Long-tail vs. Short-tail Keywords: What’s the Difference?

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? 

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 course of a month and order them by their search volumes, it’ll look somewhat like this:

As you can see, long-tail keywords are literally in the “long tail” of this graph. It’s because they are less popular (but not “worse”) variations of the short-tail keywords/head terms on the “fat head” of the curve. 

By the way, there are two types of long-tail keywords you should know.

Supporting long-tail keywords are less popular variations of more popular search queries. They are basically broader topics in disguise. 

To illustrate, while some people will search for “bedroom furniture chests”... 

… the majority of people will look for the same thing using simply “dressers”:

As you can see, despite having dramatically different search volumes, those keywords have virtually the same Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores. That’s one of the main reasons why using supporting long-tail keywords as primary keywords may not be the best idea. 

So in most cases, you should probably avoid supporting long-tail keywords and focus instead on the other type: topical long-tail keywords. 

Topical long-tail 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:

It’s good to know whether your keyword is topical. Because if you manage to rank for it, you’ll likely rank for the less popular supporting long-tail. 

Learn more: Long-tail Keywords: What They Are and How to Get Search Traffic From Them 

Both keyword types have their pros and cons. 

Short-tail keywords will have a lot of competition, but it’s not impossible to outrank pages in the top 10. 

It may take years (yes) of fine-tuning your content and years of building links. 

But once you finally get there:

As for long-tail keywords, they’re great for other reasons. In most cases:

On the flip side, you will need to rank for a lot of them to get a large volume of traffic. But as long as these keywords are good for your business, that traffic may be very valuable. 

Case in point: left-handed nail scissors. Not many searches overall. But if you’re a shop for left-handed people like Lefty’s, customers will surely expect that product. 

Bottom line? I’d say if you want to be the go-to resource for your topic, you may want to target both short- and long-tail keywords (see also: topical authority). Try to target topical long-tail keywords instead of supporting long-tail keywords, though.   

If you take a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, type in something broad like “electric cars,” and sort the results by volume, you’ll get a list of keywords. The results at the top will be your short-tail keywords. 

That’s it. If you don't know what words to type in the tool, try:

Keyword research and competitive analysis tools can help you find long-tail keywords, too. You just need to set some filters. Let's look at a couple of ways to do it.

In Keywords Explorer:

From there, refining your initial keyword list is a good idea. You can do that using the remaining filters inside the tool. 

For example, you can use Keyword Difficulty (KD) to get only low-competition keywords, such as: 

Or you can use modifier keywords, such as “for,” to let some niches emerge. 

Some examples: 

Of course, you can mix and match. Below is a filter that finds long-tail keywords posed as questions with low difficulty and minimum search volumes. 

Examples: 

You can use a similar process to find good long-tail keywords among your competitors. 

For this, use a tool like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. You can:

Looking up the popular cooking website loveandlemons.com, we’ll get keywords such as: 

Probably the most important takeaway here is not to target keywords only because they belong to the long-tail or short-tail camp. 

Instead, try this four-step process for finding keywords (we use it ourselves at Ahrefs):  

Read all about the process in How to Choose the Right Keywords for SEO.

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