What’s the difference between long-tail and short-tail keywords, and why does it matter for SEO?
Long tail keywords are more precise keyphrases that typically consist of a long search term of four words or more.
One or two word search terms are known as short tail keywords or seed keywords.
The amount of keyword searches, searcher intent, and relevance of the search results are the fundamental distinctions between short tail and long tail terms.
Both SEO
(search engine optimisation) and paid search (Google Ads), which are pay-per-click (PPC) operations, depend heavily on keyword research. You’ll discover the differences between short-tail and long-tail keywords in this book, as well as how they effect your SEO plan.
What distinguishes short tail keywords from long tail keywords?
Short-tail keywords have a higher search volume and are more frequently utilised. Head phrases are well-liked, difficult keywords.
People enter relatively broad search terms like “coffee” and “SEO” into Google.
The search results show that people using head keywords have a general intent but are not yet certain of what they seek. As a result, we frequently see mixed intent on SERPs, where blog pieces, product sites, and brand pages rank since the search engine returns all relevant results.
Specific search terms like “SEO for beginners” or “latte vs. macchiato vs. cappuccino” are examples of long-tail keywords. These keyphrases have a lower search volume and are less common.
Search engines would reduce the search results to fewer, more pertinent results for more particular terms. We would observe fewer pages ranking and more pertinent content that provides the precise answers we want.
Generic search terms with a large search volume make up short-tail keywords.
The large amount of searches is the main advantage of short-tail keywords. For instance, a simple word like “coffee” receives over 11 million searches each month. It’s a lot, that.
Short-tail keywords are highly competitive
Even when seed keywords have a lot of searches, it doesn’t matter if you can’t get ranked for them. We would have to outrank Wikipedia, which has a DA of 98/100, in order to rank for highly competitive phrases. It is not possible.
In the 1970s and 1980s, websites having a high domain authority would place below Wikipedia and had a strong possibility of appearing in the second to tenth rankings for this key phrase. This also drives a lot of organic traffic to the pages that are ranked.
Targeting less competitive long-tail keyword phrases would be a better SEO approach for the majority of websites with less authority in order to increase
Short-tail keywords are highly competitive compared to long-tail keywords
As we saw above, the phrase “coffee” produces almost 3 BILLION results that are pertinent.
Search engines return all relevant results since they are unable to precisely determine what the search term is looking for.
