103bees has added yet another new and illuminating feature to it’s search engine metrics package.
This time they’re giving publishers a visual representation of the long tail of search engine queries for their blogs. So for ProBlogger you’ll see the graph below (click for a slightly larger version) which shows the last few days search term distribution.
In that time there have been 4695 unique terms searched for at ProBlogger from 7253 visitors. Of the 4695 terms 4149 (or 88%) were searched for once only and brought in 57% of the traffic. This means that 12% of the terms search for brought in 43% of traffic.
The result is a classic ‘long tail’.
Of the four blogs that I run 103bees on this is a very typical result with all four having very similar numbers.
I’m still trying to get my head around how useful the information actually is but it does illustrate a couple of things.
- a small number of search terms (and pages) bring in a disproportionately high amount of traffic
- despite this there’s ALOT of other ways that people enter my blogs
The more content you offer, the more the long tail will become important because people are digging your archives more and more, especially when you write about more or less timeless subjects.
I checked as well now due to your post and saw an even bigger disproportion which makes me think I have a problem with my main keywords :)).
Then again, all targetted traffic is good traffic.
Btw, Darren, thanks for the Text Link Ads banner, I subbed thanks to you, got accepted and making some good extra money.
Have you seen HitTail? It helps you zero in on the few words in the long tail that are actually useful. In other words, it does the data mining for you, letting you know which words are closest to being most effective in natural search, allowing you to know where to spend your time optimizing.