Nearly everyone who's trying to compete in SEO makes this mistake. They fail miserably because what they're doing is nearly impossible to achieve. And yet, most people think that it's the right approach. Hi everyone, I'm Neil Patel and today, I'm going to teach you the number one biggest SEO mistake nearly everyone makes and you should avoid at all costs.
We're in a time when SEO and digital marketing has become more saturated and more competitive than ever. With over a billion websites on the web, SEO is no longer an easy or open playing field. A lot of times, I see many of these new websites making the same mistake that'll ultimately give them little to no SEO result and just waste their time.
What is it? It's targeting keywords that are too competitive. These days, effective keyword research is an increasingly important skill for digital marketers. Not only do they need to know how to develop a good keyword list, but using keyword research to find out what topics they should write about or what phrases they should be using while writing is super important, especially figuring out which ones aren't competitive.
Nowadays, doing keyword research effectively is a top priority for any website or SEO. If you look up a competitive term, such as car insurance, you'll likely see some big brands pop up. If you're a new website, it's going to be almost nearly impossible to compete with those brands. What's the answer? Target long tail keywords.
Some marketers keep aiming for highly competitive head terms, and they're wondering, hey, why is their search traffic not growing? When I start targeting long tail keywords, I increase my searching in organic traffic to 173,336 visitors per month. Nowadays, I'm getting well over a million. You're missing out on a lot of search traffic if you're not creating blog posts around longer search terms.
You're probably wondering, is it really worth it? Well before I break down how you can go after these terms, let me tell you one interesting stat to show you how profitable it is.
According to Search Engine Guide, Amazon makes 57% of their sales from long tail keywords. That's because longer tail keyword variations, especially those that have commercial intent, convert really well.
For example, let's say you have a dog food business and you're trying to break into the dog food online space. Most likely, you want to go after keywords like dogs, dog food, pet food, because that would get a lot of search traffic. The monthly search volume for dog food is roughly 135,000 searches per month. But the pay difficulty is 100 and the SEO difficulty is 77. That's incredibly high. Coming in as a new company, there's very little to no chance that you're going to rank well unless you have an established brand and high domain authority, which most new companies don't.
Instead, you want to focus on long tail keywords, like dog food for allergies or dog food for senior dogs. These keywords have a lower monthly search volume, but higher quality search traffic because they're more specific, and they're going to convert because they're more specific.
For example, dog food for allergies has a monthly search volume of 9,900 and a SEO difficulty of 38. That means it's going to be easier to rank for.
If you're trying to figure out how you can rank for these terms or where to find them, check out Ubersuggest. Type in a head term that you're thinking about going after, you don't need to know the long tail variations, just look at the head terms, type them in, and then go to the keyword ideas report.
It'll give you all the other longer tail variations and it even breaks down the SEO difficulty. Look for terms that have a SEO difficulty score of 40 or under. Those'll be easier for you to rank for.
You also want to look for ones that have volume at least in the few thousands per month because volume doesn't always mean clicks. And, when you do all of this, it'll help give you more ideas and more ideas for you to produce content.
There's also a questions tab on Ubersuggest, prepositions, comparisons. These are also more places where you can find more keyword ideas, more content ideas. That will drive keywords that convert into revenue.
Here's another quick tip that I love doing to find the right type of content to produce. On Ubersuggest, there's a content ideas report. When you go very specific, it'll show you all the content that's already been created around the web based on social shares, back links, and search traffic. It even tells you, when you look at the estimated visits, all the keywords that the article ranks for. When you click on back links, it shows you all the people linking to that article. And when you look at social shares, the more social shares, chances are, the more people that like it.
When you're trying to figure out what keywords you should go after, also look at all the content pieces that have some of those similar keywords because this will give you ideas of what you can create that can help you not only generate traffic from all three, right? You don't want to just generate traffic from Google. If you're going to create content, might as well get traffic from the social web and might as well get referral traffic. Referral traffic is other people linking to you, as well.
Keep that in mind because this will help you craft content that does well for more than just Google. Don't just create content for users and Google, create content for users, for Google, for social media sites, for other people who own websites and want to link to you. This will all help you do better in the long run and generate more sales.
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