You’ve heard of Long-tail Keywords, and you’re familiar with Short-Tail Keywords. But which should you focus on when you’re writing your website copy. It can be a delicate balancing act, but these are the reasons we believe you should focus on writing Short-Tail Keywords.
Keyword Length vs. Focus Keyword Length
Before writing your content, you should determine which Keyword you will focus on that page. While including a lot of long-tail keywords in your content can be extremely beneficial, your FOCUS keyword should remain short. Your focus keyword will likely be comprised of multiple words to rank for a specific search term. Multiple words make it more of a keyphrase than a keyword, but they act as the same.
Long-tail keyphrases are a great SEO strategy. The longer the Keyword, the more specific the audience will be. Specific audiences translate to less competition in Google rankings and a higher probability of getting on top. It’s also likely that the more accurate your audience is, the more likely they will be to convert into actual customers or subscribers.
So why does this matter if Long-tail keywords are a good thing?
What Makes a Focus Keyword Too Long
The Keyword you are focusing on might become too long when it begins to affect the quality of your content. Yes, it’s essential to include relevant search terms to what you are ranking for; however, Google also rates you on readability and sentence structure. You could also be penalized for keyword stuffing, or inserting too many of the same keywords into a paragraph to cheat the system.
Because Google will automatically pull the relevant terms from copy, it’s not essential to write your keyphrase precisely the same way each time it appears in your content.
Reducing your focus keywords, especially when using helpful plugins like Yoast or All in One can significantly improve your rankings. Using related keywords to your focus keyword will also help improve your content rankings and your search intent rankings. Search intent is what the user meant to look for vs. what they were searching.
