What Is a Keyword in SEO?
A search query. What somebody typed into a search box when they were looking for something. The word carries thirty years of industry baggage on top of that. Almost none of it belongs in the definition.
It Is Just What Somebody Typed
Somebody wants a leaking radiator fixed. They open a search box and type something. Those words are the keyword. That is the entire definition. Everything else people attach to the term, such as where to place it or how often to repeat it, is industry practice bolted on afterwards.
Why the word misleads. It sounds technical.
Keyword sounds like a setting. Or a tag. Or something you configure in a panel. It is none of those. It is a description of what a person did.
Where the baggage came from. Early search engines.
Decades ago, matching genuinely was based on which words appeared on a page and how often. So an industry grew up around placing them. The engines moved on considerably faster than the advice did.
What it is not. A property of your page.
A page does not have a keyword in the way it has a title. It has a subject. Searches either match that subject or they do not.
Why the distinction matters. It changes what you do.
Treat a keyword as a thing to insert and you edit pages. Treat it as what somebody typed and you ask whether your page answers them, which is a different and far more productive question.
What this cluster covers. The useful part.
Working out what people actually search for, deciding which of those are worth your effort and turning that into pages. The rest of this page clears the ground first.
Do They Still Matter
Yes, with one qualification that changes how you use them. People still type words and those words still determine what a page gets considered for. What changed is that the matching happens on meaning rather than on exact strings.
What that means practically. Synonyms count.
A page about fixing a dripping tap can be matched to somebody searching for a leaking tap, without the second phrase appearing anywhere on it. The engine understands the two describe the same problem.
Why people think they stopped mattering. Bad advice retired.
What died was the technique, not the concept. Exact phrase placement stopped working. A good deal of commentary took that as keywords no longer mattering at all.
What still depends on the words. Which subject you chose.
The searches you decide to serve determine what you write about. That decision is the whole exercise. It is made in words.
Where the mechanism is explained. Our advanced material.
How search engines interpret meaning rather than matching strings is covered in our advanced SEO material. This page only needs the consequence.
The consequence. Cover, do not insert.
Which is block three. It is the single most useful thing on this page.
Which Means You Do Not Insert Them
The instinct after finding a keyword is to put it into the page. Into the title, the first paragraph, a heading, a few more times in the body. That instinct is wrong, it makes pages worse and it comes from a model of search engines that is thirty years out of date.
What happens instead. The words appear anyway.
Write properly about replacing a boiler and you will use the words people search when replacing a boiler. Coverage produces the language. Nobody has to place anything.
Why insertion is visible. It reads badly.
A phrase forced into a sentence that did not want it is obvious to any reader. So the technique costs you credibility with the person who arrived, in exchange for nothing.
The version people still attempt. Subtler now.
Not crude repetition, which nobody tries any more. The same phrase in every heading, a town name pushed into sentences it does not fit, a services list padded with variations. Our guide to keyword stuffing covers each.
What about a target number. There is not one.
No percentage, no count, no recommended range. Any figure quoted anywhere is invented. We will not publish one.
The useful discipline. Be clear early.
Make plain in the opening sentences what the page is about. That is a readability decision that happens to serve the same end.
One Page, One Subject
A page trying to serve several unrelated searches serves none of them well. This is the structural principle everything else in this cluster depends on. It is broken constantly by businesses trying to cover more ground with fewer pages.
What a subject means here. One thing somebody wants.
Not one phrase. A subject usually covers many related searches, all of which one good page can satisfy. That is the unit to build around.
What breaking it looks like. A page about everything.
A single page covering boiler repair, boiler installation and annual servicing. Three different situations, three different readers, one page that half serves each.
Why it fails commercially. Nobody feels served.
Somebody with a broken boiler wants a page about broken boilers. A page that also discusses installation reads as a business talking about itself rather than answering them.
The opposite error. A page per phrase.
Just as damaging. Building separate near-identical pages for tiny variations produces pages competing with each other, which our cannibalisation guide covers.
How you tell which is which. One test.
Would one page satisfy somebody making each of these searches. If yes, they belong together. If no, they need separating.
What that test produces. A map.
Applied across a whole list, it groups searches into subjects and assigns each to a page. That exercise is the most valuable one in this cluster.
Keywords Are Not The Strategy
Businesses are regularly handed a spreadsheet of phrases and told it is their keyword strategy. It is not. A list of searches is raw material. The strategy is the decision about which subjects the business will own. That decision is made by people rather than by a tool.
What a list actually is. Evidence of demand.
Useful evidence, telling you what people are looking for. It contains no judgement about which of those you should pursue.
What is missing from it. Everything commercial.
Which searches lead to work you want, at margins you can accept, in places you can serve. A spreadsheet knows none of that and cannot.
The strategy question. What will you be known for.
A business cannot own everything. Choosing three or four subjects and covering them properly beats touching twenty, particularly for a site without much standing.
Why the list gets mistaken for the plan. It looks like work.
A file of several thousand rows is impressive. It is also the easiest part of the exercise. Handing it over as a deliverable leaves the hard thinking undone.
What turns one into the other. Grouping and choosing.
Sorting the list into subjects, then deciding which the business will pursue and in what order. Clustering covers the first and our content strategy guide the second.
Where To Go Next
Three routes depending on what you need. The order below is the one we would suggest for a business starting from nothing.
If you want to do the research. The method.
Our guide to doing keyword research covers the whole exercise, including the part nobody mentions, which is that most of what you find is not your customer.
If the vocabulary is the problem. The types.
Head terms, long tail, transactional, branded and the rest are all explained in the types guide, which sets out how the four classifications overlap.
If somebody has handed you a list. The numbers.
Before acting on it, understand what the figures in it mean. None of them comes from Google, which our metrics guide covers.
If you run a local business. Start there instead.
Local research is a genuinely different exercise, because the volumes are small enough that the tools stop being reliable. That has its own guide.
What to do first, practically. Write down the questions.
Before opening anything, list the questions customers ask you every week. That list is better research material than most tools produce.
The thing worth knowing before you start. Most of it gets thrown away.
A raw list is full of people who will never buy from you. Students, researchers, jobseekers, competitors and people intending to do the job themselves. Removing them is the actual work. That is why the method guide opens on it.
Where everything sits. The hub.
All twenty-two guides are on the keyword research guide.
Somebody sent
you a keyword
list and called
it a strategy.
A list of searches is evidence of demand and nothing more. It contains no judgement about which of them lead to work you want, at margins you can accept, in places you can serve. A file of several thousand rows looks like the deliverable. It is the easiest part of the exercise.
What we do with a keyword list:
If a proposal tells you how many times to use a phrase on a page, ask where that number came from.
Every guide.
One subject.
What the words mean, what the numbers in a keyword tool actually are, how to find the searches worth targeting, how to turn a list into a publishing plan and what to do when a page you relied on slips.
