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Get Your Keywords On-Target by Avoiding These Mistakes

Learn from The Top Five Mistakes Made When Choosing Keywords to Target – and Find Out How to Avoid Them

When you’re building a strategy to get visitors to come to your site, your choice of keywords to focus on are among the most important ones you’ll have to make. If you focus on the wrong keyword, you will focus on creating the wrong content, and could even take you in pursuit of less effective link building options.

It doesn’t matter if you’re doing the work yourself or if you’ve hired a professional to do it for you – getting even the best results for the wrong keyword will not bring you the kind of results that bring you viable prospects.

(Although hopefully if a professional is helping you, they’ll advise you to target better keywords. Do yourself a favor – if one does, seriously consider their advice.)

In my time helping companies with overall traffic solutions that include search, these are the mistakes I see most often. I’ll also discuss a few tips you can use to avoid or correct them.

Mistake #1 – Choosing Keywords that are too difficult

I’m not saying it’s impossible to rank for the word “jobs”. However, there are several things to consider here. First, it would be exceedingly difficult and could take years, especially if you’re working with a shoestring budget. Even then, it’s improbable that you’re going to knock a site like Monster or Career Builder out of their spot. Second, it’s woefully untargeted, and untargeted keywords get you people who aren’t even sure what they want yet.

Finally, there are so many easier choices out there that bring you much more traffic.

Think about the last time you were looking for a job. You probably typed in “post a resume”,  “job search” or even the exact position you were seeking. Or you looked for a site where you could look for jobs. There are lots of good reasons not to pursue single word keyword phrases, but you’ll probably find your own experience to be convincing enough.

But just in case it isn’t, here’s a quick story.

One of my clients gave me a reason why he wanted to target the keyword “travel”. He told me, “my customers are the greenest of the green.”
Here’s what I told him.

My mother is not a big web person. Out of the last ten years, it’s only in the past two that she’s had even a slight understanding of what I’m “doing on the computer”.

I’ve recently had to show her how to attach files to an email.

And even she knows that she’s not going to find her favorite pair of Manolo Blanik’s by typing in the word “shoe”.

How to avoid this mistake:

Give your future customers and clients at minimum the same credit for brains that you give yourself. If you want the latest Stephen King novel, you don’t type in “book” because you don’t want just any book.

Also, when you’re doing keyword research, don’t just look at numbers of searches, look at difficulty, too. And if you’re tempted to target the hardest keyword anyway, remember – it doesn’t matter how many visitors come from a keyword you’ll never rank for – zero traffic by any other method is just as bitter.

Mistake #2 – Choosing Keywords that are too easy

I’ve witnessed several people who had mistake number one figured out, then target keywors that are too easy, thinking that they’ve bested the search engines. But it’s just a whole different type of wrong.

Yes, you want to target keywords that are easy enough to attain, but ONLY targeting the very easiest keywords does not a search engine strategy make.

It’s not just that it’s hard to find enough low-traffic but highly-targeted keywords to generate enough traffic to be worth the effort. Easier keywords typicially (though not always) bring less traffic.

There’s also all the money you’re leaving on the table. Sometimes targeting a slightly harder keyword can double your traffic.

How to avoid this mistake:

When choosing your keyword, you want to strike an elegant balance between the difficulty of the keyword, and the amount of traffic it will send. You face the same danger in picking keywords that are too easy as you do keywords that are too difficult – lack of traffic.

Mistake #3 – Choosing to Target for Groups of Keywords That Aren’t Related

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. In search strategy, the simplest way to get your customer to cross your path is to make your path intersect with theirs. For example, show up in the searches they do in Google and Yahoo.

Having a tightly focused and targeted topical site is one of the many strategies you could use to get in the searches – create great content that people will link to, and get a nice rankings boost. It’s passive, and it’s slower, but it’s free. And if you do the supporting work in the background to penetrate the influencers in your network, it works.

So when your search professional or coaching expert asks you “what keywords are you hoping to rank for” and you say “Poetry, hula-hoops, and bear attacks”, expect strange looks.

Not only should each of these topics have a separate site, if your site doesn’t address the entire spectrum of related words within one keyword family, you may want to target even more tightly. Even poetry.com could do better than targeting the word “poetry” – they specialize in publishing amateur poets.

They’d do better having a site for studying classical poetry, one for contemporary, a forum site for hobbyist poets, a call for submissions site for those more serious about their art, etc.

If you look at the situation with brick and mortar logic, you’ll see the light. How much would it throw you off to walk into your local grocery store and see row after row of stereo equipment with one little corner of basic items in a back corner?

I’d be wondering which of these things this store did better, if either.

And let’s say you run, as a serious hobby. Are you going to go to any department store to get your running shoes? Or would you rather go to an athletic shoe store where the people know a little something about your sport?

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Specialize in one core idea per site.

It’s one thing to splinter off into a closely related item on a regular basic, or even to go completely off-topic from time to time, but it’s quite another to try and go in two different directions from one site.

Think about what big corporations do. GE, NBC Universal, MSNBC, and Microsoft are in the same corporate family, corporate cousins, so to speak. But they don’t share a website, nor should they.

Even if each of the companies were owned by the exact same entities in the same proportions, since they offer different markets and serve different audiences, they still need separate identities in order to be promoted properly.

Mistake #4 – Choosing Keywords that aren’t related to your product

There are actually several ways to screw this up, and having done them all, I’m quite familiar with the process. You could pick a keyword that illustrates what you offer, but doesn’t quite tell the correct audience.

You could choose a keyword that brings other peers to your site instead of your potential customers and clients. Or you could pick a keyword that has two meanings, neither of which lead your ideal customers to you.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Start your keyword selection process by thinking and acting from the perspective of your ideal customers and clients.

What problem does your product solve? How would your prospects phrase it? Are they already typing that into Google? What comes up when they find it and how would your site be better than that?

Ask yourself these questions and write down the answers. Actually do the searches – if you can, interview your potential customers and ask them. Incorporate them into your keyword research.

Mistake #5 – Choosing Keywords for show, rather than for targeting buyers

I know this one sounds out of the blue but you’d be surprised how often this happens. Here’s the scenario.

A small, successful company gets interest from a group of investors. To impress them they say, “Well, by next month, we’ll rank on the first page for a phrase which will bring us twice the search traffic, which we believe will double sales. So we’d be profitable again in a couple of months.”

They base this on the fact that they currently rank in the top 100 – how hard could it be to move to the first page?

Investor guy says “Okay, call me when you do it and the money’s as good as yours.”

So executives at small company tell marketing to make it happen. Finding that they’re unable to do this themselves, they in turn call  whoever rumor has it is the latest search miracle-worker expert.

Ms. company owner says, “Can you get us on the first page for the keyword phrase baby water?”

Ms. Expert replies, “Perhaps. What do you sell?”

Ms. Company Owner says, “Baths.”

So now the expert has a problem. Technically, yes, she can get them that listing, for their current site. But it will interfere with their ability to be found for baths, and kill their profits, so they still won’t reach their goal.

Either way, they’re shot. And they don’t want to hear that changing their keyword strategy to appeal to the people who buy their antique baths and bath fixtures would likely make them more than the investor was offering.

I love that story because something like it actually happened to me.

But more commonly, folks start finding out what keyword choices they should have made right when they’ve almost achieved their initial goal. And they get caught up in the idea of ranking number one for something so much that they forget that ranking number one for the wrong keyword phrase isn’t helping them.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Take targeting seriously. Don’t be lured by easy traffic in great quantities if it isn’t targeted to your niche. At best, you want to start another venture in that niche, or develop a product to serve it.

But don’t ever settle for a whole lot of bad traffic over a moderate amount of good traffic. You’ll end up with fewer leads who are less likely to buy.

It’s like successfully getting 40,000 teenagers to express interest in owning a home. Many of them may even be sincere. But how many of them are going to buy from you in the suburbs in the next six months?

Maybe – maybe if you targeted an area with a high population of teen stars, you’d get a few. If you’re lucky.

The point is, even a great quantity of untargeted leads is still no good. You’d be better off with half as many really interested prospects. The truth is, you could get a lot more for half the effort if you target more precisely. It’s just easier.

The Right Keyword Brings You The Right Traffic

Getting the right keyword for your site is of critical importance. The right keyword is the foundation for everything else you will do in your efforts to get better organic search results. It’s not about keyword density or even latent semantic indexing, or any of the factors that Google, Bing or Yahoo may or may not be using to rank your site.

Your keyword choice informs a myriad of decisions you will make about your site and how you will prepare documents to reflect the topics your site is relevant to, other traffic strategies you’ll use, as well as your link strategy.

So even if your keyword choice rarely appears on your site, and your ranking is purely link driven, it would still have to be topically related to that keyword or your prospects won’t stay around long enough to click, subscribe or buy.

Let’s face it. A quick article isn’t going to solve all your problems picking keywords. But getting this one element right could drastically improve the effectiveness of your entire organic search campaign.