SEO and the Long Tail

When Hollywood releases a blockbuster it may take over $100 million in its first weekend. Next weekend it will be a bit less and the weekend after that even less and so on until the cinemas stop showing it. Then it comes out on DVD generating another big burst of revenue but this quickly dies off. The film is forgotten, the DVDs are placed in bargain bins and if the studio is lucky, the film has now made a profit.

Right?

Wrong.

This is what happened before the Internet when everyone depended on shops with limited shelf space. Once a film had been out on DVD a year or two, it went into the remainder bin and was never restocked. Now shops are online, they have unlimited shelf space and this is changing everything. The movie will continue to make money. A DVD sale here, a DVD sale there. Just a few dollars each time but it builds up and it doesn't stop. Casablanca was made in 1942 yet its still selling well on Amazon. It turns out that a movie can make as much money once the studio forgets about it as it did when people were queuing round the block to see it.

This phenomenon, known as the long tail because of the shape of the graph.

The Long Tail works for anything of value as long as it remains available. This is why it can be worthwhile writing an article that only attracts five people a day. Because five people everyday is 35 people a week or over 1800 a year. Those 1800 are worth about $10 a year. If the article took an hour to write then $10 is not a great return but it is still $10 you did not have before. Of course the article will earn you another $10 the next year and the year after that it may only make $9 and $8 the next year. Eventually the article will be out of date and no long included in Google's results but by then you will have $50+ for an hour's work.

Obviously this requires you to take the very long view and will never make you rich unless you write a vast number of articles. But this isn't the only way the long tail helps.

It turns out that a lot of things are shaped like the Long Tail graphed. For example, how people use keywords.

Early on in my experiments I targeted the keywords “montessori and dyslexia” with an article because it had very low levels of traffic and no real competition. This gets me the expected traffic but look what else it gets me. This graph shows the first 21 keywords use to find my article in March 2008. There were also another 20 keywords, each one used once over the causes of the month.

Even counting “montessori and dyslexia”, “montessori dyslexia” and “dyslexia and montessori”   as the keywords I targeted, they only account for less than 50% of the visitor landing on that page. The other keywords that I caught by accident accounted for the rest of my visitors and revenue on this page.

What's happening here?

Look at the nature of the keywords. Most are variants of keywords I targeted, e .g. “montessori schools dyslexia” (Montessori is a specialised teaching method). Others are pure luck that I just happened to mention when writing the article. This is the Long Tail in action. If “montessori and dyslexia” is the openning weekend of the movie, “on montessori learning methodology dyslexics” is a DVD sale ten years after it was released.

The Long Tail holds true for every page I write.

The more articles you write the more keywords you will hit by accident. There won't be a lot of visitors for each keyword but there will be a lot of keywords.