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What Is The Long Tail

According to Wikipedia: "The phrase 'The Long Tail' (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 'Wired Magazine' article to describe the niche strategy of certain business such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The distribution and inventory costs of those business allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or "non-hit" items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail."

The Long Tail of 'Search' refers to the theory that lower-demand search terms are searched on less frequently, yet in total, those low-demand searches exceed the volume of searches for the more popular terms and phrases. Customers frequently use the search engines using 'natural' terms and phrases. By performing well in searches for lots of related but obscure terms and phrases, websites can garner a significant amount of web traffic that relates to their product or service. This gives small software companies a fighting chance against large software companies who have deep pockets and lots of staff members.

How Software Companies Can Capture The Long Tail?

The easiest way for small businesses to capture The Long Tail of Search is to build a community around their software. Customer-generated content is key in establishing an effective Long Tail of Search. MicroISVs should encourage their customers to provide web content and participate in online conversations related to your company's products or services. Software companies should develop interactive sections on their websites so that customers can participate in product dialogues. Interactive sections can include blogs with comments enabled, or discussion forums and newsgroups. There is not doubt that content generated by customers is fantastic for capturing the Long Tail of Search. Lets face it -- customers are going to naturally use obscure phrases to describe what they are looking for.

Forums

Forum posts are great sources to capture the Long Tail of Search. Posts will often contain language and search terms that are unusual. The unusual terms used by customers may not receive frequent searches, but they are legitimate terms and will likely be closely related to your product offering.

Blogging

Hosted blog posts and blog comments also tend to include naturally occurring phrases and terms, and what some refer to as spoken language.

White Papers

White Papers that explain in detail how specific products or services are used can also include terms and phrases that will generate search results.

The Long Tail of Search provides small businesses with great opportunities to compete against big business, and webmasters that are able to generate content using the collective voice of their customers and prospective customers will benefit even more from it. By targeting the obscure terms that customers use when speaking naturally, the small businesses can compete much better. Software businesses who take the time to build a community will extend the Long Tail of Search for their businesses.

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