Web Design Ireland

The long tail strategy is a theory based on the fact that if you spread yourself widely enough, that visitors will come to your website as a result. One particular company that long tails especially well, is Amazon. Take a look at Amazon’s selection of books and CD’s and you will be hard pressed to find a greater product range in a physical shop.

What they have done with their online strategy, is to put their products up (their main products in stock) along with the obscure and hard to find products which aren’t held in stock - creating a mammoth virtual store. People searching for these obscure products give Amazon increased hits to their website - which wouldn’t otherwise have been possible if they only listed products kept in stock. They are upfront about this and let visitors know that getting this product in will take a while, however that customer may in turn buy more frequently purchased products as well.

If you apply this to a search engine strategy for Amazon - they have realised that ranking highly for the most popular product on the market may get say 10,000 visitors a day, but the combination of visitors searching for more obscure terms across the board adds up to an additional 20,000 visitors, depending on how long the tail really is.

If you were to apply this to your business strategy - don’t concentrate on targeting one keyword phrase - it may be brilliant to obtain top ten search engine positions for a competitive phrase such as mortgages or Viagra - getting phenomenal traffic for one phrase - but the same can be achieved if you simply add content - loads of content. Overall the best way to gain additional traffic is to spread your content out throughout your site - and search engine results will follow. Remember also that your referral logs are a goldmine of information. Build content around the keywords people use to find you and your site will go from strength to strength.