How big is the long tail anyway? A study by Dustin Woodard, posted on the HitWise blog, suggests it is ridiculously large, and that the top 1000 search terms only make up about 10% of all search traffic.

That’s right: only 10%. The rest are searches like “field dress moose” instead of “Britney Spears.” In fact, the top 10,000 terms only account for about 18% of total searches.

What to do with this information? It reiterates how important it is to develop a big, deep supply of content that can help you rank for as many relevant terms as possible. There’s no question that getting a big chunk of the long tail is far more valuable than going after hard-to-get top terms.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 8th, 2008 at 9:51 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.