THE KEY TO KEYWORDS

At Greensquare, our use of keywords on client websites remains part of the overall digital marketing mix. While we don’t consider them essential for search engine rankings in the same way as they were in even the recent past, keywords are still helpful for understanding and matching visitor search intent, and how this can be incorporated into website copywriting and other digital assets. As technology continues to evolve, specifically with how people query search engines via assistants like Siri and Alexa, it’s safe to say the ‘old ways’ have rather lost their value.

Focusing on getting that elusive, ‘competition-killing’ keyword to a page 1 ranking doesn’t make the same sort of sense as it once did. Google’s algorithm has been something of a moveable feast for several years, and keywords haven’t – in and of themselves – been the be all and end all of rankings for some time. Also, you do need to question whether you can be absolutely certain that the effort and funds you’ll invest in ‘traditional’ SEO will be of benefit to your bottom line.

Very often our conversations start with a client saying they must absolutely rank for *a single phrase*, which doesn’t take into account the many conversational variations that searchers themselves will use (which can be vast in terms of their variety). More often than not, it also tends *not* to be the phrase that has the most value for their business – business owners think and talk about their product or service in a totally different way from those who use or purchase it.

Most importantly, this legacy approach to SEO also doesn’t allow for the changes Google has made with regard to machine learning. Very few ‘static’ phrases can hope to encompass the almost limitless qualifiers to questions that Google is now capable of using to process search queries, in order that the most relevant, useful results are delivered to those posing a query online.

Introducing BERT
In 2018, Google introduced what they call “a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers”. That’s a bit of a mouthful, so now they and everybody else calls this technology BERT. BERT looks at all the words in a sentence, and how they relate to one another, rather than processing them one word at a time in sequential order. If, for example, you were to ask the question ‘Can I make a reservation for a restaurant in someone else’s name’, BERT will understand that the words ‘someone else’ have changed the context and meaning of the query, and deliver or direct you to a result accordingly.

In a nutshell, this means that Google Search is constantly evolving to the point where it can effectively interpret real-time human speech. This has been driven by voice-controlled devices (like the aforementioned Siri and Alexa) but that technology is escaping those silos and is becoming far more commonplace across all types of devices, mobile or desktop. It’s estimated that roughly 27% of web users now use voice search to ask questions, and that figure is constantly growing.

Still not convinced? Well, 30-35% of searches were done without direct interaction with a screen during the latter part of 2020. That’s 30-35% of search reliant on voice technology alone. No screens = no clicks. Spending your digital marketing funds to rank for a specific, clickable key phrase on a traditionally screen-navigated device where those 10 first-page blue Google links equate to some sort of SEO Holy Grail doesn’t seem quite as cutting edge now, does it?

Just answer the question
The key word (no pun intended) that you may have picked up on running like a thread through this piece is ‘question’. Currently, most voice search begins with a phrase like ‘can you tell me…’, ‘where can I find…’, ‘what should I be looking for…’ and so on.

Obviously, you can’t pivot all your website copy into this format, but you should certainly be aiming to ask and answer common questions in relation to your product or service, whether that’s in run-of-page text or on a dedicated FAQ section.

So where does that leave keywords? Well, pretty much where they always should have been – most ‘white-hat’ SEO practitioners worth their salt have stuck to the position that you should write for visitors, and not for search engines, and the latest technical developments don’t alter this advice. As computers become more efficient at interpreting human speech, just go ahead and write in a natural, conversational way, incorporating the words and phrases relevant to your offering where it would make sense to do so if you were having a ‘normal’ conversation.