Here’s an example of a short tail keyword; local advertising.
Short tail keywords are typically the popular keywords with one, two or three word search queries having the highest search volume in a topic.
Also known as head terms they usually have the greatest search volume but are also the hardest terms to rank in Google for.
How to do short-tail keyword research
Using Ahrefs you can filter a specific keyword by the number of words.
I’ve used advertising as the short tail keyword.
- There’s 116,864 phrase match keywords that include “advertising”
- There are 12,857 keywords containing 1 or 2 word keywords.
- There are 103,997 keywords containing 3 or more words.
So if “local advertising” were the short tail keyword, what’s the long tail keyword ?
The long tail keyword that I initially targeted when I created my page was
how to advertise my business locally
This long tail keyword has 6 words in the query.
Short Tail Keywords versus Long Tail Keywords
Here’s a quick comparison of short tail versus long tail keywords.
| Short Tail Keywords | Long Tail Keywords | |
| Search Volume | Higher | Lower |
| Keyword Difficulty | Harder | Easier |
| Clicks from searches | Higher | Lower |
| CTR | Lower | Higher |
| Conversion | Lower | Higher |
Ideally, when doing your research you should identify both short tail keywords, medium tail keywords and long-tail keywords as part of your content marketing strategy for your target audience.
By only targeting short tail keywords may be a primary reason your website doesn’t get the organic traffic you think it deserves.