As promised, here’s 5 cumulative percentage curves generated from real live keyword data.
The top 24.8% of “lyrics” based keywords account for 80% of the total traffic (337154).
The top 29.5% of “dog” based keywords account for 80% of the total traffic (418969).
The top 34.8% of “personals” based keywords account for 80% of the total traffic (30106).
The top 37.4% of “blog” based keywords account for 80% of the total traffic (48092).
The top 49.3% of “buy” based keywords account for 80% of the total traffic (119031).
One important thing to note is that this data is generated only by sampling the top 1000 keywords that contain the base keyword. If all the keywords were sampled the tail would be longer, but the curve’s shape would be about the same.
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August 2nd, 2006 at 11:20 am
[...] Dan Zarrella ? Blog Archive ? Cumulative Percentage Curves of Keyword Niches [...]
August 7th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
[...] In a previous post I talked about the short head and long tail of keyword traffic. The 80/20 rule doesn’t quite apply but some general 20-40/80 rule does. Despite the fact that multiple and more targetted keyword phrases don’t cost anything for the searcher, keyword traffic still roughly follows a pareto curve. In his Chris Anderson asserts the 80/20 rule is enforced by powers of economics. In the music industry the risks and costs to music companies defines what becomes a “hit”. In keywords the only powers driving towards a pareto distrobution are similarities in the way people express themselves. Its only a small slice of expression, a few words used to describe something we want, but the head and tail distribution suggests we all comunicate in strikingly similar ways. Or at least a lot of us do. Building on my new PHP POS Tagger and my PHP ngram tokenizer I plan to study wikipedia as a course to derive some data about distribution curves of the most popular ngrams and how they can relate to keyword selection. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
August 30th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
nice but wouldnt it be more clear to plot those graphs on a log scale?
August 30th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
nice but wouldnt it be more clear to plot those graphs on a log scale?