One of these days you’re going to hit the top spot on Google and you will be over the moon. You will get the traffic you’ve been waiting a long time for and the money will start flowing in. As long as you can hold onto the top spot you will have a profitable business that is going to give you a great lifestyle. What could possibly go wrong that could mess everything up?
The answer is not getting it right in the first place. Can you imagine working on something for years before you realize you made a mistake right at the start of your journey? I can’t say all of your hard work would be nothing, but it will have been slowing you down. Keyword research is one of these things you need to get right straight away and we’re going to find out how you do it properly at the first time of asking.
Too much competition
If you plan on ranking for a certain keyword any time in the next hundred years you don’t want to go up against a lot of competition. Just remember that the only competition you are interested in are the ones on the front page. If there are already five powerful websites sitting in the top five search results it’s not a good idea to pursue it because you won’t get much traffic in sixth place.
Not enough searches
When you try and rank for anything it’s going to take some work to reach the top of page one unless you’re really lucky. You want it to be worth the effort and that means choosing a keyword that has enough people searching for it every month. It’s up to you to choose a number you’d be happy with, but anything over 1000 is generally considered decent.
It must be exact
You need to make sure you’re looking for exact-match searches. That means people are typing in the exact keyword you want to rank for. It’s quite easy to choose a keyword with 20,000 searches per month and low competition, but when you dig a little deeper you might realize you’re looking at broad searches and the actual amount of people typing in the exact keyword is much lower.
Keywords that convert
If you’re selling something on your site it’s important to choose a keyword that attracts traffic looking to buy something. If they are typing ’42-inch televisions’ into Google it’s likely they want to buy a television. People don’t usually type something like that if they aren’t looking to buy. Those types of keywords will always bring in more targeted traffic and you will make more money.
Broad means bounce
Don’t get greedy and try to rank for keywords you know are easy just because it will bring more traffic to your site. You might get a few thousand extra visitors per month, but they will just leave as soon as they get there and your bounce rate will be a lot higher than it should be. You can’t help ranking for some things, but you shouldn’t go looking for untargeted traffic.
