Why did Google make these changes? #

Our mission is to organize the world’d information and make it universally accessible and useful.

As Google continues its work to deliver the best results possible, they have had to fight back against black-hat tactics and spammers.

This has led them away from simple algorithms and towards developing some of the most sophisticated technology to deliver the world’s information.

Google started doing this with Panda back in 2010. The purpose of this updates was to reward high-quality content and get rid of “thin” content pages.

With Panda, most website owners – that had been enjoying search visibility by having a separate landing page for each tiny variation of each searchable keyword – got affected. At that point, we started “consolidating”, i.e. merging multiple landing pages into one.

On April 24, 2012, Google announced another step to reward high quality sites, an algorithm change aimed at fighting against webspam. The algorithm change was first called “The Webspam Algorithm” but eventually began to go by the name of “Penguin”.

Penguin penalised who have done dubious activities such as buying mass links, spamming low quality directory sites with your links, or paying an intern to leave hundreds of comments on blogs.

Google Hummingbird, announced in 2013, was a big step forward from Panda because instead of using a set of signals (which were still quite easily manipulated), Hummingbird focused on a deeper understanding of the search query and the user’s intent behind it.

Hummingbird make it possible for a page to rank for a query even if it didn’t contain the exact words the searcher entered.

For example, if before Hummingbird you had been searching for [hiking area], Google would try to match the words in your search query to words on a page, so, you’d have seen this exact phrase in the title of each top result in Google. With Hummingbird, goes beyond simple keyword-matching. It turns your search term into concept and tries to find pages that cover that concept, i.e. finding interesting places nearby to go hiking.

Its interpretation increased even further with RankBrain in late 2015. Google said that RankBrain is the third most important ranking signal, after content and backlinks.

In 2019, Google improved its contextual understanding of keywords further, yet again, with the BERT update – which they announced as their “biggest leap forward in five years”.

How algorithm updates influenced the way we do keyword research #

Because search engines have changed, the approach to keyword research needs to change as well.

Keep in mind, there’s no universal approach to executing keyword research.

It will vary based on:

• Your website (authority, number of pages, quality of content, etc);
• Your goals and objectives (branding, exposure, traffic, leads, sales);
• Your budget, resources and deadlines;
• Your industry and competitive landscape.

Here some key points to help you do your research in an efficient way:

1. SERPs Analyze

   Source

   Google is always changing how it displays search results.

   

   The starting point for any effective SEO strategy is understanding what Google chooses to show and why. Only then can you figure out what you need to create or adjust on your site to show up more often—and in higher positions.

   The goal of this type of SERP analysis is to confirm that your content plan matches the current SERP content (i.e. will satisfy intent);

   If a particular feature dominates results, your content should follow the same form and answer the same questions.

   By analyzing the factors of web pages that appear in Google SERPs for targeted keywords, SEOs are able to determine potential tactics for improving their pages’ positions in those results.

2. Figure out the user intent

   Behind every search is an intent – a need or want – for a product, service, or simply more information.

   You need to find out what really makes your prospect tick. You have to figure out their frustrations, understand their desires, and find out what problems keep them up at night.

   Getting the inside track on how your audience thinks (and what it needs) not only allows you to create perfectly targeted content, but it allows you to create products and services that solve very specific problems.

3. Clustering Keywords

   It’s not a new tactic. We were clustering keywords 10 years ago. It’s the methodology that has changed.

   Several years ago we were grouping keywords by a common modifier. Going back to our hiking example, the traditional keyword clustering tactic would result in a group of keywords that would contain [hikes] and [easy] in one phrase, as [easy] is a common modifier in this case:

   • [easy hikes near me]

   • [easy hiking trails near me]

   • [easy mountains to hike near me]

   This method of grouping doesn’t make sense anymore because it still relies on exact matching. Nowadays we should clustering keywords based on what kind of information searchers are looking for: informational, navigational, commercial, transactional.

   

   Bear in mind that every query has its own unique intent, but it may change they travel through their user journey. For example, someone may start off wanting informational content, and end up converting to another type of user intent by the end of the blog post, such as commercial or transactional.

4. Ignore Long Tail Keywords

   What makes Long Tail keywords confusing is that there is a lot of “noise” in the SEO. There are many who claim that “Long tail represent a significant share of all search traffic you get”. There are others that claim “Long tail keywords are dead”.

   …

   If you think long tail keywords are phrases with 6 or even more words than yes, long tail keywords are dead! .

   

   whatever we call them, we know that Google looks at keywords as concepts and tries to understand the intent behind search queries.

   So when a page is optimised around a medium tail keyword Goole will rank the page for that keyword plus a huge number of similar keywords.

5. Trends, Competitors and Social

6. Write for Human

   Gone are the days of keyword density obsessions and stuffy keyword phrases inserted awkwardly into content. Today’s content is all about user intent, which often boils down to context. By using keywords and synonyms to create context around your keyword phrases of choice, you can provide your users with a more complete, relevant, and useful search experience.

   By writing content that holds reader experience at the pinnacle of importance, you’re positioning yourself to make the most of the trend toward semantic search in the post-Hummingbird world and to provide more relevant results to your users. Building content that is based around relevant topics, important themes, and valuable information for your audience is a more solid keyword strategy than targeting one or two keyword phrases. Because of this, today’s content creator can afford to focus less on keyword phrases and more on context and relevance.