What makes for successful keyword research: part 3, the common mistakes

The final part. Part one covered the groundwork, part two covered choosing.

Here are the four mistakes we see most, in rough order of how much money they waste.

1. Terms that are far too broad

A party hire business decides to target “party hire”. It’s the obvious phrase. It has the most volume. It’s what the business is called.

It’s also, on inspection, a terrible target.

The competition is everyone in the country. And the traffic, if you somehow got it, would be mostly wrong: people wanting jumping castles when you hire marquees, people in other states, people researching for a school fete in eight months.

“Marquee hire southern suburbs” has a fraction of the volume. Almost everyone searching it wants exactly what that business sells, and wants it soon. That isn’t a compromise. It’s a better keyword.

Broad terms feel like ambition. Usually they’re just expensive.

2. Language only the industry uses

A skin clinic ranks beautifully for “nd:yag laser treatment”. Genuinely first, no competition at all.

Nobody searches it. Their customers search “tattoo removal”, “pigmentation treatment”, or “how to get rid of sun spots”.

This is common in technical fields, and it happens because the copy was written by the person who knows the most about the subject, which feels like it ought to be the right person. Expertise makes you fluent in vocabulary your customers don’t have.

Use the industry term where accuracy demands it. Rank for the words customers actually type.

3. Describing yourself the way you see yourself

Related, and subtler.

Businesses build an internal identity over years. A firm might think of itself as offering “integrated compliance advisory”. Its customers think they need “help with a workplace safety audit”.

Both describe the same service. Only one gets searched.

The test: could a customer who has never heard of you have arrived at this phrase on their own? If it requires knowing your internal vocabulary first, it won’t be typed.

4. Keywords with no meaningful search volume

The most insidious one, because it produces a report that looks like success.

Some providers select keywords precisely because they’re easy. Highly specific, effectively uncontested, ranked first within weeks. The monthly report shows a column of number ones.

And nothing happens. Because eleven people a year search those phrases, and four of them were you checking.

Rankings aren’t results. If a first-place ranking produced no visitors and no enquiries, it produced nothing, and a report celebrating it’s describing an activity rather than an outcome.

Ask for the traffic and enquiry figures next to every ranking. The two together are informative. Either alone is decoration.

The pattern behind all four

Every one of these is the same failure in a different costume: optimising for something measurable that isn’t the thing you actually want.

Volume is measurable. Rankings are measurable. Neither pays wages.

The question at every decision point is the same: if this works perfectly, will the people it brings become customers? If the answer is no, it doesn’t matter how achievable it is.

A quick sanity check

Before committing to any keyword, three questions:

1. Would someone typing this be looking to buy what I sell? If not, it may still be worth a blog post, but it isn’t a commercial target.
2. Can I realistically rank for it in a year? Look at who’s there now and be honest.
3. If I ranked first, would it change my business? Enough volume to matter, or so quiet it’s a rounding error?

Three yeses is a target. Anything less needs a reason.

Where this leaves you

You should now have a shortlist of realistic, high-intent keywords mapped to specific pages. That’s a plan, and it’s worth more than most of what gets sold as SEO strategy.

If you’d rather not do it yourself, it’s the first thing we do for every client. Get in touch.