The diversity of search terms: a striking example

My post about Episode 10 of the TV series Flash Forward has been doing rather well at getting traffic from search engines.

In total 81 different search phrases have generated traffic to the page and the most popular of those has only produced 10% of the total search engine traffic.

That’s a pretty striking example of just how diverse people’s search times frequently are these days. Part of that is people using increasingly long search phrases, which triggered Google to widen their search box in September.

It’s a reminder too of the dangers of thinking of search engine optimisation as being optimising specifically for a very small number of phrases. Sometimes the bulk of traffic does come from a very small number of different search terms but often it’s a large range instead that’s almost all long tail.