What’s Wrong With Your SEO Keyword Research?

SEO Keyword research is one of those things that we believe we know how to do when we actually don’t. I thought keyword research is all about finding keywords that have a high monthly search volume and low competing pages. But, I was wrong. Yes, finding long tail keywords or phrases, those with 3 words or more, and high monthly search volume do work. You want them so that you get your work displayed in the search engines for those specific keywords. Be it for your blog or site. The problem is, many people, including me, make a mistake by believing that’s all to it to keyword research, when it’s not. So, what’s wrong with your seo keyword research? Read on.

1. Ignoring Exact Phrase Search

Many people just type in their keywords into Google Search and Google Keyword Tool when doing seo keyword research. It works fine on a certain level. The problem is, it doesn’t give you an accurate result. So, what you need to do is typing in your long tail keywords under quotation marks. For example, “dog training”. When you type in the word dog training into Google search (with no quotation marks), Google might tell you that the keywords have 12 million competing pages. But, when you type in “dog training”, you might discover that Google only show 1 million competing pages. This is because when  you’re not using quotation marks, Google is displaying sites that are using related terms, synonyms, etc. Those are fake competition.

You have to do the same when you’re doing your seo keyword research inside Google Keyword Tool. Change the Match Type of your keywords to Exact. This will reveal the actual monthly search number you can expect from that specific keywords.

2. Not Measuring the Strength of Competition

The number of competitors in Google search is not the only thing we need to worry about. There’s another factor called the strength of competition. The strength of the competition is measured by many factors. This include Page Rank (PR), page reputation, the site authority, the number of incoming links, the page rank of those incoming links, the keyword density (relevance of contents), and other factors. If the strength of the competition is low, it’s easy for you to get the top spots in Google, even if there are a lot of competing pages.

So, how do you go about measuring the strength of your competitors? I, myself, use Keyword Elite 2.0 and Traffic Travis to help me. But if you’re a Mac user or don’t want to install any of the two software, use SEO Quake, a Firefox add-on. Using SEO Quake, you can see the Page Rank of a site, keyword density, and the number of incoming links (look at the Yahoo version (Y!L), not Google) to the site. If you think you can beat them, go for it.

3. Being Too Greedy

Getting all your keywords to the top of Google SERPs is fantastic. But, let’s just start with one, shall we? Many people are spreading their keyword optimization and link building efforts into many different keywords in many different pages in their site. This might’ve worked in a very low competition niches, which usually means they’re not that profitable as well. But in the highly competitive niche, like internet marketing or technology, you can’t do that. There are too many competitors who have the skill and knowledge to rank high in Google. The only way to beat them is by, contrary to popular belief, putting all your eggs in one basket. Keep generating back links into the keywords in one of your pages until you rank up high. One keyword on the first spot is better than 10 keywords ranking on the 2nd page of Google search.

4. Choosing Keywords with No Commercial Value

What’s the most profitable keywords in the internet marketing niche? If you say, make money online, you’re wrong. That keyword has a high search volume but it doesn’t convert. You’ll only get, what I call, eyeball traffic. Depending on how you’re trying to make money online, eyeball traffic can be totally useless to you. If you’re focusing on Adsense and maybe PPM (pay per mille/thousands) ads, it’s good to have eyeball traffic. But if you’re trying to make money off affiliate income, focusing your effort on keywords like make money online is ineffective and time-wasting.

First, it’s tough to get the top ranking because every internet marketers and bloggers wants that keywords, usually for some egoistic reason (See I’m no.1 for that tough keywords!). Second, it’s a non converting keyword. Meaning, your visitors who visit your site using that keyword won’t usually buy from you. So, instead, of choosing the eyeball traffic keywords, find keywords that are problem solution or product names types. For example, keyword elite 2.0 review (a product name), how to get more traffic (a problem solution), etc. To help you find keywords with commercial value, try Microsoft OCI.

These are some mistakes that I have made when doing seo keyword research. If you realize that you’re still making any one of them, it’s time to stop and change your approach to keyword research. Feel free to comment or tweet it if you like it.

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