The future of keywords in 2017

One of the most frequent mistakes made by professionals in the SEO world is to carry out the same keyword research year after year without taking into account the latest innovations in the world of SEO. web positioning. And it is that the arrival of voice searches and the rise of RankBrain tell us that it is time to consider a new approach in terms of research and optimization of keywords in content.

THE IMPORTANCE OF NATURAL LANGUAGE

In voice searches, which have been growing enormously in recent months, natural language is essential, since users do not write in the same way they speak and SEO experts must adapt our content if we want to reach users. using voice search.

But, natural language searches potentially represent thousands of variants even the simplest queries. So how can we do accurate keyword research?

The recommendation is to stop directing content towards keywords and start directing them towards concepts. From this moment we no longer have to create content with an exact match of the keywords, but that respond to a need or a question from users.

GOODBYE TO KEYWORD OVEROPTIMIZATION

For many years, those of us who write content have tried to cover Google's shortcomings with proper keyword optimization.

For example, since Google could not distinguish between the singular and plural, we put the same keyword in singular and plural in different parts of the text. Similarly, the abbreviations seemed to be prohibited because Google would not know what we were talking about and were relegated to the background in parentheses. The same thing happened with synonyms, we had to create completely different content to position for each of the keywords since Google did not understand that they were synonyms.

However, all these practices are now a thing of the past. The new specialized Google andn semantic searches and that uses the RanKBrian is able to understand that the singular and the plural are the same, it knows what each of the most common abbreviations refer to and even shows us synonyms of our keyword in the search results.

This means that we are facing a paradigm shift, where the traditional tasks of optimizing texts with keywords are going to evolve, leaving behind all these difficulties and developing towards a higher quality content, where synonyms are essential.

WHAT ARE THE OPTIONS?

As we have just stated, there are thousands of variants of natural language keywords, so it is difficult to know what to do. Do we write content for each variant? Do we use the greatest number of variants in a piece of content? Neither of these two options is effective.

The first one involves a huge amount of work and can make the content of very low quality, since we are going to have to repeat the same thing dozens of times, only with different keywords, which can lead us to be penalized by Googleor, even worse, by users who will quickly flee our website. The second does not seem to be very suitable either, offering overoptimized and low-quality content with which our audience will not feel very comfortable either. Then?

There is a third way: choose similar keywords and try to group them in a natural way, always thinking about how the user would like to find said information, that is, in a concept.

WRITE FOR USERS

Let's give an example to make it clearer. A real estate agency wants to write an article about renting in Barcelona, in the list of keywords we will find interesting variations such as the rental price in Barcelona, rental prices by areas of Barcelona, average rental cost in Barcelona, cheap flats to rent in Barcelona , find cheap apartments to rent in Barcelona, etc… Among the examples we have seen, two concepts are clearly distinguished: the price of rent in Barcelona and cheap flats/apartments to rent in Barcelona, so we would have to make a content for each concept in which we include the different variants, but always thinking of the user.

Put yourself in the shoes of a person looking for a cheap apartment to rent in Barcelona: how would you look for it? What natural language would you use? What data would you like to find in the article? What tips would help you the most? What questions would you ask yourself?

Just putting yourself in someone else's shoes and writing content with keywords designed by and for the user, you will stand out in web positioning.