Keyword research, planning, management, and selection all play major roles in determining your SEO rank which then interprets the success of your business. Settling on strong, relevant, specific keywords are extremely important to your SEO as they will able to facilitate the right kind of traffic to your website. Anyone who visits your website should make some sort of purchase or at the very least become a subscriber. Yet, keywords can be a very tricky thing and not every business knows which keywords to settle on. However, selecting keywords that are totally wrong for your business can lead to disastrous results. Here are some choices you want to avoid when picking keywords for your business.
First selecting very competitive one-word choices. Settling on obvious one-word choices is not a good keyword decision. If you sell home appliances and use the word ‘home’ or sell bicycles and your word is ‘bike,’ expect to rarely show up, if ever on any search engine results page (SERP). What’s wrong with making such a choice is the competition over the Internet is incredibly high and unforgiving. Settling on just one-word will cause you to have spend lots and lots of money just to keep your business afloat.
Another keyword blunder is settling on vague keyword phrases. Say you sell a specific granola bar with certain ingredients in it that helps with weight loss. However if you make your SEO operate based on the word ‘weight-loss,’ it isn’t likely that you’ll receive a constant flow of traffic to your website. Weight-loss means different things to different people who will be looking for all kinds of information when they search for the item. Even if you do get some kind of ranking, traffic will not convert to sales very often.
One mistake a business could make is having a keyword for an item or service they don’t even provide or sell. This goes beyond all good sense. If your competitor is selling a service or item you don’t provide yourself do not suggest that you do. While this may temporarily raise your ranking you will experience a quick downfall in no time once people catch on to what you’re doing and refuse to visit a website that lies to them.
One other error is using wrong location based keywords. ‘Painting solutions Florida,’ is a strong keyword that brings in the right kind of traffic for instance, but if you only offer such services in that state/city then it would be illogical to consider every location-based keyword suggestion generated by some application. Instead focus your energy and resources on keywords that generate the right leads.
Now in order to have an effective keyword research plan that avoids all these mistakes you should analyze your competition, select long tail phrases, see where competition is low, and always review keywords every month or so to see which remain relevant and specific and which do not.
