Fact or Myth: Long-Tail Keywords Are Easier to Rank

One of the most common pieces of advice you can find on SEO is to use long-tail keywords. It’s often repeated, almost a gospel for SEOs, taken for granted that it’s simply true. Use long-tail keywords, or you won’t rank.

Is it true, though?

I wanted to do some digging into this topic, give it some serious thought, and come to the truth of the matter. Come with me on my thought process as we investigate!

Before we dig too deep, I do want to specify a point that comes up in this discussion a lot: what I’m talking about is largely about blog content.

Keywords are obviously still important for things like PPC advertising, where keywords are the root of targeting. They’re also important for things like product pages, where specific nuggets of information are key elements of what makes the page relevant. For blog content, though, the situation is different. That’s what I want to examine.

Defining Long-Tail Keywords

First, let’s define what exactly we’re talking about here.

The concept of the long tail goes all the way back to the 1940s and comes from statistics in the analysis of frequency distributions. Benoit Mandelbrot – of fractal fame – is often called the father of long tails because of his work on long-tail distribution statistics.

When it comes to marketing, the concept of the long tail was popularized by Chris Anderson, who wrote a famous Wired article about the concept as applied by companies like Amazon and Apple. Amazon didn’t sell just the top 100 bestsellers; they sold millions of different books. Even if each book only sold one or two copies, that would add up to more in sum total than if they had just focused on the high-demand, high-volume products.

Long-tail distribution can be found pretty much everywhere that choice is possible, from storefronts to music players to TV channels to marketing.

When it comes to keywords and SEO, the idea is fairly simple. The longer a keyword is – the more words it uses – the longer the “tail” of the keyword is.

Just as with Amazon’s books, a website can take advantage of long-tail distribution to succeed. Ranking #1 for “shoes” would get you an immense amount of traffic (presumably; more on that later), but there’s also a ton of competition for that keyword, so your chances of ranking are low. By focusing on long-tail keywords, which have much less competition, you can build up a snowball of ranking and traffic that can exceed the site that ranks #1 for “shoes.”

So:

• Instead of targeting “shoes,” target “durable hiking shoes for men.”
• Instead of targeting “vacation rentals,” target “upscale resort rentals in Washington.”
• Instead of targeting “dog food,” target “allergen-free organic dog food.”

After all, anyone outside of the top brands is going to find it hard to rank for any of those short-tail keywords. Meanwhile, anyone with a blog and some high-quality content has the potential to rank for long-tail keywords, and when your site ranks for thousands of long-tail keywords, you can pull in enough traffic to become one of those big brands.

Initial Opinions: Are Long-Tail Keywords Myth or Fact?

Many people treat “you need to use long-tail keywords if you want to succeed” as an inalienable truth, but I’m coming to believe that it’s really not as critical as many marketers make it seem, even in posts from the last year or so.

I personally believe that long-tail keywords were 100% the way to go from around 2008 or so up through about 2019. In the years since, they’ve gotten less and less important, and today, I think it’s almost something of a myth.

Targeting long-tail keywords is still important, except I’m increasingly of the belief that keywords aren’t important, at least not in the way marketers traditionally think of them. Let’s dig into what I mean and the reasons behind what I’m saying.

A Matter of Intent

The first thing to talk about is intent.

Search intent has become one of the most important aspects of both Google’s ranking and how content is created. Consider these three search queries:

• Netflix
• Google Pixel 9 Specs
• How to Prune a Fruit Tree

On the surface, these are three very different kinds of queries, but it goes beyond just being about different topics.

• The first is a navigational query. Anyone typing “Netflix” into Google is probably just trying to go to Netflix.com. Most browsers are set up to search anything typed in the address bar unless it’s a URL, and a lot of older people view Google as a sort of homepage and use it to navigate to their favorite sites. Incidentally, that’s a huge security hole and is why Google ads that run phishing sites to “out-rank” legitimate sites are a huge problem.
• The second is an informational query. Any of a hundred different websites can provide that information, but most of the time, people just want to get it from the manufacturer directly.
• The third is a tutorial query. The user wants information, a step-by-step guide on how to do something, the concerns that can come up in doing it, things to avoid, and so on.
• There are five broad kinds of search intent. The three I listed above plus commercial and transactional. Commercial would be something like “best place to buy the new Google Pixel,” and transactional would just be “buy Google Pixel.” They’re similar, but the desired result is a little different between them.

Long-tail keywords are usually somewhere in the middle, in the informational and tutorial range of intent. Navigational and transactional are the opposite and are usually quite short-tailed. Sometimes, a transactional keyword can be a long-tailed keyword, but since it’s transactional, the only kinds of pages likely to rank for it are product pages and storefronts, not blog post content.

So, your first roadblock to “long-tail is required” is simply that intent matters. A great long-tail keyword with the wrong intent will never rank, while a short-tail keyword with the right intent can rank well, even on a small site.

Keyword Difficulty and Competition

One of the core assumptions of long-tail keyword usage is rooted in keyword difficulty.

There are only ten (give or take) spaces for sites in Google’s search results. Google lumps any given domain together so no one site can have more than one space on the results page. So, you have to be one of the top ten most relevant, useful pages in order to rank for any given query.

For a short-tail keyword, that means you’re going against the whole world. A basic query like “dog food” puts you up against sites like Chewy, Walmart, Open Farm, Petco, Amazon, PetSmart, Hill’s Nutrition, Purina, and others. If you had to sit down and think about it, you could probably name 20-30 big-name brands, either in the pet space or the retail space, that would rank well for that generic topic.

The idea is that you can get around this using long-tail keywords. Sure, pet food companies might have cornered the market for “pet food” as a query, but if you target “red pellet nutritionally complete food for medium-sized lizards,” surely there won’t be that much competition, right?

That’s where you run into the opposite problem. A query that is so long-tail and so narrow that no one even searches for it, let alone clicks links for it or reads content about it.

On one hand, you have high-volume, high-competition keywords. On the other, you have zero-volume, zero-competition keywords. Both are effectively useful for small businesses and blogs looking to make a name for themselves. That leaves finding the right balance between the two as long-tail keywords that strike the right balance.

The biggest issue here is that keyword difficulty (and, to an extent, even search volume) metrics are basically made up. There are tons of different keyword research tools that offer keyword difficulty estimations, and they all use their own algorithms to make those estimations, and they’re all basically just guesswork.

There’s also a pretty big problem. Take a look at these three keywords:

• “Roof Replacement”
• “How do I replace my roof?”
• “How to replace the shingles on a roof.”

The first one is short-tail. The middle one is long-tail. The third one is very long-tail. Naturally, you’d probably want to target the second or third, right?

What if I told you these are all basically the same keyword?

NLP and the Word Cloud Paradigm

Remember how I said things changed back in 2019?

2019 was when Google rolled out its BERT algorithm. BERT stands for bidirectional encoder representations from transformers, which is a fancy way of saying that it’s an algorithm that can use language transformers as part of natural language processing.

Natural language processing, or NLP, is the precursor to our modern Large Language Model text parsers and generators. It’s effectively a way for the computer systems to take words and understand what they mean on a somewhat deeper level than basic word associations or definitions from the dictionary.

If you’ve ever noticed that you can search Google for a query, and you’ll get results that are relevant but don’t include the word or phrase you searched for, that’s because Google’s language processing can understand topics rather than just keywords.

Words have synonyms, words and phrases that mean the same thing or are often used in the same ways. A simple example could be that you could write an entire blog post about search engine optimization by spelling out the acronym every time, but your post would still rank for “SEO” because Google understands that “SEO” and “Search Engine Optimization” are the same thing.

Under a traditional understanding of keywords, a list of keyword phrases like:

• How to do a roof
• How to install a roof
• How to replace a roof
• How to re-roof a house
• Steps to replace a roof
• Step-by-step roof replacement

Would all be different, even if they’re similar. But, website owners didn’t want to write ten variations of every piece of content for each different keyword, and Google didn’t want to encourage you to do so. They also didn’t want you to have to do clunky keyword stuffing by injecting each of those into one post on the topic. NLP helps them understand that all of these are the same and are relevant to the content, even if you don’t use them all.

Keyword research tools might even evaluate each of those keywords differently. They can have different estimated search volumes, different estimated keyword difficulty, and even different target demographics. While that information can be relevant for narrow-targeted paid advertising, it’s not useful for organic blog content.

Forget the Long Tail: Think About Specific Topics

Something you might have seen me say in the past is that “blog posts don’t rank for 2-3 keywords; they rank for hundreds of keywords.”

If you write a good guide to replacing a roof, that guide will rank for potentially thousands of keywords, many of which will be variations on the same core keyword phrases. If they aren’t treated identically in Google’s search results, it will be close enough to make no difference.

This is why I’ve been largely trying to look beyond the idea of specific keywords. The more you focus on keywords, the more artificial your content ends up looking. Writing naturally, meanwhile, will showcase that you’re writing for an audience, not for keyword-seeking robots.

Instead of looking for long-tail keyword opportunities, you should look for niche topic opportunities.

The core concept is the same: find something specific enough to have lower volume but also lower competition so you can rank for the topic where others might not have covered it.

• How to replace a commercial roof
• Can you DIY a roof replacement?
• How to replace a roof with solar panels

Niche topics, not keywords.

This is all why I generally think of long-tail keywords as not precisely a myth but just as an older paradigm for SEO. It’s why my business here is called Topicfinder, not Keywordfinder. It’s why, when you use it, you get lists of potential topic ideas, not lists of keywords you need to spin out into topic ideas.

The era of the keyword is dead. It’s all about topics of conversation, niche discussion points, and nuggets of information people want to find.

Identifying these niche topic ideas, matching them up with an audience and the search intent of that audience, and creating top-tier content to suit their needs: that’s what modern marketing is all about now.

Leave a Comment