The past year has seen an astonishing increase in the number of keywords used in a typical online search query.
People searching for keyphrases of 8 or more words increased by over 22% in the last year.
Searches with 5 or more phrases have increased 10% over the last year. The data comes from Hitwise with a sample of 10 million Internet users.
In our business we call this a “long tail” search. Long-tailing is something we have been talking about for years now and although it’s growth is surprising, most SEOs would have used long tail strategies in their online marketing campaigns. The reason is simple. The searches are more specific, therefore, there should be less competition and in turn this should result in more conversions. However, you are likely to get a lot less traffic for such specific searches.
So it’s probably time to take a serious look at your SEO keyphrase strategy! It looks like people are becoming more specific in their searches when seeking the information they require.
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- The Rise of the Long-Tail Keyword (blippitt.com)
- Hitwise: Search Queries are Getting Longer (readwriteweb.com)
- Hitwise: The Long Tail of Search is Much Longer Than Expected (readwriteweb.com)
#1 by paul savage at February 27th, 2009
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I guess searchers are getting smarter learning how to refine their search queries.
Do you think they included stop words when they counted the number of words ?
Paul
#2 by Tom Doyle at February 27th, 2009
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Hi Paul
Yes for sure! I haven’t decided if that’s a good thing or a bad thing in the long run.
I’m sure they did include stop words. However, sometimes stop words make a difference to the serps (possibly more so) when long tailing.
For example:
http://www.google.ie/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLJ_enIE271IE271&q=football+jerseys+for+sale+in+london
http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1T4GGLJ_enIE271IE271&q=football+jerseys+for+sale+london&btnG=Search&meta=
You’ll see including “in” makes a difference to the SERPs
Tom