The Long Tail of The Google Nexus 7

This week, my Verizon Wireless-tethered Galaxy Nexus SmartPhone finally received the Jelly Bean update to Android version 4.1. Despite having a small increment in its version number, Android 4.1 makes a huge difference in the way the Galaxy Nexus runs.

. . . SNORE . . .

Despite that first paragraph being short and containing a simple, focused message, it’s likely that I chased a few people away. It’s geeky, right?

Well, no, not really.

What we do here is marketing. That may sound different than my usual rallying cry for “business change”, but just as I found out in the late 1980s when I marketed myself as a computer consultant and found out to most of my clients thought the phrase I think it’s time I computerized my business meant they wanted to computerize their accounting systems, I’ve come to realize that to many of our clients today business change means “getting found”. It means search engine optimization. It means marketing.

Besides receiving Jelly Bean on my Galaxy Nexus, this weekend I also received a notice that this story about the Nexus 7 had received its first traffic for the search phrase “nexus 7 can’t play music without wifi?”. We rank for over 8,000 search phrases on Google, because we practice the long-tail marketing techniques that we preach. But this one caught my eye because A) it’s wrong and B) I’m an old-school computer guy and it made me think once again of a truth: computers are too hard. My favorite example of that is this story about the woman who couldn’t find “her Linksys Wireless Internet Connection”.

This stuff happens all the time, because as I said above, computers are too hard. Not impossible. Not designed with end user failure in mind. Not something you can’t figure out if you have the right mind set and enough time. But involved enough and requiring enough expertise in enough different disciplines that only a small portion of people and an even smaller number of business operators have a fighting chance to pull off complex tasks like search engine optimization on their own.

Seeing the traffic we pulled for nexus 7 can’t play music without wifi, I decided to take a look at the phrases that have drawn us traffic on that Nexus 7 story. In true long-tail tradition, it’s pretty long:

• buy nexus 7 tablet
• can i watch live tv on nexus 7
• cool stuff to do with nexus 7
• cool things to do with nexus 7
• google has dumbed down nexus 7
• google nexus 7 tablet wifi problems
• google voice on nexus 7
• how much can 8gb hold on nexus 7?
• how to call off of nexus 7 using third party software
• i want a nexus 7
• nexus 7 apple lawsuit
• nexus 7 apple lawsuit
• nexus 7 as a telephone
• nexus 7 build quality issues
• nexus 7 change name
• nexus 7 cool
• nexus 7 cool things
• nexus 7 cool things to do
• nexus 7 disable google talk
• nexus 7 disappointing
• nexus 7 email account wasnt found
• nexus 7 email account wasnt found
• nexus 7 google talk
• nexus 7 google voice
• nexus 7 google voice
• nexus 7 google voice male
• nexus 7 gtalk
• nexus 7 knows my email
• nexus 7 swype
• nexus 7 things to do
• nexus 7 voip
• nexus 7 voip
• nexus 7 won’t turn on
• phone like nexus 7
• things to do nexus 7
• things to do with nexus 7
• using nexus 7 to make google phone calls
• voice nexus 7
• when will my nexus 7 arrive
• where can i try a nexus 7
• why cant i play downloed videos on my nexus 7
• why can’t you buy movies for nexus 7
• why does nexus 7 only have 6 gigs

And those are only the phrases I could find using my default search engine optimization tools; those 40-odd phrases account for maybe 500 search hits to Answer Guy Central, but the story’s been found thousands of times, as its positions in our search traffic results shows:

Our Nexus 7 long tail extends, it seems, way further than just those phrases.

By now you’ve probably figured out that this story, starting with a fun “computers are too hard” anecdote, is leading to “hire us to do your search engine optimization”. But in case you need more evidence of the difficulty of doing your own long-tail marketing, here’s a list of reading on peripheral issues to that to keep you busy for a few minutes:

• So Many Svbtle Self-Promotional Tools, So Little Time
• Web Reviews Are Weird
• The More Things Change, The Faster They Change
• Hubspot, Pricing Changes, and Customer Problems
• Google’s Panda: A Very Scary Search Marketing Business Change

So here’s the truth: of course you can play music on your Nexus 7 without WiFi. But you can’t stream it over the Internet; you need to have downloaded it to your tablet, and Google doesn’t make that clear in a way that most people can pick up on. Computers really are too hard, even in the age of $200, do-everything tablets.

By the way: search for “I don’t have an Any key”, and you’ll see that Long Tail Marketing has us ranked for that, too. And as I write this, Answer Guy Central’s position for that search is #1. We’re in pretty good shape for “computers are too hard”, too: