Short tail keywords: Why you should use short tail keywords

When onboarding SEO clients, our Omaha SEO agency explains to our clients the importance of all of the strategies that complement one another to help your website organically rank in search engines. And new or existing clients might notice that Monstrous Media Group’s keyword strategy has different types of keywords. There are some longer, shorter and in-between ones. Why would you use different keywords in the keyword research process? 

This is because different keywords bring in different website traffic. There are millions of keywords out there, but the right keywords are what is critical to help a company’s website rank in search engines. In the SEO world, there are two different types of keywords that searchers are typing into search engines. 

There are long tail keywords which are longer search queries of four words or more with lower volume opportunities. On the other hand, there are short tail keywords that our experts will explain more about in this blog! 

When a consumer searches “what is SEO?” The results that populate on the first page are blogs and content that has that keyword inside of its content. This is on-page optimization, which differentiates your website from the competitors. 

Here’s why short tail keywords are the more popular option for SEO experts to use to help their client’s rank in SERP. 

What are short tail keywords? 

Short tail keywords are popular keyword phrases that are one to three words per search phrase. They are called short tail keywords due to being shorter phrases than their long tail friends. Short tail keywords are favored over long tail keywords because these search phrases are more popular which have a higher search volume on search engines. 

As one can see on the graph below, the red and orange part of the graph is where the short tail keywords would be located in the search demand curve with the blue and purple keywords being long tail. The green area is the middle ground between the two search phrases. 

Here’s a great example of short tail keywords. 

Our experts simply type into our system- “seo” and thousands of results populate for this keyword and thousands more results show for variations of this phrase. 

As one can see, “seo”, “seo company” and “seo services” are high volume keywords with search volumes of over 10,000, but on the next column, it shows “77.59” and other numbers. 

What are those? That is how dense the keywords are which means the higher the competition is for those keywords. 

Why should you use short tail keywords? 

As a company who is searching for SEO services, simply typing that into Google will populate over millions of results, which is not very helpful but short tail keywords are important. Short tail keywords should be used in the SEO strategy because these keywords bring in more website traffic and are national ranking keywords with some local flare in.

This means that a company can rank for a national keyword with a local short tail keyword as well. How is that possible?  

An Omaha SEO agency like Monstrous Media Group uses short tail keywords to bring in higher traffic to a website and rank for national keywords, but on the other hand, these are keywords that are highly competitive and take a considerable amount of time to rank for. 

This is because with short tail keywords a company is going up against some of the biggest competitors in their industry. Trust us, it can be done, but it will take a bit of blood, sweat and tears on our end to get there. 

Is there one keyword our Omaha SEO experts prefer over the other? No. It all depends on the strategy that is at hand. Short tail and long tail keywords are both essential and should be used correctly and complement one another. 

Hire us! 

Monstrous Media Group is the leading Omaha SEO agency in the Omaha, Lincoln, Nebraska area. For more information and a free SEO consultation, contact us today.