The long tail session is hitting all of the blended areas of serach, which is in itself Long Tail. Aaron Shear is speaking now about Shopping Search and hitting the longtail search terms in a shopping search engine campaign.
Aaron feels that the main “head” search terms, or the money terms, result in a lot of traffic bouncing off the site : meaning they can drive a lot of semi-targeted traffic but not the best in conversions, dependent upon the terms. Looking at a mixed scale of traffic, bounce rate and overall volume; the “Fat Tail” terms and “Long Tail” terms result in lower bounces and higher cleaner conversion volume.
Most shopping engines and ecommerce sites have a difficult time defining user intent, as product pages are very product oriented, targeted towards one product name or model numbers.
Aaron recommends clustering common product names and descriptions and using the data from converting keywords; applying them to the product descriptions.
Aaron also gives a tip on keywords : shopping search engines suggest recommended terms, use those for your own site SEO.
Comparison engines are the best at ranking the tail, and a lot is to be learned from them. But where else can you look for data, as an ecommerce company?
- Look at the affiliates : What are they doing? How do they generate traffic?
90% of traffic should be from ‘tail terms’, if not : you’re leaving money on the table.
