Content is king!

Well, everybody knows how important content is when it comes to promoting your product and services online. While content is king what should be the queen?

Keyword research!

Yes, you heard it right.

Keyword research is the next big aspect that determines your success when it comes to product & service promotion. Here, best keyword research tools play an important role to help you find right keywords for your niche. While keyword research is an important factor considered by industry experts and SEOs, still people make mistakes while searching for the right keyword.

In this article, we have discussed 7 common keyword research mistakes that you should avoid right now.

Common Keyword Research Mistakes

Avoiding Buyer Persona Research: While Buyer Persona is considered to be a “semi-fictional character that represents your ideal customer”, avoiding it while researching keywords for your business could be a serious mistake you are doing. Here, most businesses spend considerable time understanding their buyer persona based on research, data, and analysis. Using this understanding of buyer persona for your business will help you do proper keyword research and understand what the search pattern is and what terms is your ideal customers are using while searching for your product or service. Thus, you should be vigilant to buyer persona while researching for related keywords.

Avoiding User’s Buyer Journey: Every user before buying a product or service goes through 4 critical stages of the purchase funnel. It starts with attention (A), interest (I), desire (D), and action (A) or AIDA model. This model is indicative of the steps a customer goes through in the process of buying a product or service. In addition to this, the next mistake SEO professionals do while researching keywords are neglecting the buyer’s journey while using wrong keywords for different stages. For example, if a user is searching broad term like “handbags” he might be interested to know about handbags to buy or just to check them out. But when he is searching for “Prada handbags stores near me”, the probabilities are high that he is going to buy the product. Thus, the user’s buyer journey also plays a crucial role while searching for the right keywords.

Avoiding User Intent: With the above example, one can understand how crucial it is to understand the user intent and use the right keywords in their contents. Giving another example, if a user is searching for “suits”, he might be interested in buying the product, see the designs, or for some other reasons. At the same time, if he searches for “Men’s suits stores”, the intent becomes clearer that he could buy the product sooner or later. So, you should be clear before writing the content to select keywords that match your buyer persona, buyer’s journey, and user intent.

Missing on Competition Factor: If you want to rank for highly competitive factors then you need to wait for long and it is true. Well, this is another mistake most SEOs do. Here, being unrealistic they want to rank for keywords that are highly competitive in nature without working on the basics. Instead, selecting highly competitive keywords one should give attention to keywords that are less competitive in nature and has fare searches. For example, ranking for keyword “sedan cars” could be tough for you instead of ranking for keyword “sedan cars showrooms in xyz location” when you are a car dealer.

Neglecting Importance of Long-Tail Keywords: Competing for broad match keywords has always been a tough task for site owners instead of long-tail keywords. Thus, you shouldn’t be doing this mistake to avoid losing money and wasting efforts unnecessarily. Here, you should start with long-tail keywords and gradually move to use broad match keywords. Alternatively, you can target long-tail keywords as your head term or focus keyword and use broad match terms as LSI keywords. Here, you can also create pillar pages.

Also Read: 5 Types of Keywords That Brings You More Traffic & Business

Avoiding Best Content Writing Techniques: One of the best methods to write keyword optimized content is to follow the best content writing techniques. Here, pillar pages and topic cluster could help you tremendously. In this content writing technique, you need to write one longer form content (pillar page) where you can target the main question/s of your target audience. At the same time, you need to answer all related queries in subsequent cluster pages and link back them to pillar page. Here, the user gets all the information he needs and there will be high chances that you will be ranking for desired keywords. Thus, you should give importance to selecting the right keywords for pillar page and cluster pages.

Targeting for Traffic Instead of Conversion: This is another keyword research mistake that most SEOs do. Here, they give high importance to keywords that bring them traffic and neglect keywords that could convert more. So, the next time you search for a keyword on the planner make sure that the keyword converts for sales. Ultimately, revenue is something you work for!

TL;DR

While keyword research plays an important role when it comes to effective marketing of your product & services, it becomes crucial to do it right. Missing on critical factors like buyer persona research, users’ buyer journey, user intent, competition factor, and other important factors could make keyword research less effective. Thus, it is suggested you should keep tab on all these important factors to avoid common keyword research mistakes. You should also ensure that you use proper long-tail keywords and keywords that brings you more conversions.
So, these were few common keyword research mistakes that you should avoid to get effective marketing results. If you ever occurred such mistakes, then feel free to share your experience and tell us how you dealt with it.