Is Keyword Targeting Considered Old School?

The topic has been swirling around for months now: is keyword research and keyword targeting becoming old school? And the new question becomes: wouldn’t our time be better spent focusing on topics and ideas and broad concepts? These are two great questions and we’ll spend our time today answering them as best we can. There can be benefits to both. Keywords can drive your rankings among search engines. Getting rid of them all together could hurt you in terms of search ability. 

Keyword Research: It’s a Classic

You have a website and you want to drive traffic to your products/services. What has been the classic method of accomplishing this goal? Keywords! The idea is to think like your customers. How would they search for you? What terms would they type into the search bar? Then you would think of every relevant keyword that you would want to be searched for and create a list. From this list you would plug relevant keywords into your content in order to drive traffic to your website (without overstuffing) and increase your ranking factor. Keywords have been a great SEO tool to optimize your pages for best success among the search engines. 

The Wave of the Future: Concept-Based Targeting

This relatively new idea of thinking takes away the stress of keyword research and focuses more broadly on concepts and ideas. The idea is that the content is the star and Google will be able to pick up keywords and relate them back to your article and this will help boost your rankings. However, you can write the most stellar article one one idea, but Google isn’t necessarily going to understand to pull out the significant keywords that people would be searching for. Say you own a garden center and you want to blog about the best time to plant a garden. Your article might be A+ material, but the terms and phrases that people will associate with that article will not be the same as if it were written specifically with keywords in mind. 

Solution

So what’s a person to do? The best option would be to combine both ideas for great results. You don’t want to get rid of keyword research altogether. Even though it may be considered old school these days, it is still a tried and true method. But there is also value to writing content based on ideas and concepts. Take your topic for ideal garden planting and create an outline. Now think about what target keywords you could use in your headings, subheadings, and titles that will get picked up by Google. This will be your best bet to actually get search traffic to your site on a continual basis. It’s all about blending these two concepts together into one harmonious working model.