Chasing the Long Tail

Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine coined the expression ‘the Long Tail’. His example was how Amazon.com makes most of its revenue from huge numbers of specialised titles, not the blockbuster, high-selling books we see in bookshops. Each specialised title may only sell hundreds of copies per year, but there are just so many of them, compared with the small number of ‘top ten’ books (which is, of course, always only 10).

So how do you make the Long Tail work for your website?

Let’s start with an example close to home: a Backpackers’ Hostel in Queenstown. Try some searches for their website:

You see that as the search becomes more specialised, the number of results shrinks dramatically. The number of results is a measure of the competition for that phrase. The same competitive pressures apply to organic search results and pay-per-click results (Google AdWords).

The wider and more generic searches (especially single-word searches like ‘queenstown’) have lots of competition. This means big costs and also low conversion rates. Instead of trying to fight muscle with muscle, why not be clever and compete in lots of niches?

So if you have a ‘wheelchair backpacker accommodation queenstown dog allowed’, then you can buy those keywords in Google Adwords for a few cents per click. You should also be able to convert these visitors to customers more easily — they are a long way down the sales cycle already.

You can also help your organic rankings for these specialised, long-tail searches. Create lots of focused pages targeted at specialised search terms.

One good way to do this is with a blog. Include it in your site, or at least have plenty of links back to your site. Write about the disabled couple from Stuttgart in Germany who stayed for a fortnight. About the family with 6 children and 2 dogs. About the snowboard team from Egypt. Be genuine and be yourself. (And if you write about guests, then ask them if it’s OK.)

An online guest book is another great way to include lots of long-tail keywords. You don’t even have to write it: your guests do the work.

Don’t try to fight the big players with your own generic ‘everything for everyone’ bland offering. Instead, actively position your business in hundreds of niches. When the wheelchair-using dog-owning vegetarian backpacker finds that you are the only hostel in town it’s an easy sale.