submitting a course should be considered a by-product. The bigger dividend (I assume) is being part of a very prestigious group and collection of high-quality content. |