The Long Tail Never Ends For Local Search

Stats from 1,000,000 referals

[inbound]

I was looking at stats from the last million referals to our most popular site and it confirmed what many people may know/guess about the long tail in regards to local search... it's very long.

Some stats:

835,000 different phrases were used.

The most common phrase brings in under 500 visitors per 1,000,000!

Just 72,000 phrases were used more than once.

It seems there's no end to the combinations of terms that people use. A great opportunity, but a problem in itself due to the variety of data people are looking for.

[daveVk]

To put this into prospective, how many pages on site, what sort of distribution of pages are being hit ( eg number to most popular page ), how many words in average search phrase?. Figures suggest large number of pages with hits distributes widely? Do you think this is particular to local search?

Thanks Dave

[inbound]

There are 170,000 pages on the site. Well over half of those were found from the 1,000,000 referals studied. The long tail isn't unique to local search at all but if you have 170,000 combinations of area/category then you've got an awful lot of long tail to go after. The average length is 3.4 words.

[centime]

170,000 pages, may I ask, is this user generated content and have you free of supplemental issues

[FromRocky]

For a long tail query, it dosn't matter whether a page is normal or supplemental index. I have seen many time where a supplemental is at position 1 or two, above the normal index pages.

[inbound]

Centime, we don't have a major issue with supplementals although there are some (hard to tell exactly how many given the large number of pages).

As for UGC, there's none of that but the data is genuinely useful and a lot of effort is put into keeping it up to date.