8 Keyword Research Mistakes That Might Hurt Your New Website Traffic Growth

Every SEO strategy starts with keyword research, and if someone is telling you to just skip this part or just choose any keyword without doing proper research for the content creation part, your SEO strategy is in the wrong hands.

You being a new website owner are not the only ones who will be making these keyword research mistakes that we will be mentioning in this blog but even the seasoned ones are still making them.

Keyword research is something that builds a foundation of every SEO strategy and if that is not up to the mark or at least not done keeping in view the basics, it is gonna cost you both time and money.

In order to help the ones who have just launched their website and are looking to level up their keyword research game, keep in view these most common keyword research mistakes that will ensure that your website traffic and revenue doesn’t grow.

8 Keyword Research Mistakes To Avoid As A New Website Owner

1. Choosing TOFU (Top-of-the-funnel) keywords over MOFU and BOFU

If revenue is the ultimate goal of your website then make sure you avoid targeting TOFU keywords rather than MOFU and BOFU in the earlier stages of your keyword research.

TOFU keywords or Top-of-the-funnel keywords are basically those keywords that educate users rather than guiding them to make an action or providing them the solution to their problems.

2. Relying heavily on search volume

Generally high volume keywords don’t match the user intent which means they might not be the right choice for you if you are just new to keyword research for your new website.

Plus, targeting high volume keywords doesn’t mean that you will be getting that much traffic to your website, they are quite competitive keywords and are difficult to rank on. 

So the better option for you might be to go for long-tail keywords that clearly state what the user needs or is searching for.

3. Choosing keywords with high keyword difficulty

We understand that sometimes the keywords that are relevant to your business might have high KD and you choose them out of relevancy but we think that isn’t what you should be doing.

See, in the early stages of creating SEO strategy for a new website you should be focussing on keywords that can give you quick wins and don’t demand high initial investment like backlinks.

Targeting keywords with high KD is not a bad SEO practice, but choosing relevant keywords that align with your business goals with low KD might be the best thing to do when you are new to keyword research.

4. Not targeting long-tail keywords

This will be your biggest keyword research mistake.

By not targeting long-tail keywords, you will be missing out on tons of opportunities to attract highly relevant users to your website.

Basically long-tail keywords are the ones that directly target the needs of your prospects. 

Yes, they might have lower search volume but they are very much relevant for your business and you can’t seem to miss them while curating your SEO strategy.

5. No focus on search intent

While doing keyword research you need to have a clear idea of what is the intent of the user while searching this keyword.

The user search intent is basically divided into four parts:

• Informational: Searching to get awareness about a particular topic (Example: call center scripts)
• Commercial: Searching to find the solutions about their problems (Example: call center scripting software)
• Transactional: Searching to buy a solution (Example: call center scripting software pricing)
• Navigational: Searching for a particular brand for a solution (Example: zingtree call center scripting)

Before choosing any keyword you need to be sure of what search intent that particular keyword has and does that align with your business goal as of now or not. Not doing this will be your one of your biggest keyword research mistakes as your keyword is not going to rank anywhere if that doesn’t sync with the intent of the SERP.

Our suggestion is to go for keywords that have commercial and transactional intent in the early stages if you are up for making revenue from your website.

If the main goal is traffic and not revenue, then you should go with informational TOFU keywords.

6. Targeting one keyword on one page

What you are reading in the heading is a SEO practice that is now outdated.

Targeting a single keyword on a page is not recommended now as you need to use phrases or even words that explains the user as well as search engine crawler what you are talking about.

In the language of SEOs we call it SEMANTIC SEO.

In Spite of targeting a single keyword per one content piece, try to make content contextual by using LSI and contextual phrases to make your user or the crawlers easily understand the intent behind it.

Making sure, we aren’t saying that you should not be targeting any particular keywords in the content. You should be targeting one primary keyword and 3-4 secondary keywords in your content and apart from this, you should try to use terms that support the intent of your content.

7. Missing out on competitor keywords

Doing keyword gap analysis is one of the easiest ways to find keywords that directly align with your business goals.

All you have to do is, copy your direct competitor website URL and put it in a SEO tool like Ahrefs and analyse the keywords they are ranking on and then filter out the keywords as per your needs.

Being a new website owner, I think this might be your first step while doing keyword research for your website.

8. Not evaluating other channels

Know where your customers are.

Let’s take my example only, I’m selling my SEO services via my website but do you really think that Google might be the only channel my customers are available on.

No, obviously.

Reddit and LinkedIn are the popular ones among all if I talk about my target audience availability.

They might be using some particular terms or sharing their problems on these channels that can act like my keywords on which I can create content on.

So, apart from Google you should be analyzing other channels too where you think that your target audience might be available.

Wrapping Up

So, do remember all of the above keyword research mistakes if you are up to start the process of exploring keywords for your new website content strategy.

We recommend you to hire a professional SEO agency like GetSetRank for this work as we already have experience with ranking keywords for new websites.

In the meanwhile, you can focus more on sales and customer success strategies while the SEO agency can focus on your website’s organic growth.