Niches Web Design

One of the neatest observations to gain popularity in the last few years is that of The Long Tail, first coined a few years ago by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson (here's the original article). He noticed that the internet had opened up access to niches--that searches and national distribution networks had given new markets to obscure and small-market products. The classic example is Netflix, the direct-mail movie rental service, that has a huge catalog of titles, the great majority of which are so obscure that no local video rental store could afford to carry them. But Netflix actually rents them all and if you add all these low-volume rentals together you'll find the total volume exceeds that season's blockbusters. I learned just how strong the long tail can be a few years ago when I worked on Quakerfinder.org, a meeting/church look-up service. For the first year, the site got moderate traffic from search engines. Google wasn't able to index the actual church listings because users were required to type towns and postal codes in to get results. The only search engine visitors we got came in on very generic phrases like "find quaker meetings."

Suspecting we were losing a large potential audience, I redesigned the site so Google could index each and every meeting (adding a few tricks so each listing traded links with half-a-dozen other listings). Once the change was in effect (help from our programmer), those old generic search phrases were still the most popular. But now we got small numbers of visits on thousands of terms which we hadn't hit before: "Quakers Poughkeepsie" and "Quaker Churches in San Francisco," etc. This was the long tail in effect. Our visits jumped fourfold within a few months (see chart). The long tail made us much more visible. (More on the Googlization effort in that year's analytic report.)

A great new traffic analysis service is called HitTail. Like many other programs it tells you what search phrases have brought traffic to your site. But what's cool is that it gives suggestions--keywords it thinks will bring even more visitors in. Some of the suggestions are funny. For example, it thinks I should post about "traditional sweat lodge songs," "ticklish armpits" and "how to dress with personality" over on Quaker Ranter. But it also thinks I might consider posting on "small church local outreach ideas," "new online magazines" and "christian quakers."

If all one was worried about was sheer traffic volume, then a post on each keyword might be in order. But this would bring a lot of random traffic and dilute any focus the blog might have (I already get a lot of traffic on a particular non-typical post that I wrote partly as an SEO experiment). My guess is you should go through the HitTail suggestions list to find topics that match your site's focus but do so in language that you might not normally use.

I might try some experimental posts on my personal blog soon. I'll definitely report back about them here on the MartinKelley.com design blog. In the meantime, check out HitTail's blog, which has some good links.