Power of the “Long Tail” - Real Estate Sites, Music, Keywords, and Leads

Did you know that if you were to post your real estate property on the top 10 real estate sites you would only be reaching 24.1% of the market?*

According to Hitwise.com, the top 10 real estate sites combined reach 24.1% of the market. These are sites like Realtor.com, Move.com, Zillow.com, HomeGain.com, Rent.com, Apartments.com, etc. This means there is a “long tail”of sites that in aggregate drive 3X more visitors than the top 10 real estate sites combined.

The “long tail” is everywhere. It is part of the music we buy, keyword traffic to your website, search behavior and even in vertical lead generation.

The long tail in Music.

Chris Anderson’s book, “The Long Tail” discusses how iTunes revolutionized the way we buy music tracks. Prior to iTunes, one would go to Wal-Mart and buy a track. Wal-Mart only carries the top 50,000 most popular selling tracks so if you wanted to buy something not on the top seller list, it was almost impossible to find. iTunes now offers over 6,000,000 tracks. Of these 6,000,000 tracks 80% of sales comes from the “long tail” of tracks. The non-top sellers.

Keyword Traffic

If you own a website, I can guarantee that your keyword traffic looks something like this:

Sites like HitTail.com, can track the keywords that are coming to your site. The top 10 traffic generating keywords will drive about 20% of the traffic to your site, the other “long tail” of keywords, which can equal thousands of keywords, generate about 80% of the traffic to your site.

Search Behavior on search engines

SearchEngine watch wrote an article awhile back about the long tail of the top 100 search queries. The chart is below.

This becomes even more apparent when you look at search queries at the vertical level. Within any vertical, the top 10 searches drive about 20% of the total traffic. For example, Houses for rent, rental houses, etc. drive about 20% of the traffic as compared to homes for rent in denver, 2 bedroom home for rent in atlanta, etc. drive about 80% of total search engine traffic.

Vertical lead generation

With the ever growing fragmentation of all vertical websites, the long tail of vertical sites are increasing everyday. For example, in the rental market, there are more and more rental and classifieds sites hitting the market each day. This means, property managers and owners need a way to post their vacancies on the long tail of sites.

Distribution platforms are entering the market to focus on this need. The largest vertical rental distribution platform for single family homes is Rent Marketer and the largest distribution platform for Apartments is Apartment Marketer. Both sites allow one place for owners and property managers to post their property and get distribution on the long tail of sites.

The long tail is everywhere. The future of marketing is making sure your product or service is reaching the audience that is on the “long tail”. After all, the “long tail” in any industry is 80% of the market.

*Hitwise Real Estate Category Report, December 2007 and Inman News