I was preparing for a conference call with a client this morning,  and got to thinking about keyword research, targeting, audience, and so forth. And one word leapt into my mind that encompasses the keyword research aspect of SEO. The word is focus.

What should you focus on during the keyword research phase of an SEO campaign? You should focus on your potential audience, or site visitor, and you should focus on identifying the correct keywords to capture those visitors.

It sounds simplistic, but it is often overlooked, and it is important to keep in mind during SEO. Stay focused.

If I am selling frozen New England clam chowder via my website, it is tempting to target a broad range of keywords. The thinking goes: if I spread the net widely, I’ll get more visitors to the site, and potentially sell more yummy clam chowder. Wrong.

Two major pitfalls await those who do not focus on the target audience and the keywords to reach them. If you target broad keywords, such as “frozen food”, “New England”, “soup”, and so forth, what happens is:

A. You are competing against millions more websites in the search results than you need to be. You are competing against New England tourism, frozen fish, and sites that provide soup recipes, just to mention a tiny fraction. This competition makes it harder, if not impossible, to rank well for much of anything.

B. Even if you do happen to rank well for some terms, the majority of your visitors will have no interest in your product. Not only is all that traffic “wasted”, it is detrimental to your longterm SEO, because the fact that most visitors to your site “bounce,” or leave the site immediately after arrival, is duly noted by the search engines, and your ranking suffers.

The answer to this dilemma? Don’t be afraid to focus. Focus on those narrow keywords that will bring truly relevant traffic to your website. Focus on clam chowder lovers, especially New England clam chowder. In this case, you can probably focus on all chowder lovers, since there may well be Manhattan clam chowder lovers ready to defect, but keep it focused. You will succeed far better in the search engines, as they will perceive your site as an authority in its niche. And your visitors are infinitely more likely to stock up on your scrumptious frozen chowder.

When it comes to keyword research, stay focused.