A fantastic SEO blog we follow regularly at Active Website, is by SEOmoz.org.  This week, SEOmoz referenced a post by Bill Tancer from Hitwise, who spoke at our conference in October, regarding the long tail of search demand. For those who don’t know, the search demand curve is a way of assessing the ranking of keywords. For example, you will notice in the chart SEOmoz created, there are 3 main sections. The Fat Head section is reserved for the top keywords. If you searched for “Denver Real Estate” it would fall under this category.

This section contains the highest amount of searches. Many people feel this is keyword gold, but actually we need to bring the focus to the Chunky Middle and Long Tail sections.  Here you will find searches for company names, addresses, agents, as well as geographical searches, but more niche specific. This is where the traffic lies! While it’s important to rank high on searches for “Dallas Real Estate,” we need to keep in mind the percentage of these searches that direct to your site is minimal. The high quality unique searches in the Chunky Middle and Long Tail are what matter. We need to instill in our clients the importance of this data.

We used the chart SEOmoz presented in the blog, Illustrating the Long Tail, and modified it to fit our data for the real estate industry. Below is the chart of the Search Demand Curve for one Enterprise Network Member.

The Long Tail makes up 59% of the traffic that directs users to the site compared to the Head Terms that are only at 5%. These numbers are consistent across the board for all Enterprise Members. The amount of traffic in the tail is almost hard to comprehend.

Additionally, leveraging this traffic resource has an extremely low cost-to-benefit ratio. By simply writing a blog article about a featured property and using the address as a link back to the main site (not a rebrand), the majority of that traffic-heavy long-tail source is covered. Bear in mind, MLS data is shared along dozens of sites that compete with you in the search engines, so making your content in the property details pages unique is important. To get the best result for this page, try replacing industry-specific language with the longer, more descriptive terminology and add a sentence or two about the property (starting a property description with ‘WOW!!!’ or ‘AMAZING PROPERTY!!!’ is useless for both the user and the engine and doesn’t count as a sentence).

The importance of ranking well for the property address is a search engine strategy often lost in the shadow of the primary terms, but the satellite view of search traffic shows that mastering the art of long-tail searches for your area will bring a higher visitor volume than the top position for all your primary terms combined.