Keyword research is an essential part of any online marketing campaign. Think of doing proper keyword research as laying the foundation for your brand new mansion – not having a proper foundation means your palace isn’t going to hold for very long. To help you save you time, here are 3 keyword research mistakes to watch out for:
1. You’re using broad match only to conduct keyword research. When you use the Google Keyword Tool for keyword research, it automatically selects ‘broad match’ when displaying your keyword search volume. This means that the estimated long tail search volume is included with your results. For example, the keyword ‘light shows’, currently has a local broad volume of 60,500 searches a month – not bad, right? But if we turn off ‘broad match’ and switch to ‘exact match, the local exact volume will show that the keyword gets 1,600 searches a month. Not as good as we expected, eh?
For the most part, the exact volume is what you want to be looking at because you want to get an idea of what people are actually typing in ‘light shows’ without any extra keywords. Make sure you look at the exact volume for all your keyword research or else you might be kicking yourself in months to come when you find out that your super keyword is in fact a weakling keyword.
2. You’re ignoring intent of keyword. Let’s say you have an e-commerce store that sells dog toys. You do some keyword research and you find that the keyword ‘dog’ gets 201,000 local exact searches a month – great! One problem: that keyword isn’t tailored towards your site and is in fact very general. People searching for ‘dog’ could have all kinds of intent:
- Dog research
- Dog food research
- Dog clothes
- Dog parks
- Dog training
You get the picture.
You want your target keywords to be relevant to your site so they can help achieve your ultimate goal: more conversions. So for this example, perfect keyword targets would be “dog toy reviews”, “best dog toys”, “dog toys”, “dog toys online”, and so on.
3. You’re only targeting the headtail keywords. This leverages #2 – headtail keywords with heavy volume like ‘dog’ get an impressive monthly search volume, but the intent is all over the place. By that I mean searchers can be trying to research different dogs, dog food, tog toys, dog hospitals, and more. In addition, competition for those keywords is fierce – the Top 10 on search result pages often are established brands with many links. And that means they’re very tough to dethrone. You really want to laser target your keywords so you can get users what they want. If you help others get what they want, you’ll get what you want. Action Step: Research the less competitive, longtail keywords.
They are less competitive and often convert better. Example:’iphone’ vs ‘iphone 4s deal’.
What other keyword research mistakes should people be mindful about?
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