The 8 Most Common Keyword Research Mistakes

Without a doubt, keyword research is one of the essential search engine optimization activities, which has a major impact on the further long-term success of your digital marketing campaign. However, it often happens that when analyzing keywords, people tend to overlook some fundamental regulations. As a result, they don’t achieve the expected goals – the website doesn’t appear properly on search results. Because of this, their conversion rate does not improve. To give you some ideas about keyword research, I’m presenting this blog where you can read the 8 most common mistakes made at some point in keyword research.

1. Focusing on Irrelevant Keywords

So let’s get this settled properly from the start, if you don’t choose the proper keywords based on your potential leads, the entire SEO strategy will be worth nothing. I get it, it may sound like a cliche, but many people usually tend to forget that. If they select the wrong keywords for their campaign, they don’t get the desired search engine traffic and it impacts the conversion rate as well.

2. Ignoring Long-Tail Keywords

Unrealistic keywords and long-tail keywords are SEO poison. They prevent your websites from appearing on search engine result pages. It’s not uncommon for people to use such keywords. 

Another error that people often make is by relying on a single word such as “dresses” or “clothing” or “shoes”. These keywords won’t get you to TOP 10 search results, as these keywords are extremely generic and competitive. So, if you run a small clothing shop, you may not have a lot of chances to appear on top of search engine results with such keywords. Most probably worldwide popular brands such as Zalando, H&M, Zara, or next could rank much higher inside the search results for such keywords. So, it’s important for your marketing campaign to keep the keyword realistic.

3. Not analyzing Competitors

Competitor analysis is one of the fundamental SEO activities that should be carried out quite often. This allows you to keep an eye on what campaigns or products they’re introducing and, as a result, you’ve got a better chance of not falling behind.

If you want to fully analyze your competitors, you should additionally test which keywords appear in Google search results for them. Fortunately, there are many tools available in the market today that can help you to spy on your competitor’s keyword visibility. 

4. Ignoring Search Intent

Are you aware of search intent? Does that term make any sense for you? Ring any bells per se? Well, if you still don’t know search intent and its impact on search engine optimization, let’s discuss that.

To put it simply, “SEARCH INTENT” is the cause for which users enter a given keyword within the “search” bar. A search engine responds to the users’ needs so that they can find the exact answer to what they are looking for. Are they searching for information? Or maybe they want to visit a particular website? If you could interpret the search purpose correctly, you will understand users better and match keywords to their needs. Where is what you need to keep in mind, even if you introduce properly-optimized high-quality content but it doesn’t correspond to the searcher’s intent, you’ll probably end up not receiving any additional traffic for your website anyway.

5. Not Distinguishing Between Singular And Plural

Unfortunately, it’s one of the most common errors that lead to frequent failures. People usually don’t note that singular and plural keywords are different.

Single and plural keywords must be considered separately as they don’t compete with each other for website traffic. To give you some perspective about it, let’s talk about an online store. The best practice would be best if category pages in an online store appear in the search results in the plural (e.g. modern dresses), while product pages in the singular (e.g. long black modern evening dress). While the category page represents a set of dresses, the product page is only talking about one dress in particular. So, changing keywords from singular to plural based on the situation could work wonders for your website. When it comes to promoting services, I would recommend focusing on singular keywords (e.g. web design).

6. Focusing On One Keyword

This is another very common error that people make when writing and optimizing content for a website for a blog, but don’t really realize that. Even if your selected keyword has a very high search volume, focusing on just one keyword will take away the opportunity to rank better on different similar keywords. 

While analyzing keywords to your content material, try and locate synonyms. Include various keywords in the textual content, thanks to that the content looks more natural and doesn’t give the impression of being created just for SEO.

7. Ignoring Conversion

It occurs pretty often that customers at the beginning of our cooperation specify which key phrases they need to rank inside the search results. This is a great approach showing that a client knows what he/she wants to achieve with SEO. However, it is a common situation that a client ignores the keywords on which the website has been displayed in Google so far.

Well, if you think about it, targetting irrelevant keywords all while ignoring keywords that have the best potential to increase the conversion rate doesn’t really lead to anything great. The rule of thumb is that if a given keyword doesn’t appear on any page within your website, then most likely the keyword will be ignored by search engines too. So, there is no chance the keyword would appear on the search result pages or produce any kind of good results for you.

8. Underestimating Actual SERPs

You must be using a lot of SEO tools to do keyword analysis. There is nothing wrong with that for sure, but as long as you don’t ignore your actual SERPs at the same time. You must always keep an eye on the actual keyword rankings. If a keyword is performing better or worse and how it’s affecting your website traffic. Based on the SERP data, you can plan your content for the keywords that are not performing as well as the ones that are on top. 

Conclusions

A well-conducted keyword analysis is one of the key elements of SEO strategy. You have to take into account many factors such as the activities of your competitors and your common keywords, search intent, seasonality and so much more. Fortunately, you have many SEO tools available which will indicate the estimated traffic and keywords with the greatest potential. Unfortunately, most of them are not free of charge, and what’s more, the output is not enough – after all, the data collected from SEO tools still needs to be properly interpreted, and that’s far more complicated. Remember that while extremely important, search volume isn’t everything about a keyword. There are more things to keep in mind while finalizing keywords for your website.