The Long Tail of Search Traffic

Have any idea how many searches occur on Google alone every day? About 200 million.

Guess how many of those searches are one-of-a-kind, and not searched again for an entire month? Google estimates over 50% of those. That means over there are about 100 million truly unique searches every day on Google.

What does that mean for you as a HubPages Author? It means searchers are not all looking for the exact same thing, and including all types of specific information in your Hubs will help draw visitors.

Let's say you're writing a Hub on Mexican food. Writing a Hub with the title "Mexican food", such a broad topic, will end up being pretty shallow, and faces stiff competition (over 16 million other pages).

So, instead of going really broad, try going really deep. Pick a topic you can write about in-depth, like "Oaxaca mole recipes" (only 74,000 competitors here). Even though there are far fewer searchers for something this specific, you'll probably rank much higher with a high-quality page. And, importantly, you'll rank well on related, one-of-a-kind searches like "mole recipe pork slow cooked" or "oaxaca spicy yellow mole avocado" (yes, they're rare, but all of them add up!), because no other Webpage (or only a few) have that kind of information.

You'll also get important backlinks because of your in-depth, useful information. People will naturally link to high-quality writing that tells them something they've never heard before (like a recipe for Oaxacan mole dip that you can make in 5 minutes, or Mole Verde with Chicken, Avocados and Cilantro), rather than a page that says that burritos, tacos and enchiladas are popular Mexican foods ("yeah, well, we already know that").

And because research has proven that people conducting those very specific, unique searches are more likely to want to buy something (instead of just doing some preliminary research, when they type in short, general topics), then you can also give them specific Amazon and eBay offers (like this, or that), that they are more likely to want to buy than someone who searched "Mexican food" (maybe they were just looking for a local restaurant?).