Here’s a great example of “The Long Tail” theory of organic search engine traffic in action. The Long Tail theory states that a small subset of keywords receive huge amounts of search volume (i.e. “Britney Spears“) while millions more are searched less frequently individually but account for more search volume in aggregate (i.e. “what was Britney Spears thinking when she shaved her head?“).
Consider the following: the wiki article on the Monument Avenue Easter Parade drew 787 pageviews between March 12th and April 12th. The image below contains the daily traffic levels and the top 5 sources of traffic. Note that John Sarvay’s Buttermilk & Molasses blog is the only non-search engine referral source in the top 5 (thanks John!).
By the way, all analytics and site traffic information is straight out of Google Analytics. I regularly post site traffic statistics, so check back often. The RichmondWiki Project traffic data is available to anybody, just leave a comment with a request and I’ll post it.
Click to Enlarge: Easter Article Analytics
Let’s break down the search engine traffic by keyword. During the same time period (3/12 – 4/12), the Easter on Parade article received 264 total visits via 86 keywords containing “easter”. Here are the top 20:
Click to Enlarge: Easter Keywords
You can see the “head” keywords are more popular: “monument avenue easter parade“, “monument easter parade“, and “monument ave easter parade“.
Look farther down at the “tail” keywords. Most are variations of the same keywords and phrases with significantly less search volume on a word-by-word basis. If you were to plot them on a chart, you would end up with a graph that looks very similar to the “theoretical” Long Tail curve:
Click to Enlarge: Long Tail Chart
Fun stuff, right? Questions or comments? Leave a note below.
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