A specific keyword about a narrow topic and often made up of several actual words is a long-tailed keyword. Initially businesses will write content and advertise based on a number of their core activities for example ‘widgets’. As the months go on they might discover a large amount of traffic is visiting because of a phrase near the end of their article about ‘widget lubrication systems for donkey carts’ which was originally not intended to be particularly important. The owner of this site might decide to write an entire article on this niche topic on the back of this interest to take advantage of the long tail of search with the objective of picking up more similar traffic.
Search is referred to as having a long tail because if one draws a graph of traffic vs keywords the most popular will have much more traffic than the more obscure. However the graph tails off for a long time forming a long thin tail-like area formed of the traffic from the more obscure, longer and more specific keywords.
This phenomenon is extremely important to marketers. It will become even more so as search engines continue to improve and deliver better matches for more obscure searches users will continue to be more specific in their search queries. This tail then forms a very large amount of total traffic – sometimes even more than the most popular keywords for a site. Marketers who successfully write for these long-tail targets will also often find that the competition is much less so the traffic can be obtained for significantly less effort than traffic obtained whilst competing for the more popular core terms.