An Overview on the Changing Keyword Strategy Landscape

In the world of SEO, overlooking any single aspect can have an adverse effect on your digital marketing plans. It is therefore important to apply pragmatic approaches to re-examine your keyword strategies while setting your marketing goals, and aim towards your objectives in the most coherent, and cost-efficient manner. Keyword strategy is always the top priority of SEO professionals and has the potential to bring intended customers closer to the brand. Gone are the days when a website would quickly rank high on search engines by simply uploading a keyword-heavy content along with a few links and an anchor text to it.

Google’s Panda and Penguin updates ensured that no ‘easy wins’ are possible in today’s digital time. Not to mention, keyword research and associated practices also have drastically changed over the past few years. There is no surefire path to get your keywords ranked quickly. Remember if you are thinking about black-hat strategies and techniques – don’t give ears to it at all. The recent search engine updates suggest that professionals who practice black-hat SEO techniques are likely to get permanently banned, which means your business presence may be wiped out.

Before we dig into different keyword aspects, let’s take a quick glance at the keyword strategy history:

At the outset, keyword strategy was primarily created depending on its relevance, search volume, and competitiveness.

Relevance – It goes without saying that incorporating keywords that has nothing to do with your business is a mere stupidity. Let’s say, if a user is seeking to buy dedicated server hosting and your business doesn’t deal in it – and, by God’s grace, the user lands your website. What do you think, it will be an awe moment for them, and you will convince them to buy whatever you’re offering? Well, it’s a bad idea. The moment they discover they are on the wrong page, they will shut the window perceiving bad impression about your business as you have misguided them.

Search Volume: Another, important thing in keyword strategy is to focus on the highly searched keyword. There would be no use of keywords (that you have incorporated in your content) that a user never searches for. It is proved and ostensibly prevalent that the search volume for ideal keywords is impressively high. There is a plethora of third-party automated online tools. Moreover, calculating keyword search volume with the help of Google’s Keyword Planner is the simplest way to do this.

Competitiveness: A keyword with low competition will anyway offer you a room to optimize and gain benefits out of it. For example, if you’re looking out for a keyword “dedicated server”, or “dedicated hosting”, the keyword analysis tool will give you complete details about the local and global competition for the same keywords. Higher competition level implies that your business will compete with those given number of webpages, if you wish to optimize that keyword. Well, bringing your website in top 5 search results is quite intricate when maximum traffic is engaged there. It would be easy competing with 50,000 web pages rather than 50 million. To put simply, selecting your keywords that have high search volume and low competition would be a sagacious decision.

For example, if you see a lot of traffic for the same keywords and you think about optimizing dedicated server India (since your business deals within India territory) – you are on the right track, or if you decide to practice old SEO strategy – you are risking your business value.

This blog will walk you through some of the important parameters that can contribute to overall business progression:

Driving Forces behind Changing Keyword Strategy

The digital world is evolving at its peak. With the passage of time, old trends become obsolete and new gets formed – agreed?  In the similar lines, our expectations, need, priorities, and methodologies have changed. The changing thoughts, searching methods, potential customers, and increasing size of markets have fuelled up the need for modifying the old school strategies. Although the three fundamentals – relevance, competitiveness and search volumes will continue to be the same, the only thing that will change is the approach.

Changing Landscape….

According to a survey conducted by NetCraft, there were around 968,882,453 websites in year 2014, which is about 50% high from the year 2004. The estimates suggest that number of websites and webpages are increasing at a rampant pace. However, only one lucky website or webpage enjoys the #1 rank for any given keyword. It goes without saying that about 10 to15 years back, not much awareness and information available for SEO, and most of the people didn’t even know about it. But, the online landscape has changed. Now, everyone is striving hard and putting their best feet forward to become agile and competitive.

Changing Search Habits…

With new technologies getting in, the way people search is getting transformed. People have started searching and buying products and services online. With the exploding number of mobile devices, the use of desktop and laptop computers has become stagnant. Adding more to it, nowadays, most users like to perform the search using the voice search option. Google Now is an intelligent personal assistant available for both Android and iOS, and Google Chrome web browser on personal computers, which uses natural user interface to answer end-users’ queries.

And,  the Long Tail Keywords Aid the Shift….

With more and more people opting for voice search alternatives to get their professional and personal chores done, keywords choice is also getting reformed. Instead of searching dedicated server or dedicated hosting, they might search in this way “which is the best-dedicated server hosting provider in India?” This is simply natural, what they feel they render their searches in the similar way. This trend has fuelled up the need for long tail keywords that can quickly support the search queries.

Long tail keywords are the combination of three to four (or more) words, highly relevant with what you’re offering.

For example, if we use buy dedicated server hosting service in India – it covers multiple important keywords into it. See the image:

There’re a number of keyword search tools that can help you execute your new natural language keyword strategy.

Best SEO strategy will help you to engage more customers and mark your indubitable presence in the industry.

Have you implemented right keyword strategy for your business? Share your experience with us in the comments box…