SEO SEO August 4, 2018 The principle of the long tail in SEO
The origin of the long tail
The long tail is a fairly well-known concept in the field of SEO invented in 2004 by Chris Anderson an American entrepreneur and journalist, author of several books on the economy of the Internet and the economy of free.
What is it for?
This concept allows small companies to position themselves on interesting queries without necessarily having the financial means of a multinational.
On an average, 75% of the traffic on a website does not come from the main keywords on which the website wanted to be positioned. It is therefore useless to focus only on highly competitive keywords knowing that the majority of Internet users are from the long tail.
The main concept of the long tail is the fact of being positioned on broader search terms, more precise and therefore less competitive.
Example: it is much more complicated to position yourself on a keyword like (shoes), because it is necessarily very competitive and necessarily taken by storm by large companies that have the ability to pay the purchase of the word via services like Google Ads. It will therefore be almost impossible for a small website to claim to be positioned on this type of generic keyword.
On the other hand, when a site is positioned on search terms that accumulate several keywords such as (Nike red sport shoe) or (buy Nike dress shoe), there is much more chance that the site will be positioned in the first results for these specific searches where the competition is necessarily less high.
Increasing conversion
Conversion is the main objective of most websites. Wanting to position yourself on long tail search terms also increases the probability of conversion, because the goal of this concept is to position yourself on the exact terms typed by the Internet user.
