When it comes to keywords, breaking a long-term habit is one of the most challenging things you’ll ever do.
Have you ever seen someone try to change another person’s diehard opinion?
Of course, we all have. It’s usually futile because it requires disrupting someone’s entire worldview they’ve held for decades.
Nevertheless, it’s important for us all to start breaking the keyword-centric worldview now.
We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of Google’s infamous BERT update. Google even called BERT the “most important update in five years.”
At the time, SEO specialists and marketers were stumped. They couldn’t formulate a proper reaction to BERT – but that’s the whole point.
BERT wasn’t a blip in the system. It’s a sign of things to come: a world where keywords matter less than they once did.
But it’s a little more complex than that. Keywords still matter – a lot actually – but not in the way most marketers use them.
Quick Takeaways:
- It’s Google’s job to answer queries, not pick the winner of SEO for every keyword.
- Keywords help Google and users understand what your content is about.
- Google is always improving how it reads and ranks content. Your job as a marketer is to create thorough content that answers the questions real people ask.
- Marketers that build their entire visibility strategy around keywords alone are missing out on the real opportunity – to create content for real people.
Google Hates SEO
Google’s algorithms are under tighter security than the nuclear codes for a few reasons.
For one, Google doesn’t want to share its technology with competitors. Perhaps more importantly though, Google doesn’t want to encourage spam.
Google hates SEO because it conflicts with the search engine’s purpose: to answer queries and questions. If everyone knew exactly how the algorithms work, we’d get like three domains dominating all the search results.
Look at every Google update. Every single one makes it progressively harder to game the system – and that’s the whole point.
Instead, we must focus on answering queries as thoroughly as possible.
