When trying to rank for our most prized keywords we sometimes forget about those long-tail keywords out there. It’s easy to do, but a costly mistake. It’s important to note that while the thousands of visitors brought in by the 10 most popular keywords may seem tempting, they really only bring in about 20 percent of the total visitors (for most niches). The other 80 percent of readers can be found through long tail keywords. In this post, I want to focus on a quick report Ryan Spoon did detailing how 5+ Keyword Search Queries Account for 19% of All Searches.

It’s important to note that it wasn’t always this way. Going back, he really shows how things have changed in the past few years. Keyphrases (no longer just keywords)  are now contributing to a greater amount of search queries than ever before. Borrowing a very nicely created graph from his post we can see the sharp increase.

This goes right in line with what Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering, said during at Supernova. He explained that somewhere between “20 to 25% of the queries that Google sees today have never seen before”. 25 percent?!?

That means a quarter of all searches done through Google have never been searched before. So it seems to me that this huge percentage of new searches have a direct relation to the large increase in long tail keyword searching that we have been seeing over the past few years.

Diving a little deeper into why people are performing more concise searches. I would probably say it has something to do with Google functionality. I know that Google will give me what I want. Going back a few years, when I would search, I would stick with keywords. Say I wanted to know about where Obama was born - I would just search “Obama born”. And I would probably get my answer. During the days of excite and altavista, any prepositions or personal pronouns and our search results would turn into junk, so we learnt to keep them out.

But more often, I now find myself searching with questions rather than keywords. These days, I can query “Where was Obama born?” - question mark and all (which Google filters out anyway) - and get exactly what I want. Although, for this to really be true, we would have to forget the eight percent increase in 1-word searches… so let’s ignore that part

So, as I was saying, keywords are still promenant in SERPs (one keyword searches are up big time), but keyphrases are quickly becoming mainstream. And it’s no longer just small traffic surges. By targeting these long tail keywords you can now bring in 1000-2000 people per month with minimal promotion and linkbuilding. If you haven’t already started - find a keyword, build on it, and then post about it. You won’t regret it in the long run.