The Worst Keyword Research Mistakes To Avoid (2021): One of the biggest reasons for not getting enough leads is not doing your keyword research right! This holds for the beginners and professional digital markers who fail to get the right list of keywords.

And if your conversions rate doesn’t satisfy you, maybe you should reconsider doing your keyword research first. With drastic changes in SEO marketing strategies, keyword research techniques are not the same as it has been before.

Today, search engines have got a lot smarter, and targeting your audience has got more challenging. We have come to a generation of ultra-targeting and creating pages having more specific keywords and key phrases.

We have come to a stage in which we leave our keyword research job on some research tool, and we blindly start working on the list that it has generated for us. But these tools only do a partial job, and we would be making a blunder by not optimizing those keywords further.

As per the studies, about 66% of the webmasters do their keyword research without outsourcing it. So, whether or not you are one among them, you need to avoid some common mistakes that SEO teams make while looking for the right list of keywords. Read on to know about the things you must not do while doing your keyword research.

The Worst Keyword Research Mistakes To Avoid?

1. Not considering the searchers’ intent (Keyword Research Mistakes)

While on your keyword selection, knowing your target group’s goal is the most important of all. If you don’t know whom to target, then what’s the point of choosing your keywords in the first place? Your entire business should be centred around your customers and what they want. Each of your actions must help you to step closer to attaining customer satisfaction.

Every keyword has a specific purpose, and a particular intent of your target audience is involved. Choosing irrelevant keywords that the audience won’t search for can even make you lose money on clicks while running PPC ad campaigns.

Further, publishing content that doesn’t match your consumers’ actual intentions can negatively affect your website. Apart from having low conversion rates, your customer engagement rates will suffer, increasing bounce rates, average dwell time, and other such metrics.

2. Ignoring the SERPs (Keyword Research Mistakes)

This is one of the top reasons why SEO strategies stand ineffective even after putting in all efforts. Often, SEO professionals spend way too much time comparing several keyword types of research tools to get the best shortlist. However, they fail to focus on the more important stuff – considering the SERPs being one. Professionals tend to take notice of the top 10 search results, which can have the highest potential to give you some of the best and profitable keywords.

Of course, keyword research tools will be quite helpful in the process; however, you have to do your study and further customize the list generated by these platforms. Also, considering the dynamic market that we have, today’s keyword lists might not be useful tomorrow. So it would help if you kept on looking for the best key phrases to survive the competition.

Ensure your content matches the search query your consumers are typing in and has strong relevance to your buyers’ intent. Keep the following things in mind while looking at the top 10 pages on your SERPs –

• What kind of content is ranking for a specific keyword? Check whether it is a blog post or other content like product pages, user guides, etc.
• Take care of your meta titles and meta descriptions and include at least your primary keywords in these areas.
• Finally, analyze the average content length for each of your keywords while looking for the top 3-10 result pages on your search engine.

3. Focusing only on generic keywords (Keyword Research Mistakes)

Living in a highly competitive market of ‘do or die’ situations, there’s no place for sticking to the old times’ generic keywords. Gone are those days, when the digital media was only a place for gaining information rather than buying. Today, we need to focus on ultra-targeting techniques, primarily through optimizing and working on specific and more drilled down keywords. Besides, precise keywords allow advertisers to write more custom content. Ad per the Dragon Search Marketing reports, 61% of the consumers are highly influenced by custom content, thus changing their buying motives.

The key to rank higher on the search engine result pages is to write more detailed and informative content on your keywords, and for that, you will require more narrowing down of your topic. Your audience has become smarter than ever, and they won’t readily spare their hard-earned money unless you hit the bull’s eye! Also, do thorough research on the alternatives for a particular search term, because everybody won’t search for the same product in the same way.

4. Inserting your keywords after writing the content (Keyword Research Mistakes)

It would be best if you had your keywords at hand while starting to write the content, and your web page should be focusing on promoting a specific keyword. Of course, you can include keywords later on after publishing your content. However, trying to fit in your keywords according to what the content is about isn’t a good idea. It should be the other way round – your content must be focused around your main keyword as well as the secondary keywords in that group.

Making your blog SEO-ready after your page is created life is not a practical content marketing approach, and it is not going to bring in good leads. Your keyword research should be followed by effective implementation into your blog posts or other web content, and then only should you consider publishing them.

Moreover, forcefully fitting your keywords into your articles would not give them a natural flow and might seem unnatural, thus hampering the content quality. So, sort out your main keyword, along with secondary and LSI keywords well before you even start thinking of your topic and make an outline.

5. Only making competitor analysis (Keyword Research Mistakes)

Yes, of course, you will do your competitor research and pull out all your relevant keywords on which your competitors are ranking. But relying solely on this and not doing any fine-tuning on your part would be a great mistake. You cannot achieve business success by merely mimicking their activities. Devise unique plans of your own and make your keyword research. Make sure that your keywords reflect your brand image and personality, which won’t match that with your rivals.

Moreover, it doesn’t make sense to follow what other brands are doing, since ranking depends on many different factors rather than merely using the right keywords, such as website optimization, publishing quality content. Also, there may be a good chance that even the leading and most successful brand in your industry might miss out on the best keywords. So, they should not influence your decisions in this case.

6. Neglecting long-tail keywords (Keyword Research Mistakes)

When short keywords used to work are long gone, the modern-day SEO professionals should work on long-tail keywords. Google search patterns have undergone sea changes, and today, potential buyers prefer typing in longer key phrases to get more detailed and to-the-point answers.

Indeed, long-tail keywords don’t generally have a high search volume. This is because they usually remain at the secondary or tertiary positions on the sales funnel, with the main keywords atop. Also, the head keywords are in the face of much higher competition, and hence the marketers tend to shortlist them first.

However, choosing keywords with high volumes also means that they have a much steeper competition, and you have to work way harder than the long-tail keywords. On the contrary, the latter enables businesses to improve their website rankings in the SERPs, thus boosting conversions.

7. Focusing only on keyword research (Keyword Research Mistakes)

Only doing keyword research won’t do your business any good. You may have put in all your efforts in choosing the most appropriate keyword list, but all your efforts might go to waste if you don’t keep optimizing their respective web pages regularly. Keyword research is not the only thing you must be focusing on, and you need to consider the following factors as well –

• Internal Linking
• URL Structure
• Web Page Optimization
• Anchor Text Optimization
• Content Structure
• User Journey
• JavaScript Limitations
• Copy Mark-up

Getting your foundations right will help you go a long way, and needless to say that a well-optimized website will increase your visitor engagement rates. You can also consider including videos, infographics, charts, or animated images to make your content look impressive and exciting for the reader.

Conclusion

Driving organic traffic is not an easy game, and you need to play it with more carefulness while being more active. It’s effortless to get distracted at the beginning with so many options at hand, but having a constant focus and, of course, a clear direction in your business will surely help you crack the nut!

Not everybody may have the assistance of an SEO expert, and that is why we are here to help you take the right path. Once you get hold of the right keywords, nothing can stop you from being the talk of the town. However, make sure to keep working on your keywords regularly to remain ahead of your competitors.

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