Medium tail keywords are those keywords which lie between short and long tail keywords. Short tail keywords are generally thought of as having no more than two/three words in them. While a keyword with four or more keywords in it is generally thought of as a long tail keyword. So an example of a short tail keyword might be “running shoes”. An example of a long tail keyword would be “nike air running shoes”.
Short tail keywords are the most competitive keywords for traffic. Since there’s a lot of content created around short tail keywords, they offer the highest amount of competition on Google for organic search traffic. There’s also a high search volume of traffic for short tail keywords. Long tail keywords offer less competition, but they also generally have much less traffic than their shorter tail counterparts.
Medium tail keywords therefore can offer the best of both worlds: both traffic and low competition in the SERPS – search engine results pages.
- Short tail keywords: 1-2 keywords
- Medium Tail Keywords: 3-4 keywords
- Long tail keywords: 4+ keywords
Medium Tail Keywords – Why Use Them?
Medium tail keywords have more traffic than long tail keywords but less competition than short tail keywords. So for some content creators, medium tail keywords are the best of both worlds. They give a blogger/content creator an opportunity to rank their content for those keywords which get traffic in higher volumes than if they went for long tail keywords.
With long tail keywords there’s much less competition in the search results. So a blogger, for example, has a much greater chance at getting found on the first pages of the SERPS. However, even with a first place listing for a long tail keyword, that might only mean a tiny amount of traffic. A long tail keyword such as “nike men’s air zoom structure 22 running”, for example, might have very low competition in the SERPS. However, looking at Google’s keyword planner, it also only gets 10 monthly searches. When you divide this search volume with the top few websites on Google, you’ll only get a slice of this even if you rank at the top of Google for it.
Here’s some examples of what might fall into the medium tail keywords:
As you can see, these shorter phrases have a larger search volume. So if you managed to rank content for any of these, you would have a larger amount of search traffic, even when you consider that you’ll be sharing the traffic with other competing websites.
Medium Tail Keywords Vs Short Tail
Have a look at Google’s keyword planner results for shorter tail keywords within this same topic.
The search term “Nike Pegasus”, for example gets 301,000 monthly searches. However, with such a competitive search term, there are bound to be many competing websites for this search term. As such it will be unlikely you can get your content to the first page of Google, or the other search engines.
Medium tail keywords on the other hand offer a much better opportunity to get your content listed on the search engine results pages, and get enough traffic to make it worth your while.
Summary
While short term keyword phrases offer a huge volume of traffic, it can be very difficult getting your content ranking for those particular phrases because of the huge competition. Your chances of landing your content on page one of Google are therefore very low. So even with a lot of work, your content is very unlikely to get more visibility from the search engines.
Long tail keywords offer the least amount of competition on Google and the other search engines. You can rank content more easily for those particular keywords. However, with longer tail keywords the search volume is very low. Even if you rank your content at the very top, you’ll still be sharing low search volume with the other top ranking websites. So for a monthly search volume of only 10 searches, you’ll likely only get a percentage of this amount landing on your website.
Medium tail keywords are those which sit between the longer tail and shorter tail keywords. They typically fall between 3 and 4 words in length. Medium tail keywords can offer the best of both worlds for content creators: less competition and more traffic.