I’m reading another great book called “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. I’ve linked to his blog here. The book describes how businesses have changed with the advent of new technology. This technology gives customers access to the things they really want as opposed to what makes sense for large retailers like Walmart to carry.
Anderson uses the example of Netflix and Amazon. These companies aren’t constrained to only carry titles that are the most popular since there is no brick and mortar overhead. Instead, they can carry literally hundreds of thousands of titles. Even though the consumer may only purchase 100-200 of these “less popular” titles, the sum of these, the “long tail” makes up a huge percentage of the business.
This shift has literally changed the music, publishing and movie industry.
How does this relate to insurance SEO? Well, as you can imagine, the distribution of search terms (i.e. Atlanta auto insurance or motorcycle insurance) follows this same pattern. If you’re good at finding the 1000s of search terms which make up the long tail, the conversion tends to be higher and the completion lower.