The Digital Marketer's Obligation to Stay Current

The Digital Marketer's Obligation to Stay Current
Peter Hatherley shares thoughts on staying current and improving digital presence.

#seofornow   #keywordresearch  

Originally shared by Peter Hatherley

Keywords or Search Queries?

For many years digital marketers have focused on keywords but have we been putting the cart before the horse?

Our audience thinks in terms of search queries so if we want to be in synch with them we really need to think in exactly the same way .

Search queries encompass the user's perspective as well as the marketer's viewpoint and also cover the ongoing expansion from words to phrases.

Intelligent semantic search engines such as Google see these as entities or concepts, especially if their patents are to be believed 

Times have changed. Conversational search has changed the playing field especially on mobile and relational queries like this are being handled by #rankbrain  automatically as part of Google's deep learning process.

So if you're still thinking keywords you may not be seeing the wood from the trees especially when it comes to user intent. Infact you may be trying to impose that intent on them without even knowing it

If we retain the thought that they are search queries not merely keywords or keyphrases the expansion into topical optimisation becomes a far more natural process.

It also allows us to build authoritative, informative content that reaches the needs of our audience. In fact it is poles apart than the heady days of the 2000s where keyword stuffing and shonky backlinking were rampant.

By simply taking a good long look in the mirror and seeing it from the user's perspective we access the touchstone of digital marketing success.

Keywords do still play a part in that topical relevancy but search queries shows us so much more about what the searcher is really looking for.

And as Gary Vaynerchuk says we need to "market in the year we're living in not 2006 or 1996." All of that cumulative knowledge is still useful but only if it leads you to what's happening now, not 10 years ago.

Marketing is about being on the cutting edge. It's about providing a service that is highly targeted to answering these queries in depth and that keeps our clients and customers more fully informed than they have been in the past