People often say that long-tail keywords are easier to rank for and convert better. But is this actually true? It depends. There are two different types of keywords, and some are no easier to rank for than their short-tail counterparts. In this article, you’ll learn the differences between the two types of keywords and how to find them. But first, let’s dive into the key things we’ll cover: keywords are search queries that get a small number of searches per month. They tend to be longer and more specific than their “head” counterparts and, therefore, often have a higher conversion rate. For example, the keyword “meditation” is a “head” keyword because it gets 211k searches per month.
The keyword Long-tail
“Can meditation make you smarter” is a long-tail keyword because it only gets 50 searches per month. At the “head” of the curve, we have a tiny number of company data keywords with super high search volumes, while the “tail” consists of billions of keywords with very low search volumes. To be precise, in Ahrefs’ U.S. database (which is the biggest in the industry, by the way), there are just 31,000 keywords with search volumes of more than 100k searches per month; on the other hand, there are 3.8 billion keywords that have fewer than 10 searches per month. Here’s how this looks like in a pie chart: But to qualify as a keyword doesn’t necessarily have to get fewer than 10 searches per month. And there’s no specific search volume threshold, which would define a keyword as.
It mostly depends on
The “head” keyword that you’re comparing it to. What is a big mistake, though, is to define long-tail keywords by their length in words. The thing is, there are many USA CFO one-word keywords that get fewer than 100 monthly searches. There are also keywords five words long (or more) with hundreds of thousands of monthly searches. Let’s continue comparing the two sets of keywords above. “How to buy bitcoin” seems like a rather straightforward question to answer. But if you look at the top-ranking page for that search query, it is actually 3,400 words long. Conversely, the top-ranking page for “how to cash out large amounts of bitcoin” is just 1,000 words long. The thing is, the more general the search query is, the more details you’ll have to include when addressing it.