How Much Will Keywords Matter For SEO in 2022?

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1. Keywords Help Indicate User Intent

Keywords are directional. They give very good clues that “point” to the kind of content the searcher is trying to retrieve. But there is still a vocabulary problem between the index system and end users, who have many different ways to ask for the same thing or something similar.

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1. Keywords Help Indicate User Intent

This is why Google and other search engines have extremely advanced query expansion technologies. For example, an end user typing “fish tank” as a query may well see the first result for a tropical fish aquarium, which may be more relevant and useful to satisfy the informational need than another page that only has the direct match to the

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1. Keywords Help Indicate User Intent

words “fish” + “tank” to qualify it. Plus, timestamps appended to keywords in the index for temporal analysis give a clue to freshness to help detect trends, and then there has to be event detection for news results. And so much more… So, yes, the closer a user can get the query to match the relevant content, the better.

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1. Keywords Help Indicate User Intent

However, users tend to not know what they’re looking for (if they did, they wouldn’t need a search engine), so search engines must be sophisticated with definition and association discovery.

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2. Keywords Help Find Striking Distance Opportunities

When I do research on a prospect, I always look at visibility to get an idea of what keyword rank is in different zones, like striking distance, developmental, etc. For example, a previous client was in striking distance for the search term “business consulting.” I examined the page to see why they were not ranking on page one

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2. Keywords Help Find Striking Distance Opportunities

for their targeted keyword and noticed the page did not incorporate all the topics associated with business consulting and they needed to expand the content to be more holistic. Once they expanded the content based on our recommendations, we built external links and got them to rank on page one for “business consulting” in three months.

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3. Keywords Help Identify the Right Target Audience

When we perform competitive analysis and look at keyword visibility for a prospect or current client versus the competitive set, we can uncover a content gap. We could find they don’t have content to serve that topic, or that the content they have is not ranking or optimized. For example, I previously had a financial client that

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3. Keywords Help Identify the Right Target Audience

wanted to rank for “kids bank account.” After looking at competitor visibility, we noticed competitors ranked for “teen bank account” and my client did not have “teen checking account” in their page title, headings, body content, etc. and therefore did not rank for the term. But kids and teens are not synonymous.

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3. Keywords Help Identify the Right Target Audience

Once we developed content for “teen bank account” instead and optimized it, marked it up with schema, built content around it, did some internal linking, promoted the content, etc., conversions rates increased by 13% YOY. The keyword “teen bank account” helped us identify the proper target audience.

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4. Keywords Help Drive Traffic

It’s no secret that the vast majority of clicks occur on the first page of Google; in fact, the top result alone takes 28.5% of the clicks. So, for example, since SEO.com ranks #1 for “SEO company,” a term that has 16K queries per month, that 28.5% of clicks should translate to 4,560 visits from that single keyword every month.

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4. Keywords Help Drive Traffic

If you increase visibility into the first page, your site can drive a considerable amount of incremental traffic, which can potentially lift sales on keywords that have high volume. Having a top position on a low-volume keyword is not meaningful. Instead, focus your efforts on keywords with high volume and holistic content that answers 

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4. Keywords Help Drive Traffic

questions end users will find useful. Far too many clients and articles focus on counting keyword success stories instead of measuring the impact of those successes. Getting a single keyword onto page 1 could very well be more impactful to a brand than getting 100 keywords into position 1.

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