This is a very straightforward and quick article in support of the recent Whiteboard Friday, which said very clearly that the long tail of search has greater volume, and is less competitive.

Well, of course for the stats mad amongst us, that's just like an open invitation to go and delve into their analytics. This is what I came up with:

Compare the number of people landing on static 'company and product' type pages with the number landing on blog pages, which are targetted at more specific subjects. I did this (with permission) for a small business (not my own) that had been blogging for about a year or more.

Ok, so whilst not conforming to levels of scientific rigor, it shows the potential. I was quite suprised to find that the conversion rate of traffic was almost exactly the same for both sets of traffic. Excluding paid and brand searches.

This diagram of an actual small business has proved most useful in encouraging people to start a blog! Feel free to use.

The impressive thing is that the profile matches the approximate 75% of searches that in the whiteboard video Rand mentioned that happen in the tail - but surely that's just a co-incidence.