Content Marketing
What Are Short-Tail Keywords?
Do short-tail keywords have a place in your SEO strategy? They should. Learn how to use these high-volume, competitive search terms in this detailed article.
If you’ve been involved in search engine optimization or content marketing for any length of time, chances are you’ve heard the terms long-tail keywords and short-head (or short-tail) when referencing keywords. But what exactly are they and how should they figure into your content optimization strategy?
Understanding how short-tail keywords work is an important part of a good search engine strategy.
Short-tail keywords are broad, one or two-word searches that, while they might generate a great deal of traffic and interest, are often highly competitive and far too generic to immediately result in conversions.
So, if long-tail keywords are highly specific, less competitive, typically cheaper to bid on, and more targeted, short-tail (or short-head) keywords are the opposite.
Short-tail keywords are generic but often searched, whereas long-tail keywords are much longer and more targeted.
Example: To illustrate, consider a user who’s searching for a laptop.
There are several things that make a short-tail keyword fall into the category of being a short-tail, most notably:
Short-tail keywords attract users with many different intentions.
Example: If a person searches for “shoes”, they may be looking for women’s dress shoes, running shoes, warm house shoes for the winter or anything in between. They may even want to know about how to care for leather shoes or how to repair a shoe sole.
This can make narrowing down search intent more difficult because the term “shoes” is so broad.
Because short-tail keywords are so short, they’re frequently searched.
This means that if you can rank for them, you have the potential to enjoy a high search volume and high search traffic (think of how often keywords like “laptops,” “coffee,” or “shoes” are searched for).
So, the brands that rank at or near the top enjoy the majority of traffic because of it.
As you might imagine, out of all of that traffic, there could be quite a few people looking to buy, so those terms are naturally high in competition.
Given the high competition, you can also bet that major companies are willing to (and do) allocate a large budget to stay at the top of the rankings for these keywords, making it challenging for smaller businesses or startups to work their way up in the search engine rankings.
Because short-tail keywords don’t have a specific user intent driving them, users who search for these terms may not actually be ready to convert (as in purchase a product or subscribe to a service).
Example: Searching for something like “coffee” may mean that the person wants to buy, or it could mean that they’re looking to compare brands, get brewing instructions, try different recipes and so on.
However, when considering a long-tail keyword like “where to buy fair-trade coffee beans in [location]” there is far more of an indication that the person is ready to purchase.
Bidding for these short, generic keywords can be incredibly expensive.
Terms like “coffee” or “laptops” have high CPC (cost per click) rates simply because of the high amount of competition that’s willing to bid for them to be at or near the top when people search for these terms.
If the search intent is incredibly broad, if PPC bids and competition are high, and conversions are lower, you may be wondering “Why would anyone even want to target short-tail keywords?” when optimizing content.
Well, despite the drawbacks, there are still reasons to consider short-tail keywords.
If you’re able to rank for short-tail keywords, it can greatly help improve your brand awareness and visibility while cementing you as an authority or expert in your niche.
Short-tail keywords can drive large amounts of traffic to your site, especially if your search engine rankings are already high for related long-tail keywords.
Short-tail keywords can form the root or foundation of a more detailed, well-planned long-tail keyword strategy. Here’s one way it could work.
Example: Let’s consider an example of the short-tail keyword “smartwatches”
As you might expect, this keyword attracts a lot of searchers but because it’s not very specific, those searchers may not be intent on buying just yet.
To reach a more specific audience, you can expand on the search term “smartwatches” to include related long-tail keyword searches that span different intents, such as:
Transactional Intent — The user is looking to buy
Informational Intent — The user wants to learn more
Comparative Intent — The user is evaluating and comparing options
Each of these long-tail keyword options expands your chances to convert a user who is in the market for a smartwatch based on being able to write content around different intents.
While following this basic strategy won’t have you ranking for the short-tail keyword “smartwatches” overnight, it’s a great starting point to gradually move up the rankings as you continue to create content that satisfies Google’s people-first, E-E-A-T guidelines on Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness and Trust.
Despite their drawbacks, short-tail keywords are still a core part of any SEO strategy. Few other types of search engine optimization offer the type of high visibility and traffic that short-tail keywords can.
Given their broad search intent though and the high levels of competition and cost around them, short-tail keywords work best as stepping stones to more targeted, long-tail keyword content.
By using short-tail keywords as the starting point of your keyword research and then building out more specific pages geared toward different intents, you can balance both the more generic and more targeted qualified leads you get, creating both brand awareness and conversions in the process.
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