The Differences Between Short Tail & Long Tail Search Terms6 min read

For example, if you were running ads and were targeting these phrases you haven’t qualified what it is that the user is actually looking for. For example:

• What type of Builder? Residential / Commercial, might be considerations, along with other aspects, such as location
• The same for Plumber, is it an emergency plumber service, which might be 24 hour plumber. Is it a commercial or residential plumbing service? 
• Again, for lawyers or Solicitors, there are different specialties. So it would be prudent to know what type you are trying to rank for. Criminal, Employment, Civil and Family spring to mind as a selection

You could easily be targeting the wrong type of customers to your website, resulting in a wasted ad spend and a poor user experience.

If you knew what particular service your potential visitor was interested in you could direct them to the most relevant page on your website for it.

Okay so that matters for paid search, but not so much for organic? 

Well actually the same thing applies here. It’s how you build up trust in Google (and the other search engines).

The main term is expanded upon to include other relevant words.

So this could be “Emergency Plumber in Leeds” which would use the “Plumber” short-tail phrase. Or, it could be “Commercial Builder in Chester”, which again would feature the short tailed phrase “Builder”.

The rule of thumb here is that the longer the phrase the less competitive it becomes. So to rank for “Builder” would be much more difficult than “Commercial Builder in Chester”.

The search terms for Builder would be significantly greater, hence the harder to rank aspect.

So, why bother with the longer tailed phrases?

The good news is that although these phrases are searched less they are much more likely to result in a conversion (this means enquiry at this stage).

Imagine searching with the phrase “Commercial Builder in Chester” and you see a page that contains specific information relating to that query. Providing what you see makes sense, you are more likely to make contact with that firm.

However, if you searched for “Builder”, there are no guarantees that the results you see would relate to a specific type of builder or indeed the location that you are in.

So now you can see the initial subset of 4 pages has grown to 12 individual pages, each with its own individual page title, headings and content.

This again helps to deliver the user with the most relevant information for the user’s search. Not only that, it is seen as best practice by search engines and helps massively with ranking!

The content on each of these pages would incorporate synonyms of the phrase, along with other long tailed variations.

One of the easiest ways to check for these is to scroll down to the bottom of the search results, you will see a section called “Related searches:”.

Your “Employment Law in Manchester” page might benefit by incorporating some of these phrases naturally within the content.

It’s perhaps easy to see that longer tailed search terms are great for delivering specific information that closer matches the searchers intent.

While at the same time also allowing you to rank for the shorter versions of the phrase.

Hopefully this has given you a decent overview of these types of search terms.

The benefits of using the longer version is that you can rank quicker and provide much more closely related content to your visitor. Content that once it is viewed is increasingly likely to result in some form of conversion activity.

Short term phrases are fantastic for high volumes of visitors, but be aware that much of it isn’t finding you because of intent or location. So this traffic might not be very high value.

It is likely that the short termed version features more heavily in a robust local organic search strategy.