Good SEO needs good links to get good rankings, you need good onsite SEO and well thought out unique content but none of this means anything if you don’t have solid keyword research to base it all on. Your keyword research is the foundation of any good SEO campaign, there’s no point spending countless hours getting your site to rank for a keyword that isn’t going to keep traffic on your site or result in a conversion.
So what exactly are you doing wrong?
Getting A Little Too Big For Your Britches
It would be great if you could rank for all those competitive big money terms but the chances are it’s not going to happen, at least not quick enough to see a quick enough return on your investment. Have three different lists for your keyword research, have the list of big money terms with a handful of realistic keywords that you know are going to bring the traffic in. Have a second list of more realistic keywords that don’t have quite so much of a search volume but are going to be easier to obtain and lastly have a list of long tail traffic that might not look to have any search volume at all but is more likely to lead to a conversion on the traffic is does send through.
Paying Too Much Attention To The Google Lies
Most of us rely on the good old Google Keyword Tool to do our keyword research, and a lot of the other popular keyword tools also pull their data from this. The problem here is that these numbers are about as accurate as Mystic Meg predicting the winning lottery numbers. Over the past year Google have got these numbers much more accurate, they almost resemble sensible figures rather than something they’ve plucked from thin air but they’re not to be taken as gospel and never ever take the broad match figure. The keyword tool is great at predicting if keyword A will get more traffic than keyword B and for suggesting terms you wouldn’t have thought of on your own but never look at the figures given by Google and wonder why you’re not even getting a fraction of that traffic.
There Are No Plurals or Variations In Your Dictionary
You’ve done your keyword research and you’ve selected a few words you want to rank but you’re still not getting the traffic you were hoping for or it’s not converting very well. People who search for items to buy just typing in one word will type in a pluralized version and people who type in a whole query or a more long talk keyword will search for a singular. People later in the buying cycle are going to be adding the word ‘cheap’ into their search or even ‘buy’. You need to make sure all your bases are covered so look at as many variations as possible and don’t forget to optimize any pluralized versions of your keywords.
Not Looking Any Further
So you’re ranking well for a search term and you know it’s getting traffic but your site isn’t getting any of this traffic. All these people are searching for what you’re selling, they’re seeing you but they’re not clicking on you. Keywords are not the be all and end all, without well written titles and descriptions they’re worthless so look at the other signals you’ve got going on. If you’re advertising your price in your description and so are your competitors and they are a lot cheaper that could be why you’re not getting that traffic. Do you have an enticing USP you could add? Free delivery, free consultations, free white papers will all help get those click throughs.
Jessica works on the SEO for Real Asset Management, sellers of fixed asset accounting software.
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