Before Google rolled out its Hummingbird update in 2010, SEO best practices looked like this: add target keywords and close variations X number of times; add more keywords to your meta description, image description, and title tag; and make sure your content is X words long. Many people still cling to these old-school rules of SEO, despite a decade of advances in Google algorithms that have made this approach obsolete.
I still have clients approach me for blog or webpage copywriting projects with a nearly page-long list of keywords they want stuffed into the content. Invariably, I have to find a tactful way to explain that what they’re asking for isn’t going to get them the organic search results they want. Not only do I not want to deal with the tedium that is trying to cram a dozen or more variations of a single keyword into a blog post, but if something is boring to write, chances are it’s going to be boring to read as well. And Google is going to know exactly what you are trying to do.
Keyword Stuffing = Low-Quality Content
The old approach to SEO was to essentially trick Google into ranking your page higher by adding as many keywords as possible. But as Google’s algorithms have become more and more advanced, so too has its ability to detect these attempts to hack the system. That’s because content that centers on keywords alone rarely provides a user with a good experience.
These days, Google’s algorithm aims to be a programmatic representation of a searcher on their site. It attempts to rank content based on what a user would find the most helpful to answer their search query, and because keyword-laden content’s goal isn’t the user experience, these pages rank much lower nowadays than they did pre-2010.
Making Content SEO-Friendly
In order to make content SEO-friendly for this new algorithm, your goal should be producing content that answers a user’s search query clearly, and has a high level of genuine, authoritative knowledge on the topic. Here is how you decide if your content is SEO-friendly content for today’s algorithms:
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- Your content answers the user’s query.
Content on your website should have a topic that provides an answer to questions that your target audience is asking. This doesn’t mean that every single page has to be formatted this way. If you’re posting the latest news about your business, or have content that’s aimed at growing social engagement, these pages aren’t going to rank in search engines – and there is nothing wrong with that. Focusing on making certain pages SEO-friendly means less time wasted peppering your content with keywords, and in the long run will ensure these pages get better search results.
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- Your content is clear and thorough.
When users input a search query, they are looking for content that is going to answer this query clearly and thoroughly. This type of content is what Google values and uses to decide whether or not a site is high-quality. The higher the quality, the higher your rankings in search results.
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- Your content is high in E-A-T.
E-A-T stands for “expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness,” and has been a big factor in how Google ranks content quality since an algorithm update in 2018. E-A-T isn’t an individual ranking factor; instead, it is a cumulative of signals that Google searches for on your site that indicate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness in your field of business.
Are Keywords Still Relevant?
Yes, keywords are still relevant, but they need to naturally focus on answering a user’s query. It isn’t helpful to focus on short-tail keywords like we used to; your focus should be on long-tail keywords that are going to come up when a user searches for something that is relevant to your business. Instead of picking keywords before you write your content, you should instead find out what your target audience is searching for, and tailor your content to answer that query.
Don’t think about content as either writing for search engines or writing for people. The audience is your goal, and the search engine is simply the tool they use to fulfill that goal. By making sure that your content answers user queries naturally, you’ll be fulfilling Google’s goal of providing users with quality content – and helping to increase your organic search results.
Amanda R. Craft 