The difference between long-tail and short-tail keywords comes down to popularity. Many people search for short-tail keywords, while few search for long-tail keywords. Because of that, long-tail keywords are generally easier to rank for and tend to attract searchers with more specific intent. This has made targeting them a widely adopted SEO tactic. So should you follow suit and prioritize long-tail keywords at all times? Long-tail Short- But first, why are they called that? It’s not about how many words they contain or how specific they are.
Short- and long-tail
Keywords got their respective names from the position on the “search demand” curve. If we take all search queries that people have performed in Google in the executive email list course of a month and order them by their search volumes, it’ll look somewhat like this: As you can see, long-] keywords are literally in the “long of this graph. It’s because they are less popular (but not “worse”) variations of the short- keywords/head terms on the “fat head” of the curve. By the way, there are two types of long keywords you should know. Supporting long- keywords Supporting long- keywords are less popular variations of more popular search queries. They are basically broader topics in disguise.
Long-tail Short- while some
People will search for “bedroom furniture chests”… As you can see, despite having dramatically different search volumes, those keywords have virtually the same Mobile Lead Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores. That’s one of the main reasons why using supporting long- keywords as primary keywords may not be the best idea. So in most cases, you should probably avoid supporting long- keywords and focus instead on the other type: topical long- keywords. Topical long keywords Topical long- keywords are the most popular way to look for a given topic. In other words, they are topics in themselves and not some other topics in disguise. To tell if you’re dealing with topical or supporting long-tail keywords, you can do two things.
