This chart compares the proportion of searches that go to each travel site for the top 25 patterns in the travel sector. The site getting the most traffic for each pattern is highlighted. Only searches that wound up at one of these five travel sites are considered.

The difference in search pattern profiles for these sites is striking. Tripadvisor leads the pack in the long tail, which makes sense given the huge amount of long tail user generated content on the site. TripAdvisor owns most of the pattern categories, but Yahoo Travel and Hotel-Guides take the lead in niche areas like maps and hotels. Traffic to Expedia and Travelocity is largely composed of navigational and branded queries (not shown). The only long tail patterns they have significant share for are "[x] ticket", and "cheap [x]".

The input data we used reflects referrals to these sites from a sample population of users who clicked on search engine result pages. Factors which will affect the number and type of search referrals a site received in this data include: how representative the sample is of the population of U.S. searchers as a whole, how much relevant content a site has for a given query pattern, and how well that content ranks in google and other search engines.

If a travel website repeated this study with Concentrate using current competitive data, then uploaded additional search data for their own site including other metrics beyond search frequency (see our demo using Google Analytics), the results might reveal that "things to do in [x]" queries lead to high quality visits and their site has a chance at winning more searches for that pattern. Based on this information they might decide to make a move on TripAdvisor in that content category. Mark Jackson describes some strategies to apply within the travel sector in an article at Search Engine Watch: Should Your SEO Strategy Target the Head or the Long Tail?. Using Concentrate, a travel website could streamline the process by downloading thousands of real queries for this pattern sent to their competitor:

Some queries in TripAdvisor pattern: "things to do in [x]"