Keyword – A very prominent word in the SEO world. But do you know that there are different kinds of keywords? Yes, and each of them has its importance. You need to incorporate the keywords according to their significance. It is very important to identify these keywords and to rank on the first page of the search engine. You must be wondering why these keywords are of so many types? Well, the answer is – unpredictable user behavior. We do not know how the user is going to search on Google. Let us suppose if somebody is searching for shoes online the searches can be of different types. It can be like, “shoes”, “shoes for men”, “sports shoes for men”, “buy shoes online” or “Nike Shoes”. We never know how our next buyer will make the searches. So the keywords can be of different kinds. We need to do a proper analysis of these keywords and we should be able to identify the distinction in all of them. It is an important aspect of digital marketing. So, let us check out the different types of keywords.
1. Short-tail keyword
As the name explains, short-tail keywords are those keywords that have a lesser amount of words in them. They are usually made up of three words or less. Sometimes they are also known by another term which is the head keyword. Short-tail keywords have a huge amount of search volume but they are highly competitive at the same time. It is believed that people use short-tail keywords in their searches when they are at the initial step of researching for stuff. That’s why they become very difficult to select and you need to be very accurate in the selection of these keywords. Take an example when a person searches for “orange”. They might be searching for what nutrients are provided by an orange, or how much calories an orange has. You cannot expect short-tail keywords to convert well because they are at the sinfant stage of any kind of inline research.
2. Long-tail keyword
Long-tail keywords are made up of more than 3 words. They are also much more specific than short-tail keywords. On one hand, they mostly have much lower search volume when compared to short-tail keywords. But on the other side, they make it up by being much less competitive.
One thing which is very positive about long-tail keywords is that they can easily pinpoint the search intent, which means that whenever the user is making searches using these long and detailed keywords, they are usually in a mood to make a purchase!
3. Long-term evergreen keyword
Long-term evergreen keywords are those that are relevant all the time. They are like evergreen fashion trends which can fluctuate but never fade. Hence their search volume might go up and down from time to time but there won’t be extreme changes. They are specifically based on the interest like “How to gain the weight” or something like that.
4. Short-term fresh keyword
The short term fresh keywords as their name suggests, come from the latest trends like the latest movie, a new but popular actor Etc. Fresh keywords are related to those things that are hyped recently.
5. Customer defining keyword
Every business has a targeted person. They need it to get a better conversion rate. If they don’t, they are going to get lesser profit and more expenses on advertising. And sooner they are going to get hit badly. Customer defining keywords are derived from the fact that your target customers are mostly male or female or how old they are. What are their demographics? What do they do? It’s better to be more detailed so that you can use all the available information to your advantage.
6. Product defining keyword
These keywords explain and describe your product. People who search with a product defining keyword are looking for something very specific. And that’s what makes them more challenging as you can either be exactly what they want or not at all.
7. LSI keyword
LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing keywords are thematic keywords that are very closely related to your main keyword. Just look at it this way, your main keyword is orange; its LSI keywords could be “orange juice”, “organic oranges”, “orange nutrition”, etc.
8. Geo-targeting keyword
By using Geo- targeting keywords you have the option to target a specific neighborhood, city, state, or even country. These types of keywords are especially very useful for smaller local businesses where people want to attract the most relevant customers, the local customers, to your storefront.
9. Intent targeting keywords
When people need some general information on any specific item or topic, they use internet targeting keywords. So the use of keywords such as benefits of, ways to, facts Etc is very helpful to bring them to your site. These keywords usually appear in informational contents and have their main aim to educate the searcher.
Summary:
These were the major types of keywords. However, there is a different type of keywords that plays a very important role in paid digital marketing. These are “Negative Keywords”. These keywords are used to prevent the ad to be displayed from certain keywords. For example, if you sell women’s shoes then you definitely do not want to display your ad to somebody who has searched “shoes for men online”. So for you “shoes for men online” is a negative keyword.
Other than that all the major keyword types are discussed above.
