One of the most common pitfalls while doing keyword research is to pick the keywords with the most search count as shown/predicted by various tools including but not limited to Overture, SEO Book and Wordtracker.

Often you would find that even though you achieve a good rank with the ultra-competitive keywords that you chose isn’t yielding the right right benefits.

There could be various reasons:

  • Google’s SERPs change with the datacenter the query is executed on and  also the location from where the search query was fired.
  • With the rise of SEO, people competititors researching for keywords often end  up looking for a keyword more than your target customer!

So – what could be done about it?

One of the first steps that you could do is to tweak your Traffic Analyzer to stop accounting for unwanted traffic. For instance, we have tweaked Google Analytics to exclude local traffic from India to give us a true picture of the outcome of the rankings achieved by our website.

Other steps revolve around choosing the right keywords and strategically planning to optimize your website for them.

I would cover them in my next post – until then, the aforementioned may be useful!