Search marketers often advise clients- particularly large ecommerce companies- on strategies to maximise long-tail traffic to their websites as a way to boost sales. For SEO campaigns this means focusing not just on the top 10 or 20 “head” terms but optimising site structure and content for category and product pages to help visitors find your products, as well as building links to these pages, to attract “long tail” search traffic. The conventional online marketing wisdom states that somebody searching for “womens shoes” – although higher in search volume- may be in the research phase, collecting information and comparing prices whereas somebody searching “blue size 6 high heels” for example has a pretty good idea of what they want to buy and therefore has a higher chance of converting. I thought it would be interesting to test these theories looking at the data from the last month for one of our ecommerce clients.