Why does this matter, you may ask as a business owner? Isn’t good enough to have good content, right? Not quite. If you ignore search intent, in fact you’re talking past your audience.

They come with the hope of finding answers and will quickly get away if those answers aren’t immediately given. You’ll lose sales potential, then your competitive edge, and word of mouth will then become toxic to your online reputation. Can you really afford that?

Without optimizing the title tags, you are leaving behind hidden treasures. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you haven’t provided relevant content on the pages since search engines will avoid viewing pages if title tags are not according to best practices of SEO. Fewer clicks mean lower traffic and ultimately do not convert visitors into desired actions. Think of how much time and efforts you spent on a blog post, but it still didn’t hit the bull’s eye with no first glance at a glance.

A poor meta description can be really a disaster. Here are three looses:

• Poor CTR: A vague or uninteresting description does not encourage users to click on your link. That may lead to lower CTR. It directly affects your relevance because of which the search engines make an estimate of relevance regarding your content.

• Low Organic Traffic: Missed potential traffic and the potential subsequent conversions every time a visitor avoids your site because the description is weak.

• Brand becomes invisible: If visitors are constantly ignoring your posts, then your brand fades out of mind, and you find it difficult to become authoritative and eventually trustworthy in your niche.

Imagine this: you’ve been working for months trying to build your website. You have implemented fabulous content, optimized all your images, even launched a few social media campaigns, and still there are no hits from Google or other search engines. Why? The truth is that even if your website is now live, search engines may not even know it exists.

Without crawling, indexing, and ranking, all your hard work is for nothing. It’s like opening the most beautiful shop in the desert-if nobody knows it is there, it does not matter how great it looks. If search engines cannot find, understand, or rank your content, you are basically invisible online.

This can bring about poor strategies. Here is why it matters in light of SEO:

• Strategies applied: Without knowledge of keywords, you will end up with contents that wouldn’t necessarily be of interest to your audiences. You would end up targeting wrong crowds and wasting all efforts on contents no one searches for.

• Spilled Efforts: Don’t know what SERPs are so you cannot optimize those contents well. You’re going to be frustrated by the hour question of the day, “Why isn’t anyone visiting my site?”

• Missed Opportunities: If he does not know what he needs to do to improve his CTR, then he would have missed a couple of opportunities in attracting visitors. Low CTR directly points out that the titles and descriptions are not all that interesting hence a miss click.

Let’s take it into the real world. I have a friend who launched an online clothing site. She designed an amazing website and came up with tons of content. She never did the keyword research, using purely vague terms to describe the products. And guess what? The site gets very few visitors, and the business doesn’t take off.

And it is precisely here that the trap has been set: misunderstanding may bring worse disasters in the field of SEO terminology.

The truth is here that by focusing only on On-Page SEO or just Off-Page SEO you miss one of the most important parts of your strategy. Just like search engines will understand your content in case of On-Page SEO, the same process is where Off-Page SEO would establish credibility and authority. So, settling for one kind of SEO alone is trying to build a house without a proper foundation or just with cheap materials. Both must go hand in hand if you want to see meaningful results.

Content quality: your content has to fill a need for answers in the form of questions and the resolution of a problem that their audiences are looking to answer. Not stuffing keywords, as many people would do this.

1. UX: Google feels the user needs to be able to use the site with ease; this involves quick loads, navigation, and proper view on mobile devices.

1. Keyword Research: Use Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner to find relevant keywords for your target audience. The keywords organically will come out in your content.

1. On-page optimization: Fine-tune every little meta tags, alt text, internal linking and structured data that web crawlers can understand what’s happening at your website.

This will be natural link building, rather than a purchase, but this will happen based on the contribution of value in partnerships and good content that others may link to.

White hat SEO is the long game. It’s all about having a site Google would like to rank because it gives value to the user.

No doubt you’re running to keep up with a new Google search algorithm every couple of months. Business owners and marketers all across the board love getting frustrated, confused, and even panicky when their seemingly overnight plunges in rankings make them so. So, why is it so darned hard to keep up?

• Lack of transparency: Google only occasionally shares the details involved in its algorithm updates. Even big updates, such as Penguin and Hummingbird, were disclosed with vague statements that SEO professionals had to speculate upon for what actually changed. This takes some time as the SEO community decides which factors to alter and which ones not to change based on the changes that occurred.

• Fast updates: It is changing at a pace that has never been witnessed before. Google reports it issues thousands of updates in the span of just one year. Some are utterly inconsequential; others quietly changed how Google’s core search algorithm functions, so ranking websites accordingly.

• The competition is going to be keen: With the large companies trying to rank top in Google, failing to know or miss one or two updates may make it leave the competitors’ way ahead of you. You will require strict monitoring with regards to Google’s update to stay ahead of the competitors in the market.

If the keywords you are using are inappropriate, then the content gets lost there. That is kind of like writing a great book and then putting it on the shelf.

It does not matter whether you have the best blog posts, videos, or social media content; without proper keywords, you are invisible, and all efforts then lead to failure.

Probably the most frequent mistakes are targeting a whole lot of short-tail keywords that appear super competitive. They do bring a lot of traffic, but usually they are very general terms and those conversion rates are much lower.

On the other hand, trying to target extremely niche keywords can bring you search volumes that are just extremely low and in turn extremely limited audience reach.

The wrong keyword choice can bring along lots of disadvantages in the process of SEO:

• Wasting valuable time and money: You may have spent months ranking for a long-tail keyword but end up making little from it since you are competing with brands that have huge SEO budgets. It is part of the reason why most small businesses fail to reap returns from their investment in SEO.

• Lack of proper Targeting: Ironically, the short-tail keywords are very broad. Thus, though they can also become good traffic drivers, the traffic which is going to arrive at your website is not the one which you wish for. Low conversion rates along with high bounce rates-all damage your SEO in the longer run.

• Frustration: Most of my clients come to my desk after months with a failure to rank for short-tail keywords. It becomes understandable the frustration that follows. It becomes easy to give up when SEO makes no difference.

But don’t worry-that won’t be you. Now that we’ve covered the pitfalls, let’s take a look at how to approach this strategically.

• Accuracy: Because it is a product from Google, the data is very accurate and right from the most used search engine.

• All the detailed info: in it, Google Keyword Planner provides keyword recommendations and search volume along with the competition for each keyword.

• Ad Bonus: In case you are going to run Google Ads, then it comes with the bonus to directly start shifting from research to creating an ad campaign.

Ignorance towards such factors as search intent will lead to many adverse consequences for your website’s performance:

• Higher Bounce Rates: Users leave your website straight away if the content does not align with their intent, telling Google that your website is not relevant.
• Lower Engagement Rates: Without actual alignment to intent, users will not engage with your content, and this reduces clicks, conversions, and signups.
• Lost Sales: If you do not capture transactional search intent-the very point when users become ready to buy-you will miss out on the dollar value.
• Reduced Rankings: Google’s user experience algorithms are a safe bet to rank lower on other search engine result pages. The contents that are not aligned to the intent of user search will rank lower.

For example, consider a small roofing business in Sydney; they were ranking for high-volume roofing-related terms but were not generating the right leads. Analyzing their site, I found that their content didn’t focus on user intent-that is, informational searches about roof maintenance were being met with an aggressive sale pitch. I restaged the content approach on the right intent, and within two months, the company saw a 30 percent spike in traffic with higher conversions.