Yesterday my company Netconcepts released a research report / white paper titled “Chasing The Long Tail of Natural Search.” The analysis was based on data garnered from 1.2 million unbranded natural search visits to 5,000,000 pages in January 2006 measured across 25 branded online merchants.

According to our research, here’s what the “average” well-branded merchant’s Long Tail profile looked like:

• Roughly 73,000 unique, indexed pages. Yet only 14% of those pages yield search traffic. These “yielding pages” each generate search traffic at a rate of 4.6 unbranded keyword visitors per month.
• 189,000 brand searches conducted per month. 80% of search traffic comes from brand keywords and only 20% from non-brand terms.
• Total market potential for unbranded keyword traffic exceeds 7,000,000 searches per month, roughly 100 searches for every unique page, and 38 times greater than total brand searches.

“Brand searches are a small minority of searches conducted every day. Yet most E-tailers rely on them for their natural search traffic. Imagine taking to your next management meeting, a concrete prediction of the value of search traffic available from non-brand searches. Until now, it has been difficult to find the numbers to justify investment in natural search optimization or quantify a site’s potential search traffic.”

We’ve come up with a concept we call “Page Yield Theory”, a method for estimating the potential value of the unbranded natural search tail. We believe it’s possible to make a robust and scalable prediction of long tail potential. We’ve even devised the scientific equation to calculate it:

[2.4 KPP x 1.9 HPK] / 4.7% CTR = 100

It’s solid research; months of hard work and deep thought went into the analysis. I think it’s a must-read for any online retailer. Download the report now »