Types of Keywords

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process of discovering the keywords used by potential customers to find your products and using this as inspiration to help create content for your website. You do this by picking the most relevant keywords to your business that are within your reach, that is they’re not too difficult to rank for in relation to the size of your business or quality of your website. Ideally you want these keywords to drive good search volume or traffic per month so you are focusing on keywords that are likely to bring visitors to your site.

Keyword research is crucial in guiding content creation by helping to identify topics to include on the website that will then attract clicks from people undertaking these searches. Basically, you’re trying to fill your website with the type of content your customers search for, so when they search, you are likely to show up. So rather than guessing what content you should create, use keyword research to help identify the types of content your customers are looking for. When this content is formatted correctly on your website with title tags, paragraph text and headings, it makes it easier for the search engine to understand your content and match it to what people are searching for.

And crucially, it provides data to inform content types and topics to consider for your website to attract organic searches leading to a specific objective.

Why is keyword research important?

When it’s done right, keyword research can help to: 

• Get the right kind of visitors to your site: If you get the wrong kind of visitor to your site, this is not likely to convert into sales. It may convert into leads, but it could be the wrong type of lead, which means your sales team is potentially wasting valuable resources. 
• Identify keywords with high search volume and omit low volume terms: Keyword research helps to identify and keep phrases that have good search volume, and disregard keywords that have poor volume. 
• Identify content gaps on your website: This is more common than you might think. When we lay out a website, for example, it’s often the web designer who leads the process, or perhaps the CEO decided what content to include and where. But that’s not necessarily the content that your users or potential customers are looking for. You can identify this disconnect by doing keyword research. 
• Steer content creation: By understanding what keywords people are searching for, you can tailor your content to match that search need.
• Target keywords that are within your reach: In other words, you can target keywords that are not too competitive and are realistic, based on your current SEO presence. Keyword research helps to differentiate between transactional keywords, which will be highly competitive to rank for, as well as the less competitive informational keywords that may be useful for your business to target.

What are the differences between short-tail and long-tail keywords?

Short-tail keywords are typically one or two keywords and are the most well known in an industry. They tend to be less specific, or quite generic.  

Examples of short-tail keywords include:

• Yoga
• Yoga poses, and
• Beginner yoga

Long-tail keywords are typically three or more words, and they tend to be more specific and less obvious. Examples of long-tail keywords include:

• Beginner yoga for flexibility and balance
• Yoga DVD for beginners over 60, and
• Easy yoga poses for 2

Long-tail keywords

The main difference between the two is that while short-tail keywords have more individual traffic, approximately 70% of all search traffic comes collectively from long-tail keywords. That’s because searchers tend to be more detailed with their long-tail searches, as they're looking for specific results.

Other defining features of long-tail keywords include: 

• Being easier to rank
• Showing higher buyer intent
• Being harder to research
• Having lower individual keyword search volume but higher collective keyword search volume
• Requiring a larger amount of content because there are more topics to cover

Long-tail keywords are valuable for SEO because they tend to be specific to the searcher’s needs. They contain many words, and in some cases a user may ask Google a direct question. You can then aim to provide the answer to this question with your content. For example, you could create content that answers the question, “What are the top 10 places to visit in Croatia for US tourists?”

In other words, if your business and SEO research uncovers the types of problems that your customers are trying to solve, you can then create the content to guide them towards your business as the solution.

Importantly, there is less competition for long-tail keywords because there are fewer competing sites with relevant content that search engines can pick. As a result, websites with less SEO experience often gain quicker momentum when targeting long-tail keywords first. Utilizing long-tail search can also drive free traffic from people looking for solutions, in addition to those looking to buy.

Short-tail keywords

If we look now at short-tail keywords, you’ll see their defining features are essentially the opposite of long-tail keywords: 

• Harder to rank
• Harder to convert
• Easier to research
• Have higher individual keyword search volume but lower collective keyword search volume 
• Requiring a smaller amount of content because there are less topics to cover