How long is the long tail?

One of the greatest benefits of producing regular content for your website is that as time goes on, you will pick up more and more long tail search traffic.

When we talk about the long tail in terms of traffic from Google and other search engines, we’re referring to the large numbers of visitors who arrive at a website having typed in a longer, less predictable search query. The more content you have, the more you’ll get these sorts of visitors arriving at your website.

But how beneficial is this? You’re probably targeting certain keywords already. Surely most traffic from search engines will come through those terms. That’s not the case. It’s called the long tail for a reason. For every popular, generic query, there are millions of related queries. Maybe there are only a handful of people searching for each one, but the bulk of search engine traffic lies in these terms and adding content to your site is the best way to tap into that.

It would be impossible to achieve, but if you could receive all of the traffic for all of the top 1,000 search queries, you’d still miss out on 90% of search traffic. Most sites will typically receive the majority of their search traffic from queries that would be categorised as from the long tail.

It’s been written that if the distribution of search queries were represented by a lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles. That’s a lot of traffic.

Alex Bowden
Writer/editor