I was prompted by reading a couple of recent blog posts to examine the relationship between traffic to RevaHealth.com and the length of the keywords that people are using to find pages on our site. The first article I read was from Matt McGee at Small Business Search Marketing which said that “One-Word Searches [were] Up 17% in 2009“. The other was by Jody at Marketing Jive, which said “Long-Tail Dead? Unlikely“.

Both Matt and Jody were looking at sets of data from Experian Hitwise, a well respected source of internet usage data. However, both were coming to fairly different conclusions. My initial thought on reading the articles was to wonder how the ongoing changes to Google, Bing and the others over the last year had affected our traffic, specifically in relation to keyword lengths. My supposition was that the keywords would be getting shorter, not longer, especially due to the roll out of localised search results on Google.

I was wrong.

Keyword Length vs Traffic

Keyword Length vs Traffic

As you can see over the course of the year the length of the keywords that people are using to find our site is getting longer, not shorter. The proportion of traffic resulting from keywords with 1 or 2 words in them has dropped significantly, while proportion from keywords of length 4 and up have all increased, in some cases quite dramatically.

Why Should This Matter To You?

So, what if anything does this all mean for you and your website? Well, first of all I’d say that whatever SEO related research you read on the web, you need to think carefully about how it relates to your site. RevaHealth.com is a site with millions of pages of varying complexity. We know that our success thus far comes from successfully capturing large parts of the long tail in relation to health clinics, so our keyword length graph has always been skewed. In February of this year less that 2% of our traffic came from searches involving single word keywords. Hitwise on the other hand is saying that in general over 20% of searches involve just one keyword.

We’re clearly not yet winning the race for single keywords like “dentists” or “doctors”, but thinking about it for a minute what would we do if we were? Without knowing exactly where the user is we couldn’t even return a decent search result for them. We are normally able to determine the country they are in, but after that it is hit and miss. So a person in Hartlepool who searches for “dentists” would likely land on our dentists worldwide or dentists in the UK pages. Neither of these are really what they’re looking for, so they’ll probably bounce. This then is a problem for both the search engines and ourselves. How do they connect the user who uses just one keyword to the information they need?

The answer has to lie with the user making their actual location available to the browser they are using more often, but until this does happen, I would have to agree with a point Jody made; as web users get more search engine savvy, they are going to use more keywords not less to find exactly what they want. For us at least, the long tail is getting longer, not shorter.

Are you noticing the keywords that drive your traffic getting any longer or shorter, or are you even looking at them?