There are plenty of tricky terms to understand in the world of online marketing, and the sub-categories of search engine marketing and search engine optimisation are no different. Take, for example, the truly strange-sounding idea of “the long tail of search.”
“Can searches even have a tail?” I hear you asking. The fact is they can, and that tail can be extremely useful when it comes to finding customers.
To explain, we turned to Joe Hanna of Modern Search - a new Australian search engine, currently focusing on property, that was created under the direction of propertyadguru.com owner Classified Ad Ventures.
“Long tail can be loosely defined as the use of three or more keywords when searching online,” Hanna says.
“For the real estate industry this is often searches for a particular property type within a particular suburb or region. ‘Houses for rent Potts Point,’ for example.”
Hanna says that as time goes on, users will become more comfortable with long tail search queries, making them even more specific - think “3 bedroom apartment for sale Fitzroy with city views.”
So why do agents need to think about these longer searches in terms of their SEO and SEM strategies? “For one thing, the competition for such specific searches are much lower than the more general terms, and as a result the cost is substantially lower,” Hanna explains.
“Secondly, agents can specifically target people searching for suburbs that they service, or particular property types. Whilst the number of people searching for these terms is much smaller than those searching for general terms, the conversions are often much higher.”
Do higher conversions and lower costs sound interesting to you? If so, stay tuned for more advice from Modern Search on how the long tail is changing things for real estate agents, property portals, and the Internet as a whole.
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