The long tail of search is a concept that is well worth understanding if you want to drive traffic to convert into customers. The way I explain it is to imagine a comet with a busy furious head at the front and a long tail stretching out. The head is very exciting, lots of cool stuff going on there but as the tail goes out further behind it, the comet (well, the comet’s tail at least) gets smaller.

This is how we look at the demand for keywords in the long tail. At the head of the long tail would be very high level terms like "TV" but as the tail gets further along we might have ''Sony Bravia TV" and at the very end of the tail we might have "Sony Bravia TV suppliers in Manly".

The theory is that the longer down the tail a search phrase is, the more keywords are put into the phrase and the amount of times this phrase is searched for is likely to be a lot less.
For example, "TV" might be searched for 100,000 times a month whereas "Sony Bravia TV suppliers in Manly" might only be searched for 7 times a month.

OK, so why are long tail keywords so good if they have such a small amount of search volume?

Well, if you combine many long tail terms together you can quickly gather up quite a few search queries to your website. The most important aspect of long tail keywords is that as people put more and more words into the search phrases, their intent becomes clearer. For example, trying to figure out the intent behind the search of "TV" is pretty hard. Is it what's on TV tonight? Or how TV works? It's a very broad term to try and understand what the searcher wants, however if we look at "Sony Bravia TV suppliers in Manly" this is much easier to understand the searcher’s intent. When trying to convert people on your website, it's much easier to try to target people with more intent. If I sold Sony Bravia TVs in Manly I would prefer to have my website rank for the long tail keyword term instead of just "TV" as I would have a much better chance of converting that customer into a sale.

For more detailed information, check out our article on What is the benefit of using long tail keywords?