One of the biggest mistakes you can make when entering into a new
market is doing the keyword and market research incorrectly. Unfortunately,
most of the “gurus” out there have been teaching keyword research totally
wrong. I’m going to show you how I do keyword research for a new website, but
first let’s clear up a few of the bigger misconceptions out there about picking
keyword.
1. Competition Level in Google Keyword Planner:
This is a common mistake people make when getting started, but even some people who have been at this for a while still do not get this. The competition level that is reported in Google’s Keyword Planner has nothing to do with the level of competition for organic rankings. It is an estimate of the competition among Adwords advertisers. Nothing else.
When you see ‘Low’ competition, that does not mean it will be easy to rank for. It just means that there are not many people spending money on ads for that keyword.
If anything, you probably want to look for keywords that show a ‘High’ level of competition. That usually is a good indicator that there is money to be made with that keyword.
PR, DA, TF, Age, Number of Links, and Pretty Much Any Other Metric You Can Think of. Another common lie spread about keyword research is that you should look at the PageRank of the pages ranking on the first page of Google for the keyword you are looking at. Is PageRank a factor in rankings? Sure. However, it is not a direct factor that you can measure for a specific keyword. Just because a page has a PR of 5, for example, does not mean it is going to outrank all other pages below a PR of 5 for that keyword.
PageRank is a measure of the quality of incoming links to a page, but it does not measure the relevancy of those links for the search query. Same thing goes for Domain Authority and Trust Flow. They really tell you nothing about how difficult the page might be to outrank.
Number of links is also a waste of time. A site with 50 links can outrank a page with 50,000 links for a specific search query. It happens all the time. I would be much more concerned with the anchor relevancy of those links and the relevancy of the pages they are coming from.
2. Number of Pages in the Search Index:
This one pisses me off beyond belief. Morons like the people behind tools such as Market Samurai keep telling people this matters. They will tell you to put your keyword into the Google search bar and see how many results Google has in their index. The fewer results, the easier it is to rank for. Sometimes they will tell you to do the search in quotes instead or they tell you to do a search like inurl:keyword-phrase because “this is the real competition”. It is complete and utter bullshit. It has nothing to do with the level of competition for a keyword and it should have nothing to do with if you select to target a keyword or not.
Do you really think that over 73 million webpages are trying to rank for that term?
The top 3 webpages, or top 5 for heavily searched terms, are really all that matter for a keyword. If you can beat number 3, who cares if there are 1,000 other webpages or 100 million other webpages? It makes no difference. It’s like running a race. If you are the third fastest runner in the race, you are going to finish third. It does not matter if the race has 50 participants or 50 thousand participants. You are third.
3. Building Sites Around Long-Tail Keywords:
I think this is a huge mistake. It can work. I almost never do it anymore. Now, I still target long-tail keywords, but I build sites that are themed around larger keywords, and then have internal pages designed to attract the longer tail phrases.
I think when you build a site entirely around a few long-tail keyword phrases, you are limiting the potential of that site. I’m going to show you a little more in the video below what I mean and how I choose keywords for a new site. My intent here is to show you that simply finding and targeting nothing but long-tail keywords is not the only method available to you. By building sites around larger keywords, you will attract a lot of traffic around related keywords that you never thought of. The sayingGo big or go home comes to mind here.