Doing Only Automated Keyword Research!

This is a very common mistake because of sales pages promoting software products that claim to automate everything. The only problem with automating your keyword research is that a real human being can always come up with better solutions and strategies any time.

Automated keyword research tools base their results on factors like search popularity (mostly supplied by a third party tool) and search result counts. As we have already seen these are no longer good indicators of keyword search volumes, demand or supply.

A good keyword research requires careful consideration of multiple factors like regional and seasonal trends, the search context, if searches are from actual customers willing to spend money and so on. So use a software tool or use an on-line research for preliminary analysis and then brainstorm with the help of a few intelligent human beings to decide the keywords you want to target. Another surefire way is to use a pay per click search engine and actually test your keywords.

Automation is best when applied to repetitive tasks that require no application of thought. So use automated tools to multiple your keyword lists (long tail keyword generation), cleanup keyword lists, etc.

Not Managing Your Keyword Lists Properly!

Once you realize that it is simply not possible to accurately find the actual keyword search volumes, you will also realize the one simple, basic fact regarding keywords…

There are no best keywords for a web page… there are only the keywords that happen to work for that web page!

If you have been running websites for a while you would have already accumulated a number of important keyword phrases that are highly relevant to each of your web pages. You should give your keyword lists the importance it deserves. Your log files and site statistics will tell you which keyword phrases got you the sales. You will also know which keyword phrases do not convert. These data are gold and should be managed properly using spreadsheets or a software.

This is even more important if you use pay per click advertisements. The success of any pay per click advertisement depends on your keyword lists, the advertisement text used for the keywords, your landing page and of course the product or service on offer. The only way to optimize this is to use different advertisement groups and associate each group with its own keywords and advertisement texts.

This leads to the most important thing you can do as part of your Keyword Strategy…

1. List all your important web pages
2. List keyword phrases that work for each of these web pages. You can find this from your server logs and PPC campaign data (if you are running ad-word / PPC campaigns).
3. Manage and tweak your lists so that your actual results continue to improve.

You can use a software like Keyword Strategy Studio to do this more easily.