Leveraging the Long Tail keywords in Your B2B Web Marketing Part I

We’ve written many posts in the past on SEO and how you can effectively target keywords to drive organic traffic to your website. However there is an important aspect to keyword research that is often forgotten, long tail keywords, and today's post will help to explain the ways marketers can use long tail keywords to improve their targeted website traffic.

What are long tail keywords?

The term long tail was first used by Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, who originally used it as a way to describe how people search for products on big ecommerce websites. This theory was that popular items on these websites (the head on the graph below) get a high volume of traffic while the niche products (the tail on the graph below) get low volume.

Anderson said that as websites develop more products (and by association, grow their long tail) the proportion business from the many small, niche markets that don’t individually sell well will help rival that popular retain channels. The image below is from Chris’ blog, “The Long Tail.”



Essentially, the left hand side of the graph shows the keywords that people search for a lot. The graph shows that there aren’t that many of these keywords and then the level of organic search drops dramatically. The word “long tail” actually refers to the way that the popularity of search terms slowly fades (creating the long, thin “tail” in the graph). The graph may not show this accurately, but what it is meant to depict is that even though the popular keywords get more traffic, the high volume of keywords in the long tail often makes up for their lower search popularity and, often, account for much more traffic overall than the popular search terms.

So why is long tail so important?

While the majority of B2B organizations are working to rank well for the popular keywords on the left (with only a select few succeeding) if you understand the long tail, and leverage its possibilities driving traffic to your site, you have the potential to gain much more traffic (and subsequently conversions) than websites  that focus solely on the popular keywords.  If you let other people compete for the popular keywords, you can focus on ranking highly in search engines for the less popular ones.
Make sure you come back to read part II of this post, which will focus on how you can choose your long tail keywords and how you can leverage them to improve your overall web marketing strategy.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at September 28, 2010 8:00 AM

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