Before starting an SEO campaign, it’s imperative that you know exactly what you want to rank for. That means you have to choose the most specific keyword term to your business and stick with it. If you start an SEO campaign with one keyword term in mind and then change it, all the effort and money you have spent on your previous campaign will have been wasted. Here’s why:

• You will have to do another research for the new set of keywords.
• Any content written for your previous keywords won’t help much to get your site rank highly. In order to reoptimize your website for the new keywords, you will need new content, new pages and new links.
• Site structure and hierarchy may have to be changed.

Each of these processes is time-consuming and costly. Whatever results you’ve achieved in a 6-month SEO campaign will likely take another six months to achieve with the new keywords, if their difficulty is equivalent. For keywords that are more competitive, it will take even longer to see similar results.

There’s no doubt that SEO is a long-term investment that will pay for itself and more, but you won’t be converting your website traffic into sales if you’re targeting the wrong keywords (and unless you can get your reoptimized site onto the first page of result pages, of course).