Short tail keyword

Also called: short tail keyword

Short tail keywords are the somewhat shorter searches that relate to a fairly general search term. In most cases, short tail keywords consist of two or three words at most. The longer the search term becomes, the more specific the search query is. Longer search terms are called long tail keywords. The difference between short tail keywords and long tail keywords is easily explained by the example below:

• Red bike → short tail keyword (general insertion)
• Red electric bike for ladies rental in Haarlem → long tail keyword (very specific to the need)

Why it's harder to be organically findable on short tail keywords

Given that short tail keywords often involve general terms, there is a high search volume on these. This is beneficial for websites that are easily findable on these keywords but this is obviously a more difficult task. Websites that succeed at this generate high organic traffic to the website. These are often the larger websites that have many pages and have many external links to them. However, it is the case that the Web site is found on a keyword with a generic entry. To refer again to the example above: People who want to buy a red bicycle, are looking for information about it or want to rent a red bicycle in Maastricht, for example, will immediately click away from the website which does not benefit the bounce rate. Also, these are the keywords for which there is relatively high payment when advertising on them in Google Ads (SEA) as there is a high search volume on short tail keywords.