How To Measure That Long Tail

You may have heard of "The Long Tail," a phrase put into popular use by Chris Anderson's article in Wired magazine a few years ago. In a nutshell, it refers to the idea that some businesses would do well if they broadened their focus to include niche (less popular) markets. You'll also hear folks referring to this concept quite a lot in search marketing conversations. That's because search gurus know there's a lot of revenue being generated from less popular search terms.

So how do you know exactly how long your Long Tail is? In a recent article by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts, he explains there are seven key performance indicators for measuring your success with this approach. Here's a quick recap:

1. Brand-to-Nonbrand Ratio: how much of your traffic is coming from searches for your brand name (not a good thing)
   
2. Unique Pages: the number of your non-duplicate webpages being crawled by search engine spiders
   
3. Page Yield: percentage of your webpages that are generating search traffic each month
   
4. Keyword Yield: how many traffic-generating keywords each of your webpages targets (the average is 2.4 keywords)
   
5. Visitors per Keyword: the ratio between search-delivered visitors and search terms (the average is 1.9 visitors)
   
6. Index-to-Crawl Ratio: the ratio between pages indexed and pages crawled by the spiders
   
7. Engine Yield: how much traffic each search engine delivers for every page it crawls
   

The Po!nt: Tracking your rank in search results is an out-of-date way of judging success. It's time for a new generation of SEO metrics.

Source: MarketingProfs. Read all the juicy details, including longer descriptions of each metric, in the full-length article here.

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