Long Tail of Search Statistics
Unique search strings accounted for more traffic than all search strings that more than 100 people searched for combined (including keyword sets that had thousands of searches).
Quantifying the Long Tail of Search. We did some data crunching the other day on all of the Google traffic we received for one site in 2009. Here are some interesting takeways.
- Unique Keyword Sets (or search phrases that occured exactly once during the year) accounted for 27.8% of all searches, while keyword sets that sent only two visitors accounted for an additional 15.2%. Combined these equaled 43% of all searches received.
- All Keyword sets that sent at least 100 visitors accounted for 23.4% of
all searches. This means that more people performed unique searches than all of the search strings combined that had over 100 people search for them. People are performing longer and more specific keyword searches than before.
- Unique Keyword Sets accounted for 71.4% of all keyword sets.
- Keyword sets that sent only two visitors accounted for 19.6% of all keyword sets. When combined with unique keyword sets these account for 91% of all keyword sets.
- The longest keyword set we saw was 144 words long. That is a long query string to type into Google.
- The average keyword set length was 5.7 words.
- The mode keyword set length was 4 words.
- Not surprisingly, unique keywords sets tended to be longer than searches that occurred more often.
