What Is A Short-Tail Keyword?

Source: Seobility

Date First Published: 25th October 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

Requirements For Short-Tail Keywords

Learn more about what a short-tail keyword is in this article.

A short-tail keyword, also known as a head keyword, is a short and general keyword of 1-2 words that covers a wide topic that has a high search frequency and very high competition. Even though short-tail keywords are very commonly searched for, they are not very specific, have lower conversion rates, and are often too competitive, making it very difficult for most websites to rank high for them, especially a new website with a low domain authority. Usually, only very large business websites that have gained lots of backlinks over the years rank high for short-tail keywords, which is why it is recommended to focus on ranking for long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords are the opposite of long-tail keywords which are highly specific phrases of 3+ words.

Short-tail keywords that are more competitive are often assigned a higher price in SEM campaigns, such as the paid ads on Google search results. Because these keywords are searched more often, it is more likely that someone will see and click through the advertiser's ad. The higher their bid, the higher the chances of them appearing right at the top.

Note:

Short-tail keywords only make up a small proportion of Google searches. It is believed that around 30% of searches use short-tail keywords, whilst around 70% use long-tail keywords.

Requirements For Short-Tail Keywords

Short-tail keywords must contain 1-2 words and any commonly used words used to structure sentences properly will not count towards the keyword count as search engines automatically filter these out when retrieving results as part of a search query. These are known as stop words. For example, even though 'what is link building' is four words, it is not considered a long-tail keyword as it has two stop words, which are 'what', and 'is', so the keywords are 'link building'. Because it is only 2 words, it would be a short-tail keyword.