Unrealistic Keywords

It’s better to have many slices of smaller cakes rather than not even getting a crumb from a huge cake!

Keyword research should be a relatively straight forward. You listen to your clients goals, examine the site content, jot your ideas down then get out your trusty keyword research tool of choice and find the keywords with the highest search volumes. Sadly, that's not the way to do it if you want to see real results and ROI.

Your first hurdle is that too many businesses high-competition keywords are simply out of reach or only really achievable for huge companies with bottomless pockets. It maybe they are achievable but in the long term part of your strategy. Being realistic is a good part of the research along with what could be your best keyword tool, common sense! Knowing about the sites age, current authority and adaptability for future work will help greatly in knowing which keywords can be realistically targeted.

Targeting one word keywords are unrealistic in most cases, they may get huge search volumes however this doesn’t mean you’re going to get traffic from it. Huge search volumes often don’t count as they should. Shock horror, well there’s logic to this statement and here’s where common sense comes into play, people learn to search and soon realise 1 word searches don’t work that well, it doesn’t answer what they are looking for. Example, the user is a man and he types in "jeans", he gets too many different results including women’s and children’s. His next logical step is to type in "men’s jeans", he may even want a particular style or colour, so he will refine the search again to "men’s black jeans" or "carrot fit jeans". So a huge search volume can actually be misleading for a lot of one word phrases.

So the actual search volume on one word phrases isnt actually accurate, as it takes into account the users first unsuccessful searches and the fact they more than likely only spent 60 seconds on that page 1, before refining they're search!

Knowing how the user will search is a big part of picking the right keywords, the phrase "men’s jeans" may bring in a lot of searches and traffic, however optimising for "men’s black jeans" qualifies the traffic, there may be a lower volume, however the traffic getting to your site is more likely to have their credit card by the PC and ready to spend!

I’m not saying don’t target one word keywords, but be realistic too and also think about the client. They are paying you not really for page 1 listings but to gain more business or sales, if they aren’t making their money back or profiting from the results, they aren’t going to be happy are they? They may have a limited budget too and can’t compete with the major players in that industry. Using more realistic keywords and I say it again, common sense will build a better campaign and will strengthen the website over time so that the one word phrase could become realistic, plus if the client is getting business then they’re happy too.

And the client can be in fact the final hurdle in your campaign and keyword research as they can fixate on one word or unrealistic keywords, once we return to them with our research it a matter of explaining the benefits and how a one word keyword isn’t as good as lots of qualified lower volume ones. I always explain it as imagine your site is a physical store, by using just the most competitive phrase you have only one road to your shop with many other shops all along the same road, people can only go one way and have too many choices to make and have to search every shop to the point of boredom to find what they want. In fact it’s more like window shopping! Now imagine your shop has many roads to it bringing customers who know what they want and can see it eaily displayed in your store, you’re going to gain more business overall and definitely more than if you had just one way to your store. Educating the client in how people search can be just as important as the research itself and doing it in a way that they can make sense from will help forge a good working relationship and trust.

All this makes more sense and being realistic will improve not only online presence, but will gain more business or sales, it will also set up the site for a strong future. Digital marketing is partially about common sense and understanding how users search and then interact with sites online, knowing this is a good chunk of your battle and works for both organic SEO and PPC.