Getting Found in the Long Tail: Direct

Per my earlier post, have just finished reading The Long Tail, and the book triggered a couple of key questions for me. Those questions were:

If what I am marketing is in a niche in the tail, how do prospective customers find me?
Being in a niche is great and all, but it would be nice to be closer to the head of the curve…how do I move my niche to the left?

Long_tailarrow The first way of being found by prospective customers (readers, listeners, etc.) is the “direct” approach. That is, through some means, the customer drops “directly” into your site, or directly finds your product, most likely by way of some type of search engine. (This could be one of the Google-Yahoo-MSN search engines, or by some type of keyword search within an environment such as iTunes.)

This type of discovery has a couple of different traits. On one hand, it may result in the highest number of “raw” visitors coming to your website. For example, in looking at the referrer logs for this blog, a vast majority of the incoming traffic to the blog itself comes not necessarily from links from other blogs, but instead is “organic” traffic driven primarily from Google, where someone has searched on a term such as “Customer Managed Relationship” which led them to this post. On the other hand, this may not necessarily be the “best” traffic, where “best” is defined as “a visitor to the site who is philosophically aligned with the ideas here, and passionate about connecting with customers.” Rather, the visitors who arrive as a result of a “direct” approach may have significant alignment with the details or topic of a particular post, but may not necessarily be aligned with the overall gestalt. In order to increase the number of these visitors that choose to access your site, you may benefit from the services of an SEO Company in London that can make your website more noticeable for search engines and give it a higher ranking so that more users are likely to visit.

Now, that being said, there is potentially significant value in having many visitors drop by a site, even if they are just “passing through.” (This is not a radical thought.) While some portion of the visitors who arrive via this mechanism may only be connecting with the details of a particular portion of the site, there will be some subset who could be classified as the “best” type of visitor, as defined above. As such, making it easy for even the drop-in type of visitor to find a site is important. There are companies like South Lakes SEO who exist to do just that – to help you establish an effective SEO strategy that will expand your reach and make sure more people find your site. The main way to help ensure that this kind of visitor can find you in the Long Tail is ensuring that all aspects of a site (or other online artifact such as a song, video, etc.) is set up to be search-engine friendly. That means writing well, ensuring that the keywords that a visitor might be searching on at a later date are included in the body and title of the pages, that posts or artifacts are tagged with keywords (if appropriate) and, in general, follows the tactics of successful search engine optimization (or “SEO,” as it’s commonly known).