Mistakes to Avoid in Keyword Research
Miguel Nicolás
14/11/2023
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There are mistakes to avoid in keyword research that you might be making without realizing. Let's solve them.
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One of the basic tools in digital marketing strategy is keyword research. That's why it's so important to perform detailed and correctly executed research, minimizing any possible errors in your keyword research.
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Do We Still Need Keyword Research?
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Absolutely! It's essential for SEO, SEM, and even when creating a content calendar or defining information architecture.It's much more than just a list of terms that are more or less relevant to a business, with their corresponding estimated monthly search volumes. It's deeper than that because it represents the way customers know and search for your products or your business itself.When our keywords for ad campaigns and the words we use to attract organic traffic in search engines are in sync, we avoid errors that could damage our visibility and effectiveness.
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5 Mistakes to Avoid in Keyword Research
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After this brief introduction, let's get straight to the point. If you detect you are making any of these mistakes in your keyword research, we encourage you to try to solve them as soon as possible.
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#1 – Focusing Only on Core Keywords
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Core keywords, or head tail, are the basic terms of any business, usually short (phrases of 2 or 3 words) and very direct.
For example: if you have an online shoe store, the core keywords could be; "online shoes" or "internet shoe store".What happens if our keyword research only includes this type of search?Several things:- We are targeting more competitive words.
- It's more expensive in SEM and takes longer in SEO.
- We lose potential reach
- We are only attacking the lower phases of the conversion funnel (BOFU).
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#2 – Focusing Only on Long Tail Keywords
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It's exactly the opposite of what we just discussed. As you can imagine, long tail keywords are terms with a more complex structure (with more words) and refer to more specific concepts.Following the previous example of the shoe store, it could be: "buy orange sandals with heels" or "satin shoes for weddings".If we focus excessively on these keywords:
- We'll rank quickly, but we'll generate less traffic.
- We'll need to work on many landing pages to achieve a significant volume of visits.
- We may target products that could be “too niche” (which could be intentional, in which case it's an advantage).
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#3 – Not Tailoring Content to Search Intentions
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Keywords can be divided into several groups, depending on their purpose.We usually talk about:
- Navigational Keywords: used to locate the address of a physical store or a website.
- Informational Keywords: as the name suggests, these search strings are used to obtain data or information about a product or brand.
- Transactional Keywords: directly focused on the final sale.
- Branded Keywords: for returning customers or potential ones who already know our business and products.
What do I mean by not adapting the content to search intention?Let's go back to shoes as an example: the goal would be to position the home page with our brand's keywords, "women's shoes" towards a category, "women's stiletto shoes" in a subcategory, "the best shoes for a cocktail" in a blog post, "store email [brand]" on our contact page... and so on. -
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If we don't take this into account when making our traffic acquisition strategy, effectiveness will plummet because we are not offering a relevant result to user.It's a keyword research mistake because the landing page has not been planned appropriately.
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#4 – Creating Content First and Forcing Keywords Afterward
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Keyword research should be a document that everyone involved in the online project knows by heart (or at least, keeps very present).It's crucial that they consult and use it when writing any text.Yes: it's true that later you can edit a product listing or a blog post, but once indexed by Google, it forces us to edit and then push to the search engine. It will always be less effective.
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#5 – Obsessing Over Volume
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If you've managed to top the rankings for 10 keywords that bring you 600 visits a month and generate 150 sales, those are the ones that matter to you. What use is placing 1,000 keywords in the top positions if they then don't work to sell or, at the very least, to provide brand recognition?
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Not all projects need to have hundreds of thousands of visits a month.It is highly recommended to balance those keywords that are really going to benefit the business, even if they are not the most searched each month, with others that give us visibility.In any case: business dictates SEO, and that is also important to be engraved in one's mind.
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Did you find it interesting? Would you like to read a second post with more mistakes to avoid in keyword research? Stay tuned to our blog!
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Images | Created by AI