Creating a website online, you have probably heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). But do you know what does it mean exactly? SEO helps you with getting your website on the first page of search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.It might sound hard to achieve that but it is actually pretty easy if you know the basics. For example, knowing how to write the description of your property so that when guests search for holiday lets, your website is the one they see first. To achieve that you need to know what keywords to use. There are two types of keywords in SEO – short tail keywords and long tail keywords.  In this blog post, we will discuss the pros and cons of using those two types of keywords.

Short tail keywords  

Short tail keywords are usually terms consisting of one to three words.  For example, if a guest has a pet and they want to bring them along on their holiday they will search for a “pet-friendly B&B/Hotel”. As you can see this term is not very descriptive as it is the first thing a guest will search for. Thus, the competition for such short tail keywords is very high, as they are searched more often. You might think that if you use short tail keywords you can get more organic traffic to your website, which is true. However, how much of this traffic will convert into bookings? You might end up with a website, which gets hundreds of clicks a week, but they might lead to just one or two bookings.

Long tail keywords  

Long tail keywords are 3-5 keyword phrases. In the above case, if your property is pet-friendly and it has a unique location you can describe it as “a pet-friendly B&B/Hotel near Lake District”. Being that specific you increase your chance of being noticed by the same guest who now is looking for a pet-friendly B&B near Lake District. The key to finding out what long tail keywords to use is to think about your unique quality that customer might search for. Is it your location? Are you family friendly? Do you accept pets in your property? Do you offer vegetarian/vegan breakfast?  If you are struggling with coming up with long tail keywords you can use Google Keyword Planner.

Another advantage to using long tail keywords is the fact that they are much more easily ranked by search engines, as there is less competition. And if someone is really searching for a holiday stay using such specific terms, then they are more likely to become your next guests. Thus, our advice is to use more long tail keywords than short tail ones.

Do beware of “keyword stuffing”, if you are using too many terms which are not relevant just so you can get a higher ranking, this will be flagged by the search engines and your page can even get a negative ranking.