Keyword research, the most fundamental and one of the most important if not the most important task in any SEO campaign. You get this step wrong and you will end up wasting time, energy and money in going after the wrong niche or demographic. Even if you get the niche right and your keyword research wrong, you will end up with one of the two scenarios described below.
- Zero to minimal traffic - Very little to nil organic traffic because there is nobody searching for that keyword/key phrase that you spent a ton optimizing your website for.
- Zero conversions - No conversions because you have optimized your website for a keyword / phrase that is not a buying keyword.
You will not believe how many webmasters and even seasoned SEO Consultants and firms get this part wrong. If you are a doing it yourself kind of person, I would urge you to outsource this part of your campaign to a SEO firm or SEO Consultant that knows what they/he/she are doing. Many if not most of the SEO Companies offer keyword research as part of their SEO Service portfolio but finding the right firm is another story in itself best left described in a follow on post.
I have seen many SEO firms that push relatively easy to rank keywords onto clients simply because it makes their job easy. A popular tactic is to offer Guaranteed SEO Services and as part of the keyword list pick 10 real easy long tail keywords out of say a total of 15. The Guaranteed Service is deemed successful if the SEO firm ranks the website on the search engine result pages for 60% of the total keyword list. You can see where I’m going with this. A client that is not educated enough about keywords blindly trusts the SEO firm and will even be convinced because they will see some high competition keywords in the target list. Sadly the keyword list is also padded with enough long tail keywords of little value to easily meet the requirement of the guaranteed service.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for long tail keywords. Infact long tails often end up as buying keywords than your typical one or two word key phrase. This is where a little keyword research is necessary. This is why I believe that getting the right data on a list of keywords upfront that are targeted to your business or niche is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization.
Remember keyword competition is not always an indicator of conversion. Let us walk through an example. Assume you are an SEO like me :). As an SEO what is the first keyword that comes to mind to try and rank your website for? Yep, that’s right. It’s “SEO” The holy grail for all SEO Companies. Let’s look at the competition. At the time of writing this there are approximately 278,000,000 results in the Google index for the keyword SEO as you can see from the image below.
