If you’re not a major industry player, then competing for short-tail keywords might be a waste of time. Yes, your keywords are searched thousands of times per month, but if all that traffic is going to your competitors, what’s the point?
To illustrate this, I ran short-tail, mid-tail, and long-tail keywords through a rank tracking tool and got some keyword stats. As you can see in the screenshot below, as the keyword gets longer, the keyword difficulty drops dramatically. This means that the top ranking sites have fewer backlinks, less optimized content, and lack other authority signals :
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Additionally, long-tail keywords are often related tunisia mobile database to smaller product and service niches where you’re more likely to compete. For example, every bike shop sells bikes, but not all bike shops sell gravel bikes.
If you sell titanium gravel bikes, this should be the first keyword you optimize for. Yes, it’s only searched 1,000 times a month, but there’s a good chance you’ll rank on page one and get at least some of that traffic.
Long-tail keywords have higher conversion rates
Users who search for more specific terms are further along in the purchasing cycle than searchers using general queries. Typically, long-tail keywords convert 2.5 times more than short-tail keywords.
This makes perfect sense. Someone looking for the best bike is probably just exploring. But someone looking for the best gravel bike under $1000 has a stronger intent to buy and is probably just a few steps away from pulling the trigger.