Keywords research is a critical stage when starting a website or a blog. Many online businesses are failing or receiving only partial results although many SEO efforts (and sometimes capital) were invested. In this post i want to discuss the most common keyword research mistakes.

1.  Promote a Website Only For One Or Two Keywords

Too many webmasters are relying on too few keywords- Sometimes the webmaster think he has only one term that fits, sometimes he wants “to focus” and sometimes the SEO company wants easy life for its work. In many cases its a combination of few reasons.

I will try to explain it through an example: Let’s take a reasonable competition keyword for analysis- “Making money ideas”.

Let’s say you have reached to the 5th very respectable position. According to the Search Results Page Click-Through Rate, the 5th position receives 3%-6% from the clicks. If we calculate it as 4.5% (the average) it means that from the term “making money ideas” you will receive 2,722 monthly clicks or about 91 daily clicks.

It is clear that it doesn’t worth working so hard for only 91 daily clicks… Even if you are competing with more competitive keywords, there are more disadvantages to promote only one keyword:

–  Only one keyword site’s promotion could lead to shallow and not comprehensive website.
–  Your linking profile won’t be diverse- Backlinks with the same anchor text.
–  Highly volatile- You depend only on one rank that can change rapidly.

2.  Neglect Long-Tail Keywords

Did you know that only 30%-40% (on average) of site’s traffic come from “core” keywords? The majority of traffic come from low-volume keywords, which all together create most of the traffic for websites. These are the long-tail keywords.

Many webmasters tend to neglect these kind of keywords and consequently they lose a big portion of their potential traffic. Beside that, long-tail keywords have more benefits:

–  Easier and faster to promote because they less competitive.
–  Higher conversion rate- Audience that referred from long-tail keywords is more targeted.
–  Better website- Your website will be richer with content.

3.  Fixing On Keywords

As online business owners, we are more comfortable by sticking with the old familiar keywords over the years. It is become easier to promote them as we gain more industry authority and seniority. However, it is still important to research and to analyze.

Search volumes changes as time goes by, new trends creates new search terms and your online business may now relate to more areas. continuing the research will keep you in the game stronger and for longer time (potentially unlimited).

Many times, the research is easier than what you might have thought- Just look in your site’s analytics and try to find new gaining momentum keywords to promote and to reinforce.

4.  Worship The Promotion Of The Competitors

Many people who just begin working at home and starting their own website, don’t conduct a proper research that is unique for their online business and simply “copy” the keywords from their competitors to “learn from the bests”…

Yes, it is true that learning from your competitors is important, but to believe that their research is the smart one for you also, is a big mistake! You need to stay focused on your own uniqueness while combining winning elements from others.