Confused by long tail search talk? Me too. It seems that many people think that any search that falls outside their prime keywords is “long tail.” Not so. Long tail refers to a very specific set of searches that have statistical relevance to your prime terms. For example, a few articles I penned had the terms “Madonna” and “outside the box” in them.  Just because my blog is searchable by those terms doesn’t make them “long tail” terms for my primary search terms (“real estate blogging” and “real estate blogs.”)

Long tail also doesn’t mean a very long, very specific phrase like “condominiums on a beautiful golf course in Cape Coral. That kind of search phrase is what we call a “sub prime search.” Meaning that it is so specific that a search engine like Google may not find it in its primary index and could therefore display a result form its secondary index (omitted results). It’s the same thing when searching for your name on Google. Unless you have a name like “Jane Smith” you will likely show up within the top search results for a search of your name. The reason is simple, the likelihood of those terms being found within the same document together is statistically insignificant so it becomes easier to find your name or a long search phrase than to find a prime term like “Cape Coral Real Estate.” But honestly, how many people are actually searching for your specific name? Not many. 

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What is the “Short Tail” searches?

The short tail search terms are your prime keywords like “real estate” and “your farm area.” All those competitive terms that most people search by to find a site about buying and selling homes in your area.

What is the “Long Tail” searches?

Now that you know what “long tail” isn’t. Let’s find out what long tail is. According to HitTail (one of my favorite online SEO tools), the Long Tail is an economic concept that says the collective demand for less-popular items can exceed all the most popular added together. So, long tail search is about using terms related to your prime search terms that will individually cause less search hits but collectively increase your search hits. Get it?

What are “Coat Tail” searches?

OK, I totally made this term up, but it works. Coat Tail searches are all those miscellaneous long phrases or super specific terms that are very rarely searched for and pull only “omitted” or sub prime indexed pages from search engines. Coat Tail searches are often confused with long tail searches. However, coat tail terms have almost no relevance to the prime search phrases.

How do you find “Long Tail” terms for your site?

Use HitTail. I could spend my whole day coming up with what I think the “long tail” terms for my site are based on my back end analytics or I could use HitTail which does all the work for me. Believe me, I love anything that helps put SEO on auto-pilot and HitTail does just that. It looks at all the terms my site has been searchable by, throws out the prime keywords and the way too specific ones and then comes up with recommendations on terms I should include in future articles. So, does it work? Heck, yeah! I started with HitTail in November and have seen a 61% increase in search traffic. According to HitTail, around 90% of all search traffic to RSS Pieces comes from long tail search terms.

HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the natural search results of your site.

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What does HitTail say about real estate?

I am always amazed when a big wig at some company will let me squeeze a quote out of them for this little blog, but nevertheless, Mike Levin, super hero HitTailer graciously providing his take on real estate and the long tail in this quote:

“There's a lot of talk about the long tail lately, and one of the industries that has embraced it, at least in the blogosphere, is real estate. I was in a discussion the other day with some friends just starting out in their careers discussing how success was always about taking the next lateral step, maybe into a slightly different industry, or a different class of deal. We got quickly into the discussion of how a real estate agent could become a multi-millionaire off of a single deal, hearkening back to the lessons of Robert Ringer in his illuminating book, Winning Through Intimidation. The difference between a Donald Trump and a Remax agent basically comes down to the size of the deal. We quickly turned to how many billion-dollar real estate deals there really were on the planet at any given time. And from there, the concepts quickly turn to the long tail. Every lateral step you may ever wish to take is contained in the long tail, with the billion-dollar deals at the head, and everything along the way still worth pursuing in one's way up their real estate career.

By now, I hope the relationship between the long tail and real estate deal sizes is clear. But the long tail appears in real estate in more places than graphing the sizes of deals going on in the world. The long tail also describes the diversity and types of properties available, and the specialties of the real estate agents, with residential and office spaces probably constituting much of the big head of the graph. But as you start looking at the undeveloped neighborhoods at the edge of suburban sprawl, highly speculative projects, sports arenas, and the like, you start creeping your way away from the big head of real estate into the long tail. Are these deals worth it? Yes, because there is not necessarily a correlation between the location in the tail and the value of the deal. In fact, even the onsies-twosies may be amongst the most valuable on the planet. In fact, we joked about SeaLand, the independent country built on an oil rig platform that's now up for sale. Someone could make a sweet commission off of that, and it's wayyyyyy into the tail.

So, it heads or tails? Not at all, because the distribution of sizes and types of real estate deals on the planet dictates a somewhat even distribution, allowing the ambitious agent move from the marginally profitable head to the massively profitable specialty deals in the tail--lateral step by lateral step. In that journey, I'm sure the agent will become increasingly authoritative in increasingly niche specialties, simultaneously reducing the pool of potential deals, and their own ability to pair up buyers and sellers. And in the end, I believe this is why the new long tail blogging tool, HitTail, is making such a splash in the real estate business. You want to describe a property, perhaps in a blog, in such a way to maximize your chances of pulling in the handful of people at that moment on the planet who are googling to find exactly that property. And if you don't line up the crosshairs just right, you're going to miss that opportunity. Like with so many other businesses characterized by a multitude of long tails, real estate is about publishing frequently and with just the right description and keywords to pull in a buyer (or perhaps a seller), while keeping tight control on whether and how they become aware of each other in the non-online world.”

Don’t let the door hit your long tail on the way out.

If you’re not targeting the Long Tail, you are closing the door on a substantial amount of traffic. If you use a service like HitTail, you can target your content to improve hits for long tail terms which will account for more total traffic than searches for your prime key phrases.

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