The long tail of searches by Tony Green

Anyone proficient in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will tell you if you are looking to drive traffic to a website for a chosen word if your word is not listed on the first three pages of your search results then the website in question might as well not exist.

I would agree in terms of the common traffic your website may not be accessible. Conversely, information may be available on what you are looking for. Chris Anderson mentioned in his article and book on the Long Tail that items which are not desired by 80% of the general public may be valuable to certain niches of the other 20% of the population.

Case in point, I scheduled an interview for a position and I researched the corporation ahead of the interview. I checked Google and after finding the company’s website it did not contain any useful information. Determined I kept scrolling through the search results. I found a business plan done on the company on the 25th page of results completed by pair of M.B.A. students at the Monterrey institute a few years before. I found precisely what I was searching for.
I printed out all 105 pages of the plan, after which, I read and studied it ahead of my interview. A few days later during the interview after when I went into depth about what I learned my interviewers had the strangest looks on their faces. I came clean to them about the report I found on the Internet. As it turned out this business plan was proprietary and not supposed to be available. My potential employers were not bothered too much by this as eventually I received the job offer.

From this, I will always review multiple pages when searching for anything on Google what case something of use may well be found. The long tail lives!