Defining Short, Midtail and Longtail

Keywords

1. Description

2. Procedure for finding beneficial keywords for a specific category in a certain location

3. Example

4. Conclusion

5. Sources

1. Description
The initial goal of this white paper was to define short, mid tail and long tail keywords based on
their search volume according to keyword planner.
First, we researched volume of keyword traffic of category-specific keywords on a national level
across 25 industries with the highest number of businesses and compared it to the volume of
traffic of same KW when location qualifier was added. For example, the search term
“landscaper” has 12100 average monthly US traffic and “landscaper Chicago” has 260 average
monthly local traffic. While the search term “arborist” has 22200 average monthly US traffic and
“arborist Chicago” has 70 average monthly local traffic. And we continued to find examples like
this. We came to the conclusion that judging the benefit of a keyword by simply looking at its US
traffic is wrong and is skewing our data.
We also found that the numbers that Ahrefs provided are way off the numbers in Keyword
Planner, and besides that Ahrefs doesn’t have much traffic volume data on a local level.
So we devised a simple to follow procedure which allows us to find the beneficial keywords to
use in our SE optimization efforts tailored to every vertical and geo-location.
For this procedure, we rely on the data provided straight from Google using Keyword Planner.
We assumed that is true the Pareto principle (also known as 80/20 rule) that a limited number of
keywords are producing the most significant overall effect.

2. Procedure for finding beneficial keywords for a

specific category in a certain location
The first step is to enter a few specific keywords in “Search for new keywords” Tab (you should
write down all appropriate KWs you can think of).
Google provides more than 700 KWs.
Now you need to download those keywords and save it to a spreadsheet.

Then copy all of the keywords and paste them to “Multiply Keywords Lists” Tab.
Add for location qualifier the biggest city in the particular state your business is situated, and
press “Get search volume”.

Now Google returns only keywords that have local search traffic - the kind of keywords we are
interested in.
When we sort them by search volume the first 10%-20% of these KWs are most beneficial. Of
course you should check the list for any KWs that are irrelevant and remove them.

3. Example
For example let's choose the “Movers” category. When applying the local qualifier “Chicago”
google returns 178 KWs. The total monthly searches they deliver is 16410. The first 10% which
is 18 KWs deliver 12250 searches. This is 75% of searches. The next 30%, from the 19th till
the 72nd KW deliver 2990 searches, which is 18% of searches. And the last 60% of KWs, from
73rd till 178th deliver 1170 searches or 7% of searches.

4. Conclusion
Across the 25 verticles included in our research we found that the first 20% of local keywords
with most traffic produce on average 76.61% of the monthly traffic.This is very close to the exact
80/20 ratio we assumed. The graphic illustrates the % of traffic produced by 20% of the
keywords in every category.
Those are the beneficial keywords. The average number of beneficial keywords (the first 20%
of KWs with most search volume) across the 25 verticals are 26.50
The following chart illustrates the number of beneficial keywords by category.

As for answering the initial questions:

What is the minimum search volume that a KW should have to be categorized as Short/ Midtail/
Longtail, we came to the following conclusion.
The first 10% of KWs with most traffic volume are the short KWs. On average they produce
62.89% of the traffic. In the 25 categories we researched the average number of short tail
keywords are 13.61.
The mid tail are the next 30%(from 11-40%) of KWs producing on average 25.17% of traffic.
The long tail are the last 60%(from 41-100%) of KWs producing on average 11.94% of traffic.

Short Tail 10% Mid Tail 11-40% Long Tail 41-100%

Average % of Traffic 62.89 % 25.17 % 11.94 %

The following chart illustrates the number of most beneficial keywords (the first 10%) by
category.

The following graphic illustrates the distribution of search volume (in %) between the first 10%,
the middle 30% and the last 60% of the keywords.
Anton Blagov