No matter what your content marketing strategy is, keyword research is one of the most important items to keep at the forefront of your mind.
Keywords are what your audiences uses on a daily basis to search for things that are most important to them. Keywords also inform marketers as to what their audience wants to know, lets them monitor their competition, and through analytics offers them a constant flow of content ideas.
Key word research is different from what it was even a couple of years ago. Search engines are becoming smarter through sophisticated technology and keyword research tools are getting more advanced.
The SEO world is changing, so should we. Here are three SEO trends reshaping the keyword research concept and with it the way we brainstorm, create, and optimize content.
1. Being in first place is no longer enough
If this has been a long-term goal of yours then this may come as a bit of a shock. This standalone goal is one of the past.
As an agency we get asked for this goal a lot and we know that companies put a lot of money and time into being in the first place spot on Google. But you need to ask yourself: How much traffic is that top Google position going to bring? Is it worth the trouble and money? Is this the only SEO strategy I am going to put in place for 2020 and beyond?
The short answer: It’s more complicated than it ever was. Search engine results pages provide less visibility than they once did and that should factor into your keyword optimization process. There are also a lot of “paid” places that strips our audience of their trust in our hard earned first place spot.
If you want to invest the time and effort into ranking first, here are resources to help you understand how to evaluate your traffic:
General click-through rate for Google’s top position
In the past few years, a few studies have shown the breakdown of clicks generated by the top five positions. Content Marketing Institute did one a few years ago, 2017 Google Search Click-Through Rate Study, which found the top position attracts 21% of clicks, while the second and third positions generate 10% and 7.5% of clicks, respectively.
The top position is not always the best
Things have gotten even more complicated ever since Google’s featured snippets changed last year. Google still plans to remove them from the right side and into the main listings. But there have been some additional questions raised about how we look at ranking in the SERPs.
Previously, the URL in the featured snippet would have shown up again in the organic Google SERPs exactly where it belonged (be it No. 1 or No. 5). With the de-duplication update, the organic listing is removed for any featured URL. In other words, featured snippets have a URL within the box itself and that same URL was showing up among the top-ranking results on Page One of the SERPs. So two URLs on the same page. What a win! Not the case.
Google said – not anymore. We’re deduplicating that organic URL, which means the only time the URL is going to show up is in the featured snippet itself.
Now, what was happening when Google started doing this was the URL that was ranking on Page One of the organic results were showing up on Page Two of the SERPs.
It was showing up is as a very first result on Page Two of the SERP, and we looked at a deep data set on this and found that every single instance of featured snippets with the URL ranking on Page One, the URL now moved to the top of Page Two of the SERP.
You may not think this is a big deal but the question is does it still appears on the very top of Google?
Well, not exactly. While organic listings are (mostly) created equal, featured snippets may all look different, hence there’s no way for us to tell if the featured snippet format will trigger any clicks at all.
2. Researching (and optimizing) for things, not strings
You may remember a few years ago that you needed a landing page for each variation of the keyword because search engines focused on exact keyword matching. If a keyword string didn’t appear exactly in a page title, the URL would have had no chance to appear in search results.
Things are different now than they were a few years ago.
As with all things people and Google got smarter at interpreting user queries. Now you may ask what has changed. These so-called keyword strings are now ignored by Google. They understand better (through lots of technology) what a user is searching for and gives them a larger variety of relevant results.
Let me share an example with you: Do a search for “best kayaking areas” and see the related terms in the results. You will notice “best places to canoe” and “best kayaking destinations”. It is obvious that Google knows the concept you are searching for and is providing detailed results that you may have not thought of when you were initially searching.
The key is this: When you are looking to optimize your site don’t just focus on the words and phrases but also the concepts.
3. You have LOTS of SEO Insight available to you. Take advantage of them to optimize your site.
Content marketers have a ton of tools and technologies at the tip of their fingers that they can utilize at any time and anywhere. The insights available into their audience, their patterns, interests, struggles, and timings is abundant and ready to analyzed. Also the variety and types of tools is unprecedented.
That does come with some internal struggles as to which tools are best and which ones fit my companies needs the best.
Our advice is that you test a few of them out (many offer free 14 day trials) and choose one that suits your needs and is easiest for you to integrate into your work flow.
Some considerations:
There are 3 major SEO intelligence platforms – SEMrush, Serpstate and Ahrefs that will help you identify keywords with less competition by including a keyword difficulty metric. They also help in identifying keyword intent.
Social media networks and tools provide keyword analytics opportunities to research natural language, trends, real-time keyword context, and more. A variety of non-SEO tools still give you a good insight into keywords. For example, Hashtagify helps you discover related hashtags, i.e., related concepts to cover in your content. It also provides trend analysis showing the popularity of your core topic.
What’s in your keyword research toolkit this year? Please share in the comments.