These tips can help you get the most out of keyword research without falling victim to its current limitations:
- View keyword data with skepticism. Always adopt a skeptical mindset when looking at keyword data on Google or reports generated by your favorite keyword research tool. It’s extremely unlikely that the numbers you see are completely accurate, and even if they are, they’re likely to change in the near future. Build some uncertainty into your underlying assumptions.
- Use multiple sources of research/inspiration. Similarly, you should use multiple sources for your research and find inspiration for new content pieces. Instead of relying solely on keyword data, you should also visit blogs associated with your top competitors, pay attention to social media influencers in your industry, and even conduct user surveys to plan and produce better material.
- Focus on user search intent. Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines highly prioritize user intent as a consideration, so you should too. The vast majority of user intent falls into one (or more) of four categories: informational find your mobile phone numbers database navigational, commercial, or transactional. Users are looking for information, a specific goal, a set of products and services to solve a need, or a specific product or service they’re ready to buy. All of your content should focus on addressing user search intent in some way (if you want it to rank).
- Don’t over-invest in exact match strategies. Finally, reduce the priorities you may have for exact match strategies. Creating homepages, blog pages, and even links with exact match keywords will likely hinder your strategy rather than help it. This doesn’t mean you should ignore keywords altogether; it just means that your basic keyword ideas should be a “jumping off point” rather than a real foundation for your content development.
- Continue to grow your authority. More trusted, high-authority domains have critical advantages over their low-authority counterparts. Use link building and promotion strategies to promote your best content and continue to grow your authority.
No one is advocating that keyword research be eliminated entirely. Even if Google continues to improve its semantic search capabilities while restricting data transparency, it is unlikely that keyword research will become completely irrelevant or useless. What is important is that we collectively acknowledge the weaknesses and limitations of keyword research in the context of modern SEO and are willing to take measures to mitigate those weaknesses and limitations.
