5 common mistakes when researching keywords for SEO

Before conducting keyword research for your site, you need to know the common mistakes that businesses and SEO firms can make. Avoiding these errors can save you time, rethink your Marketing strategy and bring the right audience to your website.

#first. Choose keywords that are not related to customers

Everyone tends to choose keywords that have a lot of search results in their field but don't pay attention to whether those keywords are relevant to the target customers they target. The important thing about keyword research is that they "match" with the interests of the customers you are targeting.

The example is very simple: if you are targeting wealthy families looking for a good school for your child, then you should definitely not choose keywords like "cheap schools". Families like this will not find such keywords. Instead, optimize keywords like "best school" .

Each target group of customers will have a different need and interest , they will use different keywords to search. You need to understand your customers and remember that every searcher has a plan and is looking for something. Your page will need to give them answers.

See also: 7 types of keywords to consider when researching SEO keywords

#2. Focus on too specific keywords

If you own a large page with many different keyword combinations, you may try to optimize all possible combinations so as not to miss any choice. For example, by type, color, size, price . Make a calculation, you will see this leads to an infinite number of keywords.

Many of these combinations have very low search results, or even no one is looking for them. In addition, targeting too many keywords can distract you from important keywords. Focus on keywords that have a good and potential search volume that can help your business grow.

Quality of keywords is far more important than quantity.

Do not target keywords that are too general or too specific. It is better to target the niche keywords that users use to search and buy products (services). These are the "in reach" keywords, helping you reach your nearest customers. What are the long-tail keyword keywords (long keywords, detailed product information) associated with your industry? Google calls it the " I want to buy " moment. Once you have the best set of keywords, you can expand them to target groups with different search intentions.

# 3. Choose only a few large keywords

A mistake of many large websites is usually focused on only a few top keywords. You will only see this approach in black hat SEOs with goals like "top ranking 30 biggest keywords" because black hat SEO tactics often push rankings for a single keyword. in a certain time.

See also: Are your competitors using back hat SEO?

An online sales site with over 100,000 content pages has ever asked us to do SEO for them with a list of 30 keywords. Such SEO tactics are meaningless. 100,000 pages of content must optimize between 300,000 and 500,000 keywords to get great traffic and business growth.We often follow simple rules: each page should be optimized from 3 to 5 keywords so that the number of keywords is somewhat planned according to the amount of content.

# 4. Find keywords directly on the current page structure

When starting keyword research, many people often look at the main page and the main items on the website and start searching for keywords for these sites. Then they optimize with the keywords they find. The problem is that you can ignore many important keywords that the current page structure and content cannot cover.

The purpose of keyword research is to find all the usable keywords that potential customers use to find you, not related to the page structure. Customers can search for content related to your business while they are not available on the site. When doing good SEO, you will have to edit the page structure and create completely new sections and pages to optimize keyword groups.

# 5. Wrongly put the keyword in the wrong page

Once you've found the keyword group, you need to know where to put it on your website. This process is called "keyword allocation" and this is an important step in keyword research. A common mistake is to include keywords that are not related to pages where the content does not match the keyword or the pages do not match the user's search intent.

For example, users who search for the keyword "boarding schools in usa" are usually people who do not live in the US, so pages optimized for this keyword should show useful values ​​for Overseas families want their children to study in American schools.

On the other hand, those who search for the keyword "top private schools in upper east side" (top of the private school in the upper part of New York City) are often the ones who care about the people living around so the content of the page needs attached to their needs. The keyword "boarding schools for girls" should be placed on pages related to girls' schools.

The job is not only to put keywords into any pages but also to use keywords that match the intended search and web page copy.

See also: 12 keyword analysis tools replacing Google Keyword Tool