Stephan Spencer announced on his blog that his company, Netconcepts recently released a white paper entitled “Chasing The Long Tail of Natural Search.” The research was aimed to show E-Commerce managers why chasing the long tail of natural search was necessary to maximize traffic and conversions.

In “Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search: How to Capture the Unbranded Keyword,” Netconcepts
attempts to provide insight to E-Commerce managers to quantify and capture their sites’ full natural
search potential. It’s a big opportunity for big sites. But how big is it?

The analysis was based on 1.2 unbranded natural search visits to 5 million pages across 25 merchant sites.

Here’s what an average “merchant’s long-tail profile” looks like:

• Only 14% of indexed pages yield search traffic, generating 4.6 visitors per month from non-brand searches.

• 189,000 brand searches are conducted every month.

• Retailers generate 80% of search traffic from brand keywords and 20% from non-brand terms.

• Total market potential for unbranded keyword traffic exceeds 7,000,000 searches per month — roughly 100 searches for every unique page, 38 times greater than total brand searches.
  

I’ve already downloaded the 17 page report and I must say that the research is really impressive and provides excellent conclusions. The pdf file is available here.