Can SEOs Stop Worrying About Keywords and Just Focus on Topics? – Whiteboard Friday

February 04, 2016
Aaron Polmeer

By randfish

Can We Abandon Keyword Research & On-Page Targeting in Favor of a Broader Topic/Concept Focus in Our SEO Efforts?

Posted by randfish

Should you ditch keyword targeting entirely? There’s been a lot of discussion around the idea of focusing on broad topics and concepts to satisfy searcher intent, but it’s a big step to take and could potentially hurt your rankings. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses old-school keyword targeting and new-school concept targeting, outlining a plan of action you can follow to get the best of both worlds.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we’re going to talk about a topic that I’ve been seeing coming up in the SEO world for probably a good 6 to 12 months now. I think ever since Hummingbird came out, there has been a little bit of discussion. Then, over the last year, it’s really picked up around this idea that, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be optimizing for researching and targeting keywords or keyword phrases anymore. Maybe we should be going more towards topics and ideas and broad concept.”

I think there’s some merit to the idea, and then there are folks who are taking it way too far, moving away from keywords and actually losing and costing themselves so much search opportunity and search engine traffic. So I’m going to try and describe these two approaches today, kind of the old-school world and this very new-school world of concept and topic-based targeting, and then describe maybe a third way to combine them and improve on both models.

Classic keyword research & on-page targeting

In our classic keyword research, on-page targeting model, we sort of have our SEO going, “Yeah. Which one of these should I target?”

He’s thinking about like best times to fly. He’s writing a travel website, “Best Times to Fly,” and there’s a bunch of keywords. He’s checking the volume and maybe some other metrics around “best flight times,” “best days to fly,” “cheapest days to fly,” “least crowded flights,” “optimal flight dates,” “busiest days to fly.” Okay, a bunch of different keywords.

So, maybe our SEO friend here is thinking, “All right. She’s going to maybe go make a page for each of these keywords.” Maybe not all of them at first. But she’s going to decide, “Hey, you know what? I’m going after ‘optimal flight dates,’ ‘lowest airport traffic days,’ and ‘cheapest days to fly.’ I’m going to make three different pages. Yeah, the content is really similar. It’s serving a very similar purpose. But that doesn’t matter. I want to have the best possible keyword targeting that I can for each of these individual ones.”

“So maybe I can’t invest as much effort in the content and the research into it, because I have to make these three different pages. But you know what? I’ll knock out these three. I’ll do the rest of them, and then I’ll iterate and add some more keywords.”

That’s pretty old-school SEO, very, very classic model.

New school topic- …read more

Source:: Moz Blog

      

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