Internet Marketing Glossary

Definition: Long Tail

The Long Tail refers to a frequency distribution that has a "long tail" when graphed:

As a marketing concept, the long tail refers to the profit possibilities of items that are not individually popular, but which together form a profit center rivaling that of the top selling items. The top 20% of a company's inventory may account for a much larger percentage of its sales than 20%, but the bottom 80%, in aggregate, may account for a similarly large percentage. In businesses with low costs of warehousing and distribution, such as many Internet-based businesses, the bottom 80% — the long tail — can be exploited to significantly increase the bottom line.

For search engine marketing purposes, we speak of long tail keywords. These are the keywords in a given subject/market area that are less popular than other terms but which are more specific and less competitive. For example, consider the following graph:

The keywords on the left are more popular, those on the right less popular. Notice how the specificity of the keywords becomes more acute as their popularity decreases. Fewer people search for the terms as they shade off to the right, but the terms become more descriptive and longer. Also notice how the areas of the orange and white sections are similar. This indicates that the keywords in the white area (the long tail keywords, the bottom 80% of keywords) are nearly as popular as those in the orange area (the top 20% of keywords). In other words, this graph illustrates that there are close to the same number of clicks to be had from the least popular 80% of keywords as there are from the top 20%. In practice, the long tail keywords can often account for over 50% of a website's traffic.

Since long tail keywords have lower individual popularity than the popular keywords, there is often less competition for them within a specific niche or local market in terms of organic search engine rankings. If you know your website's long tail keywords, and structure your site properly to fit them, you can see dramatic rankings improvements for those terms in a relatively short amount of time. Knowledge of your long tail keywords is also important if you're investing in pay-per-click (but in that case you want to know the bid amounts, not the traffic — a separate research process).

Our two initial service packages include a list of your long tail keywords, broken down by traffic levels. If you retain us to manage your PPC investment, we will use this information (along with web analytics) to discover your most profitable bid amounts and traffic sources.

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