Time to ditch keyword research for SEO?
No, but at least moderate it and manage expectations.
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The origins of keyword-driven search on Google predate even the founding of Google as a company, and I believe digital marketers have focused on it long before its usefulness.
Keyword-driven search became popular in the early 1960s as computers became available. As the Internet exploded into people’s homes, it became the conduit for finding things in this new medium. Initial searches were precise matches of the words people used, which also carried over into early internet searches.
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Search was just a directory
In the first incarnations of search engines, the algorithms were a little better than the digital Yellow Pages. They were not sophisticated enough to distill entire websites or even webpages into keyword matches, so they relied on what was inserted into a meta keyword tag.
Bad actors destroyed the usefulness of this tag very quickly, and searches for benign things would result in adult content. (If you still think you need to use this tag, you don’t.)
As spammers took over early SEO efforts and search engines brutally competed against each other, algorithms needed to become more sophisticated in understanding items in their indexes and the words people searched.
The origin of search algorithms to match intent
The maturing algorithms drew insights from the words people put into the engines and extracted new strings to search in their database. The algorithms also appended words to initial search queries, making a “near me” search become a search + geolocation. (For example, “pizza near me” in Beverly Hills becomes “pizza shops in zip 90210”).
This moved the world closer to intent-based search. The user doesn’t need to use the precise words that might be found in the index to find the best result. Today, we are even further past this because searches aren't converted to user-readable strings in a multi-modal search world that allows people to search with videos, images, and even songs.
It’s 2024, act like it
Yet, many are still doing keyword research, like 2014 or even 2004. I think it’s high time we move past the model of building SEO strategies based only on the search keyword ideas found in a keyword research tool. In many cases, I have seen the keywords chosen from this method only be a loose fit for an eventual conversion. So, even if the site successfully achieves its visibility goals, the impact is limited.
Marketers should instead give more than lip service to user intent; they should discover what the user wants and build around that. The user is the source for optimizing for the user.
Let the user be your guide
Here are my favorite ways to learn directly from a user what they are looking for and then to use these ideas to expand on how those intents might be satisfied. When keyword research is the source for all SEO efforts, the outcome will always be a piece of content, but sometimes even that is wrong. By learning from the user, you are more likely to match the ideal output rather than just creating content that uses these words.
In some cases, the user might want long-form written content, while in others, it could be a short-form video.
Social media
Use social media (Reddit/Quora/Twitter/Facebook/Instagram and etc). By looking at your audience's direct conversations, questions, and complaints, you can get a great sense of the needs of your potential users. You can save time by having AI summarize conversations for you, but be warned that you might lose some raw emotion, which is precisely what you are looking for. Having users complain about a feature on a competitor's app is not the same as seeing an AI summary that x% of users have a negative sentiment toward the competitor. This emotion should spur you to solve their problems with your app.
Use surveys
One of the greatest things I learned from my years at SurveyMonkey was the value of asking users questions directly and learning so much from them. When you use a survey to learn from users for research purposes, you do not need to worry about survey best practices or statistical significance. If 8 out of 10 respondents write a similar long-form response, it may be anecdotal from a quantitative standpoint, but it is nonetheless valuable information.
Customer data
This information is invaluable if you work for a business that already has ongoing conversations with users and read customer data. I love reading Salesforce notes from customer support teams or even listening to users' customer support calls to understand their pain points. These conversations provide a wealth of ideas on how customers use your solutions and are significant indications of content you should create.
(When I led APAC marketing for SurveyMonkey, my favorite part of my role was flying to different cities around Southeast Asia and meeting customers to see how they used our tools in real life. I met one customer who sent surveys but never analyzed them because their survey KPI was ensuring that their customers thought they cared for their opinions, not actually caring.)Google data
Use people also ask/Suggest - the most significant challenge with keyword research is that it lags reality since it takes months before data normalizes and the data shows enough monthly search volume for a new idea to make it into a content roadmap. Google suggest, related searches, and people also ask to respond in almost real-time to trends. As soon as someone famous dies, Google will begin suggesting queries about how that person died becuase that is what everyone is searching. Google doesn’t need 24 hours or longer to propagate that data into a suggestion.
Use these suggestions around your product topics to learn what real people are searching for. Write and optimize for these concepts because these are what your actual users are most concerned about now.
Using your users as your guide makes the most sense because your users pay your bills, not the search engines. Staying close to the users allows you to be adaptive and flexible as tastes and demands change. You are reactive but fast.
Stay close to your users
With keyword research as the north star, I have seen sites chase keywords that spike in popularity but only catch the tail end of the pop because they were following the users rather than leading them. When you are close to your users, you will know what the tastemakers in that industry are looking for even before it becomes popular. You don’t need a keyword tool or even Google to tell you what users seek when conversing with your users.
This is where you want to be. You win SEO not by outfoxing the algorithm but by thinking like your audience.
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