The head term is crowded

Ask the owner of a med spa which search matters, and the answer is usually two words: med spa. Ask a jeweler, and it is jewelry store. It is the word on the sign, in the profile's main category and in every conversation about where the next customer will come from.

It is also the search every competitor in the neighborhood is working on. The trade calls it the head term: the short, general phrase that names the category. It is the obvious target, and that is exactly the problem with it.

Google already has a favorite

There is a second problem with the head term, and it is harder to see from the inside. For a search as common as med spa or jewelry store, Google has usually settled on its favorites long ago.

Google says it ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence, and prominence means how well known a business is: its reviews, its rating, how often it is mentioned and linked to elsewhere. A business that has led the head term for years has been collecting all of that for years. Being shown first brings it more customers, more customers write more reviews, and more reviews keep it first. The lead feeds itself.

If that favorite is you, good: protect it. If it is not, moving it is slow and expensive. You are not competing with where the leader is today, but with everything it has gathered while it was there. The review counts of established leaders (chapter 2) take years of steady work to match, and the leader is not standing still while you do it.

The smaller searches are different. Many of them have no long-standing favorite at all, because nobody has worked on them. That is where this chapter is going.

This chapter is about what the map looks like once you stop staring at the head term. The short version: it is far less crowded than it looks from the front door.

What we measured

The numbers in this part of the book come from our own measurements in South Brooklyn, a stretch of 13 ZIP codes that runs from Bay Ridge and Sunset Park to Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach, Coney Island and Marine Park. We looked at two very different trades: med spas and jewelers.

For the head terms we laid a grid of 181 fixed search spots over the area, about half a mile apart, and ran the searches customers run from each spot. That is 543 map searches per trade. For the smaller searches we went to the center of each of the 13 neighborhoods and searched every service on our list there. The method page explains the details.

Two things stand out before we even get to the long tail.

The map changes every few blocks. Google does not show South Brooklyn one list of med spas. It shows different lists to people standing in different places. As chapter 2 described, the area splits into micro-markets a few blocks wide. A clinic that leads in one of them can be invisible a mile away.

Being shown is not the same as being chosen. Customers pick from the first few results, so what matters is a place in the top three, not a place somewhere on the list. One clinic we follow in Sheepshead Bay appears in 73% of the searches in its own zone, but in the top three in only 10% of them. A jeweler in the same part of Brooklyn appears in 31% of its zone's searches and reaches the top three in 5%. Both owners could say, truthfully, that they show up on Google. Neither is the obvious answer.

Most owners can find themselves on the map. Far fewer are the obvious answer.

The long tail

Now take the head term apart. A person who needs a laser hair removal appointment rarely types med spa. They type laser hair removal, often with a neighborhood or near me after it. Someone with a broken chain types jewelry repair or necklace chain repair, not jewelry store.

Each of those smaller searches is a separate contest with its own winner. The trade calls the whole set of them the long tail: many small, specific searches, each one narrower than the category. There is no trick to it: this is simply how people search when they know what they want.

Every word narrows the search

Each word a person adds to a search makes it narrower. Jewelry store is a whole trade. Jewelry repair is one service. Broken necklace chain repair is one job. In Brooklyn the first service gets about 1,780 searches a month; broken necklace chain repair and gold chain soldering get about 10 each.

The reason used to be mechanical. Early search engines looked for the words of the search in the text of a page, exactly or almost exactly. The longer the phrase, the fewer pages contained all of it, so the fewer results there were to compete with.

Search no longer works that way. Google now reads pages, profiles and reviews much as a person does, and it understands what a search means rather than matching its words. A page can answer gold chain soldering without ever using that phrase.

Yet the rule still holds, for a different reason. A longer search states the need more precisely, and now the search engine understands that need. Jewelry store could mean buying, selling, repairing or just browsing. Broken necklace chain repair means one thing, and only businesses that clearly do that job are a good answer. Fewer people type it, and fewer businesses fit it.

Both halves of that sentence matter. Fewer searchers means each long search is small. Fewer good answers means each long search is easier to win, and the person who typed it is close to deciding. That trade, small but winnable, is what the rest of this part of the book is about.

Counting the winners

To see how much room the tail leaves, we counted who wins it. For med spas we searched 24 treatments from the center of each of the 13 neighborhoods: 312 searches, each with one business in first place.

89 different clinics are first in at least one of those 312 searches.

That is far more than most owners would guess. And the five clinics that most often lead the plain med spa search are first in only 52 of the 312 treatment searches, about one in six. They are strong, and they earned it. They do not own the map.

A word of caution about what these numbers show. We searched from the center of each neighborhood, and distance counts for a lot, so some of those first places belong to the business that simply happens to be nearest. The numbers show that the small searches are spread among many businesses and that many of them are weakly held. They do not by themselves prove that working on the small searches moves a business up. That is what our weekly tracking is for: watching the same searches from the same points, week after week, to see who moves and after what.

Jewelers tell the same story with a different cast. We searched 29 services from the same 13 neighborhood centers, 377 searches in all, and found 81 different businesses in first place at least once.

The map is not owned by five businesses. There is a lot of map left over.

The soft spots

Many of those first places are held by businesses that are not hard to compete with.

In 40 of the 312 med spa searches, 13%, the business in first place has fewer than 25 Google reviews or a profile the owner has never claimed. For jewelers it is 57 of 377, or 15%. These are searches where the current answer is, in effect, whoever happened to be there.

Set that against the review counts of established leaders (chapter 2): a first place held with 20 reviews is not an unbeatable position. It is a vacancy with someone sitting in it.

Unclaimed profiles tell you how little attention some of these searches get, and among jewelers they are common (chapter 3).

Each search picks its own rivals

There is a second, less obvious reason the long tail matters. Different searches put you up against different kinds of businesses.

When we looked at who takes the top three places across the 13 neighborhoods, the jewelers' searches split into clear camps:

• Ring resizing: jewelers hold 90% of the top-three places. Jewelry repair: 82%. Wedding bands and lab grown diamond engagement rings: 100%.
• Watch repair: watch shops hold 72% of the top-three places, jewelers 26%.
• Ear piercing: piercing studios and accessory chains hold 76%, jewelers 24%.
• Cash for gold: gold buyers and pawn shops hold 67%, jewelers 18%.

A jeweler fighting for jewelry store is fighting every jeweler in Brooklyn. A jeweler who wants ring resizing is up against other jewelers only, in one neighborhood at a time. A jeweler who wants ear piercing has walked into a different market altogether, against studios that do nothing else. Neither is wrong, but they are not the same fight, and it pays to know which one you are in.

Med spas see the same thing. Laser hair removal draws 311,000 US searches a month including near me, but in our area dedicated laser studios hold most of the top places. A clinic that offers it as one service among twenty is competing with businesses built around it. Chapter 6 shows how to tell, in a minute and with a phone, which kind of contest a search is.

Why the tail suits a small business

Three reasons, all of which show up in the numbers above.

Less competition. A search for one service in one neighborhood has fewer serious contenders than the head term. You are not trying to outspend a chain. You are trying to be the best answer to a smaller question.

Clearer intent. A person searching for one specific service in one specific place has usually decided what they want and how far they will travel. That is a more useful visitor than someone browsing the category.

Steadier flow. A single head term rises and falls with the season and with competitors' ad budgets. A spread of smaller searches smooths the calendar, because services peak at different times of year. US searches for Botox peak in February and bottom out in December, with the peak 1.7 times the low. Laser hair removal peaks in July. Among jewelers, wedding bands peaks in January while lab grown diamond engagement ring peaks in June. A business that depends on one search has quiet months built in.

Small numbers add up

The usual objection is that the small searches are small. It is true. In Brooklyn, watch repair gets about 5,700 searches a month. Ring resizing gets about 280. Ring engraving, 120. Pearl restringing, 20.

Two things are worth keeping in mind. First, a small search with an easy first place can be worth more than a big one you will never win. Five thousand searches a month go mostly to watch shops; 280 go mostly to jewelers, one neighborhood at a time. Second, the small searches come in numbers. Our jeweler list has 29 services and our med spa list has 24, and most businesses offer more than they think. Ten modest searches you can win add up to real customers, and each one is a customer who came for a specific thing.

Prices tell a similar story from the other side: the price of a click follows the value of a customer, not the size of the search, which chapter 12 shows with our numbers.

Where owners usually go wrong

The most common mistake is to read "long tail" as "more keywords" and start stuffing words into the profile. Google's guidelines rule out adding keywords to the business name, and the same spirit applies everywhere else: describe what you actually do, in plain words. Profiles that try to game the system risk suspension, and customers can tell.

The second is to chase searches for services the business does not really provide. Every search you go after should be one you can serve well on a normal Tuesday. The long tail rewards businesses that are specific and honest about what they do, which is most of what makes it a good strategy for a small team.

The third is to expect a guarantee. Nobody controls who Google shows first, and anyone who guarantees a ranking is selling something else. What the long tail offers is a better set of odds: more contests, fewer contenders, and a clearer view of where you stand.

The head term will still be there

Somebody will always be first for med spa and for jewelry store, and that is fine. The useful question is a different one: are you the first answer for the smaller thing someone types at nine in the evening, a few blocks from your door?

The next chapter turns that question into a plan. It starts where the plan has to start: collecting the small searches of your own trade, which most tools do not show. After that comes choosing the first five, which we call seeds.