Even five years ago, keyword research was relatively straightforward. Marketers started with a core concept in mind and developed a list of target keywords. You then optimized your site’s pages around those keywords. Each page would focus on a single keyword. As your skills grew, you might expand to focus a page on multiple keywords or a longer phrase (also called a long-tail keyword as explained below). However, the introduction of Google Hummingbird is shifting our focus to more of a conceptual or topical approach to search optimization.
Even five years ago, keyword research was relatively straightforward. Marketers started with a core concept in mind and developed a list of target keywords. You then optimized your site’s pages around those keywords. Each page would focus on a single keyword. As your skills grew, you might expand to focus a page on multiple keywords or a longer phrase (also called a long-tail keyword as explained below). However, the introduction of Google Hummingbird is shifting our focus to more of a conceptual or topical approach to search optimization.
The Rising Importance of Concepts
Consider for a moment the movie Twilight. If you search for “the movie with sparkly vampires,”Google returns results related to the film. This isn’t because it’s serving up pages that contain the words “movie” and “sparkly vampires.” Instead, it’s associating these two concepts and returning the most logical conclusion: that you’re asking about the popular movie franchise.
Many confuse this with long-tail keywords, which is a concept that’s more closely linked with the older paradigm of single keywords. Long-tail keywords are clusters of two, three, or more keywords that follow each other in sequence. Instead of searching for “sneakers,” you might search for “red men’s sneakers.” From the long-tail perspective, Google optimizes for pages that contain all three words. In theory you get a smaller percentage of traffic, but it’s more targeted and more likely to be a good fit for your site, products, and content.
This doesn’t eliminate the importance of keywords. First, many people will still search for “Twilight” and you need to focus some of your site’s technical optimization on your target keywords. But Google’s increasing sophistication with developing conceptual search has opened many doors for website owners to expand their reach and connect with new visitors. You may also hear this referred to as Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI keywords.
The Types of Keywords That Matter
Depending on how you structure your keyword research, you’re likely going to start with a specific core concept. For example, when you were locating this book as a resource you might have simply searched for “SEO.” As you build your seed list of terms, you’ll quickly expand out to include a number of synonymous and related words.
Your keyword list for SEO probably grew to include search engine optimization, content marketing, online marketing, and so forth. Any good keyword research tool can help you determine related terms, and this is helpful because you can pair it with your audience knowledge to determine what terms your customers and prospects are using.
There are other ways to modify the terms in question however:
- Searcher intent: Consider how you might approach searches related to SEO depending on your intention. If you’re looking for how-to information “How to do SEO” versus hiring a firm “top SEO agency in Toronto” versus answering a specific question “What’s the latest Google SEO update?” Each of these yields different information. Even if you produce information on each of these topics by connecting your keywords to user intent, you’ll get much better conversion and ROI on your content.
- Local or niche context: If you’re focusing on a specific geography, this is a helpful way to modify your keywords. Niche context can also be important; for example “steel industry recruiting” is much more relevant to your audience if you’re writing for steel detailers than just “recruiting”.
Your keyword list for SEO probably grew to include search engine optimization, content marketing, online marketing, and so forth. Any good keyword research tool can help you determine related terms, and this is helpful because you can pair it with your audience knowledge to determine what terms your customers and prospects are using.
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