Mary Elizabeth Hurn referenced the following search trend in her March 10, 2009 DMNews article titled "More words in average search query: Hitwise".
"Longer search queries are becoming more popular year over year according to a report put out by Hitwise. Though the majority of searches are one, two and three word queries, these length terms are down 3%, 5% and 1%, respectfully. But queries with four to eight words and over are all up year over year in growth ranging from 3% to 20%."
So what does this mean for you if you are a list manager? It may be good news for you if your data cards are on a search engine optimized (SEO) platform. Every mailing list data card indexed by Google as a unique web page contributes to a successful long tail SEO strategy. List managers, who focus on creating a list marketing environment and data card quality within a certain domain, will ultimately benefit from this trend. Yes, list managers do have long tails.
Every list title, segment, selection and description is a target for the web robots (bots). The more of your data card content they find, the better your chances are in getting noticed on the search engine results page (SERP). The most visited web page, other than your home page, may account for less than 1% of your traffic. However, it is the sum of all of the traffic from all of your web pages that you want to maximize. Winning the battle for the long tail will not only improve your search traffic, but it may also improve your conversion rate.
For example, an attorney looking for a mailing list of small business owners in Rhode Island searches on "small business leads" using Google and pages though 76,800 results. She subsequently clicks on a link that registers her for a third-party lead service that fills her voice mail and litters her in-box with responses from various sales agents. She is not a happy camper, but she knows from experience that it's not worth suing them.
Her paralegal comes to the rescue and runs a search on "small business owners mailing list and RI". He gets one targeted result linked to a data card showing over 12,000 small business owners in Rhode Island. He calculates the cost using the base rate directly from the data card, clicks on 'get more information' receives an e-mail with the contact information, places the order on his company credit card, and delivers the list to his manager that same day.
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