| As an SEO agency, you already know the role that keyword research plays in understanding the business opportunities of your clients and how to gather hundreds and hundreds of keywords for your SEO campaign. But how do you go from a large list of keywords to an articulated, coherent, data-driven set that ensures you’ve zeroed in on the objective and know where you’re heading? Jumping straight to execution, crunching tactics and tasks might work in the short-term, but without a well-defined strategy in place, the risk of wasting client resources and, ultimately, trust is high. And you’ll know a strategy is good when you trust it to leverage your performance and generate results for your clients while ticking all the following boxes: Having a diagnosis which details the challenge to be solved. This helps you narrow your focus to a clear, simple problem that your client faces. Deciding on a guiding policy that defines the approach you follow for solving the problem. Developing a set of coherent actions: the tactics you’ll use, step by step, in accordance with your approach to get the best results and solve the problem. This logical structure, called the kernel of strategy, can help your SEO agency at every stage of campaign development, but for the scope of this article, we’ll be looking at how to refine the guiding policy by avoiding common keyword strategy pitfalls. Let’s take them one by one, so you discover new ways to get the most out of your keyword list and set yourself up for success: Pitfall #1 You include branded keywords in the mix Branded organic traffic is not SEO traffic. The navigational keywords related to your client’s website or other websites (even competitors) won’t be valuable for your SEO campaign, as you can’t directly influence them. Plus, your client owns all the branded keywords, and they’re using other channels to amplify them (marketing campaigns, advertising, paid search, etc.). You don’t need rank tracking or SEO for that. Mixing the two will muddle your data and will make your client’s position in the search landscape seem better than it actually is — which, in turn, will alter the strategy and your desired objectives. Read more: 5 common pitfalls to avoid so you maximize your keyword strategy’s business impact |
