Internet Marketing with Josh SpauldingMaking Money through Ethical Marketing.

Common Keyword Research Mistakes

Although I probably don’t do enough of it these days, keyword research is very important in finding and domination long tail keywords. The problem is so many people hear bad info on the subject then go around telling even more people the same crap!

Probably the most common bad advice I see is to use Google’s exact search to find low competition keywords by surrounding the keyword with quotes. Well, it’ll find low competition keywords alright; keywords that have 0 search volume. The thought is that if you do an exact search for a keyword, it will show all of your competition. What people don’t realize is the obvious. Exact means exact! That means it brings up every instance in Googles index of that keyword. Does that mean every single one of those sites are targeting that keyword? Absolutely not!

Just for fun here is an example:

An exact phrase search for “and we were” brought up 4,520,000 results. Many people would argue that four and half million results of an exact phrase search is competitive. How hard do you think it would be to rank #1 for that “competitive” keyword phrase that brings up 4,520,000 results? Pretty easy. Just write a blog post and title it “and we were” and theres a good chance you’ll rank #1 for that keyword. Now, how much traffic do you think you’ll get? I know this one –0–

Another piece of bad info is that you need to find keywords to get front page rankings for your articles. In a way this is true, but people misunderstand that. They think that if they can’t hit the front page with a keyword then it’s not worth it. So they target extremely low competition keywords and get little to no traffic. I’m not saying to target highly competitive keywords, but don’t think that you MUST get front page rankings for all of your articles!!

I only know of one keyword phrase that this blog has font page rankings for so far and it’s not a very competitive keyword. I’m sure there are more, but I haven’t come across them yet. But still this blog is getting over 300 uniques a day and steadily rising. Granted, some of the traffic is coming from referrals, but the majority is from SE’s. That goes to show you that you don’t HAVE to have front page rankings for traffic.

Instead of relying on the SE’s for your keyword research, use something like WordTracker (not an aff link) and get more accurate results!

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