We all know the importance of SEO in your websites to bring traffic to your business. Content writing is an integral part of search engine optimization. Though the word keyword seems very basic to the content writers, but trust me, there are many of us who don’t know what to do with them actually or how to use them properly.

With such a word that has “Key” in it, one should be very particular in its use as its wrong usage can actually block an individual from many good opportunities. One can always safeguard himself by getting themselves aware of the common ill use of keywords in SEO.

Showing Laziness in Keyword Searching and Targeting the Wrong Keywords

Choosing keywords based the businesses, which most business owners personally will use for search; thinking that those are the best is the most common mistake which is seen nowadays.

It is advised to take some time out of your busy schedule and use some good keyword research tool like Google Keyword Tool to get an apt keyword in order to avoid using keywords that won’t attract traffic, or hard to compete. Always go for the keywords with low total number of competitors and the highest number of searches.

Selecting Phrases vs. Single Words

Another common mistake is prioritizing single words as the keywords. You have to keep in mind that your target audience is very much search-savvy. They prefer using combinations of words/phrases when they found unfocused mess of results after almost most of the single-word searches.

Inability to Find Product Related Keyword

It happens sometimes that the result offered by the search engine seems entirely non-relevant to the company’s offerings. Let say, your company is offering running shoes, then the phrases that would be suitable would be trail running shoes, cheap running shoes, or running shoes for women. It is not necessary that all the keywords are focusing for your product. Hence, to avoid this situation, one should do the proper search by running query search and expanding them until he finds the correct match.

Avoiding Broad Range of Keywords

Short tail keywords are 1-2 word phrases and are more generic as compare to the long tail ones which are 3-6 words long and are relevant and specific to the product. Using only the short tail keywords won’t be of any help in bringing much traffic to your site as its wide usage will mix numerous other analogous results. As far as long tail keywords are concerned, though they will bring a lot of extremely qualified traffic, but will bound the scope as a result. Hence, it is recommended that a combination of both should be used for exceptional result.

Avoiding the Importance of Local Targeting

As localized search is rising sturdy these days, now is the time to go for geo targeting keywords. These are the keywords which encourage the result in the query for that location. For example- “pastries San Francisco,” “cupcakes Bay Area,” “cupcakes San Francisco etc.