Avoid a Keyword Mistake No Other Resource Warned Me About!
Many sites out there seem to say the same things over and over about keywords, but I have yet to come across information that I needed at the time, so I unfortunately ended up learning about it the hard way anyhow. At least now I can share it with you.
I made some serious mistakes with keywords and am writing this so you can hopefully avoid the same. If you heed this advice you will save yourself a whole lot of trouble with your site or blog.
Ignore it, and you will pick the wrong domain name, mess up all of your plans and file names, and destroy what you thought would become a traffic-laden niche site. Ignore this advice and your site may get absolutely the wrong type of nonetheless targeted, keyword-based traffic.
No This Is Not Just Another “5 Keyword Tips”
Instead, this advice goes straight to the core. Unlike other sites and articles about keywords which tell you how to use them, where to get them, how to place them, etc. I have much more important advice than this.
It’s really quite simple actually:
Do not use the wrong keyword in the wrong context, and do not misinterpret keyword research to mean something different than what it actually means!
There is a huge inherent weakness from looking at programs likeWordtracker and Overture or any other program used for keyword research. That weakness is nothing other than making false assumptions about what people were thinking when they were using certain keywords, and consequently, what they were actually looking for versus what you thought they were looking for.
Here are some classic examples:
Let’s say you wanted to provide a life advice blog, like Zen Habits or something. Say based on keyword research, you found that the word combo “sound advice” had a huge number of hits but you also noticed the supply for those exact keywords was actually quite low. Great, a non-saturated potential niche right?
You automatically assume that you should now use those keywords, get distracted by the numbers, and determine to act quickly for your life advice site, and register soundadvice.com or sound-advice.com, or .net or whatever is available containing your keywords before someone else grabs those domains. That thought alone makes you rush all the more in your decision-making process.
You’ve successfully registered your domain and then plan out your entire site hierarchy and design, file and folder names and articles based off of your “sound advice” keyword golden nugget you found. You don’t realize that there is such a thing as iron pyrite aka fools gold.
Wow. You followed all of the top repetitive advice out there for keyword-based sites and content. You run down your checklist one more time, feeling so good about yourself and your plan since you followed everything exactly, triple checked all the checklists and advice, and feel that you’ve got a winning chance that just can’t go wrong…
- You did keyword research
- You used high demand low supply keywords
- You used popular keywords that make the most sense to you
- You registered a domain name with those keywords
- You created the right title, meta, category labels and articles using the keyword
- You followed all the steps to register the site, participate in forums and discussions, etc.
- You notice the site is getting some traffic but has 70-80% bounce rate and that people stay for only a minute or two, and often less.
- You’re getting traffic for “sound advice” but never get a comment or repeat visitor
- You even tried Google Adsense but noticed that the ads were related to stereos. Oh well…they must be the most popular product that’s why they are showing this type of ad…
- You still get low traffic, and the traffic just doesn’t seem interested…
You don’t understand. You did all the right things. What is happening?
You think to yourself, this is bogus. Other sites with content not even as good seem to get more traffic and do so well, You struggle to get 10 hits a day, never seem to monetize enough even for just a stick of gum, after staying up until 2am every night, and are totally baffled and ready to give up.
By the way, you also re-looked at any possible traffic barriers such as using the wrong feed for Feedburner, not posting at certain hours, using better titles or other techniques. You’ve tried everything and more.
You even secured all the top sites again, revamped your site, template, look and feel, took extra steps to promote it, etc. Still no traffic. Now you’re ready to give up. What should you do? Do what I did. Re-evaluate your whole concept and keywords from the beginning.
What Went Drastically Wrong? I Did All The Right Things, Didn’t I?
Not exactly. Here’s the answer. This will hopefully help some of you who have reached a point where you just don’t get it, and don’t want to continue. Ask yourself one simple question. I had to do this when I reached this stage using “good life” as my keyword combo.
Ask yourself if you have been ALL WRONG about your keywords in the first place.
Did you think those keywords meant something to you, that to thousands of others out there they meant an entirely different thing? Couldn’t be, could it? I’m here to tell you yes, it can. Never assume.
This is not at all about getting it right half the time either. No, half of them were not thinking about good life advice when they typed in “sound advice”. Instead, 80-90% may have been looking for a better way to get better sound out of their home speakers or theater stereo systems. “sound” advice, get it? They wanted advice about sound. Not about life. My example is even better, based on my mistake…
I used “good life” for my site theme title and keywords, as in a “good life advice blog”. What I didn’t do is truly think more carefully about the keywords and what the traffic may have been after, and not as I see it but as they do.
For instance:
- “Good Life” typed into a search browser…how much sense does that make for someone looking for “how to live a good life, living a good life”, etc?
- If a person were actually looking for advice about living a good life, would they have simply typed in the words “good life” in the first place?
- Would they have typed in only “good life”? Would they have used such non-specific words?
- Wouldn’t they have typed in ”how to live a good life, living a good life or life advice blog” if they were looking for a blog about life advice and living the good life? Or maybe “advice about…” at least?
The Biggest Kicker of Them All
“Good Life” is the name of a Hip Hop Rap Song! The number one Google find at the time of this writing for Good Life is this
Wow. I feel like I had been had. Those darn songs. People are definitely searching for songs and media more than most other things, so be sure it’s not one of those things. That’s a new perspective and caution about playing the keyword game, and search statistics analysis game, and why I again reiterate what I originally said, that I want all keywords dead.
So here is my advice once again about keywords others seem to have missed:
Make sure your Keywords are not the title of something like a movie, song, show or something. I made some classic mistakes and that was the most classic of them all. People were looking for a song. Not a Good life. Wow.
Let me give you a quick rundown of what I learned about using keywords:
If the top 10 results in a search engine or several for your keywords are sites not about what you want to blog about, then they are not the right keywords. Change them. Find the keywords that actually fit the topic and will bring the targeted traffic related to what you write about. Here’s another golden nugget piece of advice I’ve also never seen mentioned, which only follows the logic here,,,
Better to use more popular keywords than non-relevant ones, or ones assumed relevant. If the keywords are too non-specific still, it could be completely different as a search item being sought, then what you assume. It could be a song, a TV show (The Good Life was also a British sitcom in the 70′s according toWikipedia), it could be about something in an entirely different context (remember “sound advice”?)
What does this tell us? Did You Learn Something Here?
We must do even better homework with our keywords. We must really think about this and ask others what they think. This shouldn’t be a solo decision. Better to let someone in on it and be right than go solo and make the wrong assumptions.
We could use an entire system and process and follow all the rules and still be wrong because the whole underlying basis of that system was falsely assumed to mean something entirely different than what it actually meant. That’s deep! Almost sounds like something out of the Matrix!
I learned that I should’ve done better research using Google andDogpile searches of the actual keywords themselves, to be sure I saw what the search engines gave people.
We must never forget that whatever results a search engine gives a person, for a given set of keywords, the result is based on the search engine’s algorithm and what it has concluded as the most relevant content, not in terms necessarily of literalness or even one context’s figurativeness, but instead it’s popular use. That itself is a whole new interpretation of how the web is seen and used versus how we may see the world or assume things work.
I Don’t See It That Way…
Again, it’s not through our eyes, we must play by the rules of the things we are trying to make use of. I already wrote about how much I dislike this, but regardless we must be pragmatists on this one. Even Bill Slawski replied to me along those lines when I expressed my disdain for the whole keywords thing in my comment to his article Positive and Negative Quality Ranking Factors from Google’s Blog Search at his Seo By The Sea blog.
Popularity then, as a basis for your keyword site research, is very important. I think because people are looking laterally at non-saturated keywords these days, they get overly creative with lateral substitutions and end up with keywords they think are suitable substitutes when in actuality they are not. They are non-relevant, as far as the search engine world sees it, and the world of searchers is/are concerned. It goes like this: who cares what you think. Sorry. Play by the rules of someone else if you don’t own or influence the rules.
I think again about the Matrix and what the Train Man said when Neo couldn’t escape and challenges him on defying those rules. He said something to the effect, “You Don’t Understand…I built this place. Down here, I make the rules…” I too had to learn the hard way that this world just doesn’t see things the way I do sometimes and the search engine and keyword world doesn’t operate by my rules or thinking.