Screaming About The Search Tail

Over the years, I’ve done many introduction to search marketing sessions where I talk about the value of having good, descriptive pages. Those let you tap into the search tail, the "onesies and twosies" terms, as I’ve called them, that might come up only once in a month. Add all those up, and they can […]

Chat with SearchBot

Over the years, I’ve done many introduction to search marketing sessions
where I talk about the value of having good, descriptive pages. Those let you
tap into the search tail, the
"onesies and twosies" terms, as I’ve called them, that might come up only once
in a month. Add all those up, and
they can outweigh or
be as important as the top terms you deliberately target. Today, I had to
chuckle at one particular query that brought us a visitor that illustrates the
search tail concept:

why did google have the scream

That was the query that brought one person in
from
Google
. We currently rank around second for it, for this page:

Munch’s Scream As
Google Logo

I didn’t deliberately aim to rank well for that query. I didn’t write on the
page something like:

Why did Google have The Scream? You might not realize, but today was the
birthday of Edvard Munch. To celebrate, Google made its logo similar to his
painting The Scream. So if you’re wondering why did Google have The Scream, now
you know why did Google have The Scream.

Instead, this was an unanticipated visitor, a visitor using a string of words
I didn’t think of. But that’s not a problem. Good textual content, reinforced by
good descriptive title using some of the key terms let us tap into that search
tail query.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.