Long tail and short tail what should I focus on?

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We’ve been asked recently if the keywords that should be used in an SEO campaign should be Long Tail keywords or shorter terms.

A lot of websites experience a large number of visits from long tail keywords, but if you look into this in more detail it tends to be the case that longer terms are only driving 1 or 2 visits each, it’s the number of these terms that drives the level of traffic to the site, not the keyword itself.

Building the reputation of your website using some of these longer term keywords is a good idea at the beginning of your SEO work, particularly if you have a brand new website with no history in Google. However as you build a good back link profile, gain more visibility in Google and begin seeing more search engine visits coming through to your site the shorter terms will become more lucrative.

Look at the Keywords section of your website statistics, there will be some short keywords driving a lot of traffic to your site, such as a type of product like “Dinner Plates” and then there will be some longer phrases such as “stainless steel dinner plates” which will also be driving traffic to your site, but chances are nowhere near as much traffic as “Dinner Plates” alone. If you then use a keyword research tool to look into the number of searches carried out per month for each of these terms you will see there is a lot of difference between the number of people searching for “dinner plates” compared to the number of people searching for “stainless steel dinner plates”.

When you are looking to create a keyword list to focus your search engine optimisation around it is always a good idea to focus on the keywords which have the highest potential to drive traffic to your website.

A well optimised website will not only rank for the shorter phrases you are focussing on but will also gain rankings for longer tail keywords as well. This will enable your site to be visible for potentially thousands of keywords outside your core list, some of which will be the long tail keywords whilst allowing you to gain rankings for the more search upon terms.