Keyword research appears to be a very straightforward task. You fire up your keyword research tool of choice and find the keywords that relate to your industry with the highest search volumes. Sadly, that’s not the way to do it if you want to see real results.

To many businesses, high-competition keywords are simply out of reach – at least in the short and medium term. Part of good keyword research is about being realistic and selecting appropriate keywords for targeting that take into account the site’s age, current authority and any future optimisation that will take place.

 

Lower traffic but lower competition keywords might not seem as exciting to target but if your website can dominate these areas fairly quickly then you are going to see far more traffic from the search engines than failing to effectively target a much more competitive term.

You’re looking at broad match instead of exact match

A seemingly simple mistake but one Chinese Thailand Phone Number List which many people continue to make…

Search volume is of course a very important metric when it comes to keyword research but all too often people make the mistake of looking at broad search volumes rather than the exact match figure when using tools like google’s keyword tool.

There can be a huge difference between broad match and exact match search traffic for example

There are 135,000 broad match searches each month in the uk for ‘dog kennels’ but only 14,800 exact match searches for the same keyword. Still, this wouldn’t prove particularly problematic as this is obviously still a keyword worth targeting – it would knock traffic and roi projections way off kilter if you do these kinds of things though.

The real problem comes when you choose to target a keyword like ‘ladies leather handbags’ which has a broad match search volume of 2,400 but an EF Leads exact match search volume of only 260 – failing to base your research on exact match data might mean you think you are targeting a reasonably well-trafficked keyword when in actual fact, once you’ve factored in data inaccuracies, you could be looking at a very low search volume keyword indeed.

It is widely accepted that google’s keyword tool isn’t entirely accurate when it comes to search volumes but using exact match gives you the best data available when assessing how viable a keyword is to target.