Five mistakes teams make with keyword research

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit keyword research.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

The mistakes we see most

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Search volume matters less than matching intent
• Long, specific phrases convert better than broad ones
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Look at what already ranks before writing anything. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

A reasonable first step

The short version

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about keyword research before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Look at what already ranks before writing anything — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.