By now you’ve of heard the long tail theory. Wikipedia defines it as following; “The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.” This theory has far reaching implications beyond marketing. However, for the sake of this post, let’s focus on SEO.

Traditionally, this has been applied to keyword research and optimization. Meaning, there was no need to exert too much energy optimizing for VERY competitive keywords. Instead, optimize the entire site, whether it’s a online catalog or content play. And if you do so, the total number of clicks from these “less competitive” keywords will equal or exceed the total number of clicks from the VERY competitive keywords. Ok, so what does Compete.com contribution?

According to a recent post, Compete suggests that, “[T]he top 1% of searchers performs a full 13% of all searches in a given month.” Breaking this out by engine, Compete says, “70% of search queries in September were performed by 20% of Google searchers. For Yahoo! the concentration increased to 73% and for MSN/Live searchers 75% of the queries were performed by the top 20%.” Meaning, that most of the search query volume at the major search engines is driven by a relatively small number of search engine users: power searchers. What interesting about this notion is how marketers are spending their online dollars.