Keyword research is often the first thing you do when planning a new SEO campaign (or auditing an older one). It provides the skeletal framework for a campaign, and for years has been a mainstay tool in the SEO expert’s belt. But over the past five years or so, keyword research has undergone some interesting evolutions, becoming less relevant in some ways and fundamentally changing in others.
Let’s remind ourselves why keywords are important in the first place. The goal of SEO is to get your site ranked higher for various search queries—but how do you know which queries are best to rank for? This is where keyword research comes in. It allows you to find keywords that offer:
Relevance, so that all incoming queries directly relate to your business and are capable of making your inbound users satisfied with the results.
High traffic, so you have as many new people as possible seeing your site listed in search results.
Low competition, so you don’t have to work as hard to rank for your chosen queries.
This information allows you to selectively target valuable keywords and phrases to include in your site’s meta data and content.
Finding and keeping track of keywords also serves as a valuable metric which you can use to gauge the effectiveness of your campaign by tracking keyword rankings over time.
Enter Google’s Hummingbird update, which rolled out originally in 2013. This update introduced a concept known as “semantic search,” which drastically changed how Google handled incoming queries. Rather than taking a user’s words and searching for matches on the web, Google now evaluates the intention behind a user’s query, and then finds appropriate results that match it. This may seem like an small difference, but it’s had a major impact on how search optimizers think about keywords.
For starters, including a keyword or phrase verbatim isn’t a surefire way to optimize for it, and it’s possible to gain rankings for semantically linked words and phrases that you didn’t optimize for directly – and sometimes ones that aren’t even present on the page that’s ranking for them!
Over the years, Google has also become increasingly protective of the keyword data it lends to marketers. It started with its restriction of keyword data in Google Analytics, preventing marketers from evaluating keyword-based traffic to their sites. Now, Google is throttling keyword data in AdWords (at least, for low-spending accounts), presumably in an effort to blind organic search marketers to this data.
New technologies are also shaping the way that people conduct searches. Digital assistants like Siri and Cortana are encouraging users to search for things through conversation, which fundamentally changes the way queries are input, as well as their structure, since spoken queries are often much different than written ones.
They also introduce new search mechanics into the world of optimization, offering spoken responses rather than search results pages that list relevant results.
We’ll likely see a gradual and iterative transition to a new kind of search research system, based on the new technologies and search trends around us. Get ready for some major changes over the course of the next decade.
Courtesy of Forbes
