So How Long IS That Tail?

The long tail has been so often discussed that I hesitated to even make this post, but there's a great guest post over on the HitWise blog you may want to hear about.

Bill Tancer, head of research for Hotwise, says that that tail is a lot longer than you might have expected.

The percentage of searches represented by the top keywords is actually a lot smaller than you might thing. What that means is that searches are a lot less concentrated in a few terms than you might have thought. Here are the stats for the percentage of all search traffic represented by the following numbers of words.

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

You should read the post to hear the methodology, but the implications are pretty clear. In Tancer's own words:

In summary, the long tail aspect of the search is true, but the data tells us that there may really be no head or body. When it comes to search, virtually all traffic is long tail and the word “long” doesn’t do the length of the tail justice.


Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.