Making The Difficult Choice Of A Long Or A Short Tail Keyword
Choosing between long tail (more specific) and short tail (more generic) keywords and keyword sets can be quite an arduous task as well as a difficult decision to make. In this article, we give you the lowdown on both, so that you can make the best decision for yourself, based on your requirement.
The choice between generic and specific keyword sets can indeed be a very difficult one. While generic keywords tend to bring in a lot more traffic, it is usually the specific ones that actually bring in more benefits and conversions in terms of people who are more likely to be interested in and buying the goods or services that you are selling on your website.
Let us explain this whole phenomenon with an apt example.
Suppose you are a seller of premium mobile phone accessories. While the keyword term “mobile phone accessories” would get you a lot of traffic, the keyword term “premium mobile phone accessories” would actually get you the ‘right’ kind of traffic, even if the traffic itself, in terms of sheer volume, would be lower in the latter case. And 9 out of 10, chances are that you would not just be looking to drive traffic up to your website alone; you would be more keen to have traffic on your site that actually converts to sales.
Having said that, the importance of drawing traffic to your site alone cannot be underestimated. This aspect assumes greater importance when you are not actually selling any particular product or service but are dependent on revenues from advertisements on your site. Remember that most advertisers will pay you a premium, even if simply the traffic on your site is large. They will look at targeted advertising only as a secondary aspect in a large number of cases, as their outlook is essentially to get the eyeballs, which you are helping them to achieve.
Therefore, going by the example given earlier, suppose you run a website which gives FREE information to visitors on where they could get the best mobile phone accessories for themselves, and your source of revenues are the ads that run on your website, the generic keyword term “mobile phone accessories” would suit you better than the more specific “premium mobile phone accessories” keyword term, as it is the former keyword term which will bring in more traffic to your site.
Therefore, as you can clearly see, the choice between a long tail and a short tail keyword term is actually dependent on the kind of business that you are running, as well as your revenue stream. Broadly, the more specific kind of business that you run, and the more niche kind of products or services that you sell, you would be better off with long tail keyword terms. It is ultimately a simple choice between quality and quantity, whereby natural human tendency usually tells us to go for the former.
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