Wow - I just had an eye opening experience. I was searching around in the InsureMe Google Analytics account this morning and started looking at the “non-paid” keyword report. What I found would have made Chris Anderson proud:

This is a graph of the total number of visits by search term that we received on www.InsureMe.com through natural search engine traffic. As you can see, this graph shows the classic “long tail” - while we have a handful of terms that bring a large amount of traffic, we have THOUSANDS of keywords that bring one or two visits to our site. Actually, to be exact, we received natural traffic to our site from 22,135 different keywords!

There is a lesson in all of this. You see, when I optimize InsureMe I am focusing on the big keywords like “auto insurance,” “health insurance,” “home insurance,” “health insurance quotes,” etc. But in the process, I’ve gotten ranked for literally thousands of other keywords…and many of those keywords sent traffic that converted!

So next time you get bummed out that your site isn’t ranking for those big money keywords you are shooting for, remember the opportunity of the long tail. While you are waiting to be #1 for those mega-terms, you could very well be profiting from hundreds or thousands of obscure terms that people are actually searching for!

[BONUS TIP: Use the non-paid keyword report to find search terms that you can use in your PPC accounts.]