The Long-Tailed Customer
Ok so Rolf Harris I ‘aint. But when I was asked to explain why you might not want to spend a fortune and invest huge amounts of time in PPC and SEO I remembered an article I read on the web a few years ago. The author (apologies for not remembering your name if you ever read this) had a fantastic graphic of a dinosaur with a long tail.
Let me introduce you to my version – Gerald the long-tailed dinosaur! Yes I called him Gerald, come to peace with it.
Well hopefully this article won’t stretch on for quite as long as Gerald’s tail but the purpose of this article is to explain Long Tail Theory.
If you look and try to imagine Gerald’s spine is an exponential curve looking at the axis you can read from this graph that general keywords return more results whereas more specific keywords generate less.
Still with me? OK the theory goes like this. Say you’re the owner of a chocolate shop (you don’t have to say that out loud). On your website you spend hours shoe-horning as many instances of the word chocolate on your website. You spend hundreds of pounds on PPC advertising. What happens? Well a major high street retailer spends loads more on their PPC increasing the price for the keyword chocolate and steals your place. Their TEAM of website editors upload loads of pages about how they purchase their cocoa beans from the most ethically sound sources and how wonderful it feels when you’re eating their chocolate that you think you’re making a real difference to the village the beans came from!
Basically the big guys win! However Gerald’s got a very long tail. At the end of the tail you’re still getting people interested in your products or services but THERE’S LESS COMPETITION!! So if we go back to our chocolate shop If you spend some time working on a keyword strategy to target the other end of the tail (e.g multi-coloured aniseed flavoured chocolate for diabetics) you’ve got much more chance to reach your audience and make that sale.
Don’t forget that when it comes to search engines content is king. So you need to get lots of content on your website about multi-coloured aniseed flavoured chocolate for diabetics or whatever it is you’re trying to publicise. A great way to do that is by writing articles about your subject. This allows you to reference your keywords naturally without tailoring your content to the search engines making it less readable. What’s the best way to get content on your site that’s readable and easily passed on and indexed by search engines? Simple – START BLOGGING.
This article has allowed me to mention blogging, SEO, PPC, Long-tail theory, multi-coloured aniseed flavoured chocolate for diabetics, and Rolf Harris. Not bad for less than 500 words!
So when you’re thinking about SEO PPC and keyword strategy don’t forget Gerald’s Tail!
PS I can’t wait to check my analytics in a month or so to see if I’m getting any hits from the search term multi-coloured aniseed flavoured chocolate for diabetics.
