Google is changing into an increasingly intuitive and rich feature-led tool in 2018. Gone are the days of typing a phrase into the engine’s search box and simply clicking through to a high-ranked website. Today, whether it’s responding to a question in an answer box or prompting us to make a restaurant reservation after a local search on mobile, Google is increasingly trying to answer queries in the SERPs immediately, negating the need to click further.
These rich features are dominating the search landscape more and more. And they are forcing us to adapt how we maintain our visibility online and how we get users to click through.
My recent article 5 ways to make your website stand out in the SERPs[1] went into some detail about producing content that makes the most of the opportunities Google’s increasingly rich feature-led results pages offer. But as Nicolay Stoyanov wrote in his 2016 guide to key phrase research ‘Keywords are the backbone of SEO’[2], I think this is still the case, even though the SERPs look very different now compared to just two years ago.
So how can we ensure our keyword research game is keeping up with Google’s evolution?
The same fundamentals
Understanding what keywords to use when optimizing your site and content is still central to improving and managing your visibility online. Search engine spiders are still crawling text and links across the internet in order to understand what content is relevant and authoritative to queries.
As they have always done, key phrases can vary in competitiveness.
Short-tail (one word) queries are likely to have a vast number of indexed pages already on Google and so it follows that