The Secret $31 Billion Global Local Search Market

The phrase The Long Tail was first invented by Chris Anderson.

The assumption drew in part from an influential February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality" that noted that a relative handful of weblogs have many links going into them but "the long tail" of millions of weblogs might have only a handful of links going into them.

Beginning in a series of speeches in early 2004 and culminating with the publication of a Wired magazine article in October 2004, Anderson described the real effects of the long tail on instant and future business models.

Anderson later extended it into the book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006).

Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume may collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few in effect bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large decent.

Anderson cites earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Jeffrey Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon sales and Amazon sales ranking and found a large proportion of Amazon.com's book sales happen from undefined books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores.

The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap into that market successfully.

An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.

The point I am explaining in this article is that there are a large number of search queries that happen far less often than the leading search terms like "apple" or "apple macintosh" at the head of the list.

Most search queries form the long tail search that's illustrated behind the head.

Tap into the long tail, and you've got sizable traffic, as well as traffic that often is reported to convert better than less generic keyword terms.

In other words, search has a long tail too. For example, I've long heard rumors for years to the search tail.

I'm not vigilant where that phrase it originated and with whom, but tails aren't a new consideration to the search world. While it may not be new to search, it's severely great to have the tail becoming more popularized in general. That's because it will further help out those search engine marketers who mistakenly focus on only the most popular terms to realize they need to be thoughtful of the tail as well. The same applies in the PPC industry when they make keyword research for PPC advertising.

So if you're a search engine marketer hearing about The Long Tail just now, join in! Many of you have constantly been working with it for years. That means considering broad matching on both Google and Yahoo when doing keyword research.

For organic SEO, it means having lots of favorable content that will naturally tap into the tail of keyword search.

On Tuesday Google had their analyst day, which was focused on articulating their strategy and explaining the vital dynamics of their remarkable success.

I've described Google as a "Long Tail organization" previous too, so I was delighted to see that this is the way they now describe themselves, too.

Matching these advertisers are hundreds of thousands of previously sub-scale "publishers", from blogs to under covert commercial sites.

Most are too small to have their own ad sales business, but they might now run appliable Google ads by just adding a few lines of HTML to their site.

The top keyword deal is enhanced by companies that contract to gain rankings for 15-25 terms, maybe 30.

Gradually, when studying the referrals from all major search engines and the traffic they generate, those that focus on the top 15-25 terms might be missing the biggest part and vast majority of their market.

About The Author-- Christos Margetis is an Internet Marketing Consultant with
10 years experience working with small to medium size businesses and
entrepreneurs. Author of several publications in Strategic Long Tail keyword
research explained in numerous podcasts and his coaching programs

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