What it means
Long-tail queries are specific, lower-volume searches that sit outside the small set of high-volume head terms. Kevin frames them through Chris Anderson's 2004 "Long Tail:” The internet is so vast and easy to search that it holds content and products for any taste or need, unlike offline shelves limited to what most people want. Each long-tail query is rare on its own. Combined, they add up to a market bigger than the hits.
Why it matters
The bulk of search demand is spread across countless specific queries, not a handful of head terms. Kevin cites Anderson's example that more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles, and the same pattern holds in search. As people search with more words and full questions, more demand moves into the tail, and covering it completely is how you build topical relevance and win rankings on the head terms too.
Say a mid-market B2B SaaS company ranks for 5 head terms that drive most of its tracked volume. It publishes 200 pages answering specific product and use-case questions. Each page pulls only 20 to 80 visits a month, but together they add more traffic than the head terms and lift the core rankings alongside.
How to use this knowledge
Build content that covers the full range of specific questions and entities in your topic, not just the head terms, since that coverage is what earns topical relevance. Mine Search Console, autocomplete, and People Also Ask for the exact multi-word phrasings people use. Structure pages so one asset captures many close long-tail variants instead of spinning up thin pages for each keyword.
Growth Memo guidance
The longtail is a concept SEOs are very familiar with, but it's also a significant differentiator between traditional and internet economics. — Youtube's hashtag pages and the long-tail
The idea is simple: The internet is so vast and easy to search that it has content/products for anyone, no matter their taste or need. — Here is the longtail
Topical authority — built by covering the long tail of a topic's queries completely.
Head terms — the few high-volume queries the long tail sits beneath.
Query share — the portion of a topic's total demand, most of it long-tail, that your rankings capture.
Content clusters — the structure for capturing many related long-tail queries with linked pages.
Search intent — the specific need behind each long-tail phrasing that a page has to match.