Keyword research is like the foundation of your house. Make a mistake and your house goes tumbling down. Wasted time, wasted resources, and wasted opportunity. What are the most common keyword research mistakes that cause business to fail with their Internet marketing campaign?
1. Using the broad match instead of exact match
Google keyword tool is defaulted to broad match which has caused a lot of confusion to researchers. The broad search gives you a lot of related and vaguely related terms that match your main keyword. It is useful for someone who is not very familiar with the niche and in the process of looking for related keywords that users use to find niche related information. The exact search is more specific and will give you the most accurate number of searches.
For example, ‘office management program’ on broad match shows a global search of 22,200 and only 22 on exact match. If you have used the broad match type, you would expect that if you can rank high on ‘office management program’, you’d get at least 45% of 22,200 traffic to your site. Wrong. You’ll get a maximum of 10 people visiting your site from that keyword. I know. This was the first mistake I ever did. I targeted ‘office management training’ hoping to get at least 3,000 visitors from that keyword if I get my webpage on top of search results. After optimizing the page, I got to the first page of search results and the only traffic I’ve been getting from that keyword is about 4 to 5 visitors. It’s such a shame. But that was a valuable lesson.
2. The competition column
The competition column on Google keyword tool gives you a ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’ data. For example, in line with ‘office management training’, the competition column shows high.
Anyone who doesn’t understand that this tool was built for AdWords would mistakenly take this data as ‘office management training’ has a high competition, therefore, it’s going to be difficult to rank high on a keyword with too much competition. Wrong again. The competition column gives an idea of how many advertisers are bidding for such keyword. It doesn’t reflect the competition based on the number of webpages that target such keyword.
This mistake can drive your campaign to a mess. There could be potential keywords that you might have missed because you thought that there was too much competition, while you are targeting a relatively competitive keyword because you thought that there was less competition.
3. Plural keywords instead of singular
When people search online, most of them use the singular form.
Most eCommerce websites use the plural form on their website because they are thinking of the volume of their products. An example of an eCommerce webpage is “cheap digital cameras”.
Google is good at determining that a plural and singular keyword is the same and should therefore give you the same result. Try it on Google and you would be surprised to see a slightly different result. Target the singular form. Get into the minds of an average user and you would understand why.
What keyword research mistakes have you encountered before? Share it with us and let’s talk about it.
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