The Difference Between Long-Tail & Short-Tail Keywords
Posted by Chris Stone
If you are doing online marketing and are struggling to get leads, you might be targeting the wrong keywords. While it seems logical to optimize your website to rank for keywords with the most searches in your niche, this can be the reason why you are not getting any leads. You must understand keyword research properly to generate leads.
Keywords can generally be categorized into two: short tail and long tail keywords. This distinction was first advanced by Chris Anderson in 2004 in an article he wrote for Wired magazine in which he explained Amazon's business strategy of using long tail keywords to generate leads. Since then, long tail keywords have become a buzzword in online marketing.
What is the Difference?
Suppose we have a keyword, "dog training", which gets approximately 3200 searches per day. This is a great keyword to rank for considering the number of searches. However, if there are over 10 million websites competing for that term, it will take you months of proper SEO to get high rankings for the term.
But, suppose we try to rank for another keyword which has the prefix, "dog training". For example, we could rank for "dog training careers", which has about 400,000 sites competing for that term. Getting to the top search engine results page (SERP) for this term will be easier compared to ranking for "dog training" because there are few sites competing for the term.
The logic is, it is better to rank for a keyword that has fewer searches and fewer competing websites, than for a keyword with tons of searches and very high competition. If you rank for "dog training" on page 237 of Google, who will visit your website?
The Benefits of Long Tail Keywords
The logic behind ranking for long tail keywords is that businesses can ultimately get as much traffic as that generated by short tail keywords, but faster and without having to pay for expensive SEO services. For instance, the combined traffic you will receive by ranking for a set of long tail keywords like "dog training careers", "dog training collars", "dog training DVDs" and the like can be as much as the traffic generated from the short tail keyword "dog training". Only in your case, it will be easier to rank for these long tail keywords than for the short tail keyword.
