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.