You Ask, I Answer: Do Keywords Still Matter in an AI SEO World?

In today's episode, Shane asks, with the changes that Google has made to its algorithm, is there still any validity to having a list of keywords and tracking how they are ranking? Do keywords still have a place in the SEO process? This is a good question because a lot of what's been written, including some pieces I've written myself, uh have talked about the importance of topics, uh document level topics, sentence paragraphs, and larger chunks of text that Google now uses thanks to deep learning capabilities to measure the importance, the relevance of a piece of content. Now, here's the thing about that. All those are words.

Words and phrases. Now, where things are different is that you're not going to try and get a page to rank for one word or phrase, right? You may have a focus keyword, but there's gonna be a bunch of keywords around that that should also be on that page that are relevant to that page. Uh, this is a concept in uh natural language processing called adjacency. What words and phrases are adjacent to the primary focus keywords?

So again, with the uh discussion about espresso, for example, espresso has a particular type of bean, a particular type of grind, a method, uh, machinery, and so a page that is about espresso should also have those terms featured on it in the in some degree, right? Because that's what the topic is about. And so that page may and probably should have uh multiple keywords that's being tracked for, but they are all related around that central concept and idea. The best SEO tools allow you to see uh m how a page ranks for multiple keywords, right? And uh you can set it up to design uh design uh your monitoring for multiple keywords.

Words and phrases have you keep like I said, you can't make content without them. Now, what's changed in the SEO process is not the words and the phrases per se, but the research, right? The research part of SEO is what has drastically changed in this uh artificial intelligence uh world, it's AI-driven SEO. What's changed about that is that you need much more sophisticated tools that do natural language pro language processing to get those adjacencies? Um you need subject matter experts to talk to in order to discover uh those hidden terms that may not be frequent on a page but indicate your expertise, they indicate your authority, uh your relevance, the the fact that you know the topic deeply.

So keyword frequency tools could be one way of doing that, just determining how many times does a word or phrase uh appear. Uh our friends over at Talk Walker have uh an a basic frequency counter in a lot of their software. Um the SEO tools are starting to get there, but your best results are always going to be from uh more advanced natural language processing software. So you can use some of the cloud services like uh Amazon and Google and IBM all have uh natural language processing capabilities to uh digest large quantities of text. I use an open source library um that's built into well it's not it's an add-on to the R language, the R programming language, in order to do a lot of that uh as well.

Because with the Google and other cloud services, you do pay a non-zero amount of money. It's small, it's it's not a lot of money. But for the effort, if you're gonna because you're gonna have to write code to connect to those APIs anyway, you may as well just build it with something that doesn't cost you money every time you run it. So the research part is what has changed. How do you determine those keyword adjacencies?

And there's a bunch of different methods. There's, as I mentioned, basic term frequency counts, which actually are not bad for determining just how often does a term or phrase show up within a large body of copy. Uh there is a measure called inverse document frequency, uh, which is part of term frequency that uh you can use to determine how many times does a term uniquely appear in a document that gets rid of things like the word the that offers no predictive power about expertise uh across a bunch of documents, but it shows up a whole bunch. And then there are more advanced methods like vectorization, which allow you to uh mathematically give GPS coordinates on a page to uh terms and then see you know who lives near that term, if you if you will. Um and then there's even more advanced models on that.

But those are sort of the three major uh methods for measuring uh those keywords, and they're pretty good. They will get you a good percentage of the way, especially if you don't have domain knowledge. Uh one of the things that's gonna be tough for a lot of SEO and content practitioners is that you need to have at least some level of domain expertise in order to be able to craft great content. Uh the days of Googling for two minutes and and copying and pasting a bunch of stuff off of other pages are are long gone. Uh it now, because of uh natural language models being able to understand things like grammar and syntax to some degree, that technique, which used to work in the old days, does not work anymore.

So you do need that domain level expertise. If you're wondering how to make use of this with and you don't have machine learning capabilities, you don't have data scientists on staff, your best bet is to sit down with your subject matter experts, get out a little portal portable audio recorder, turn it on, and have a conversation with them. Put together a list of questions about your keywords, about your topic, right? And for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, work with your subject matter expert, talk to them, and just ask them questions about the topic as though you were Googling it, but you're Googling it from inside somebody's head. Yeah, so what uh what is the best way to make espresso?

Or what should I look for in in espresso beans? And you'll get a talk about the roast versus the grind and a lot of detail. And that those conversations are what you can then start mining for that true expertise. That's the easiest way to get started in the new keyword landscape. The fact of the matter, though, is that at the end of the day, the the core goal of Google's algorithm changes has not changed, which is to help you find great relevant content.

So as long as you're creating longer form, great relevant content with subject matter expertise, you will deliver on what it is that Google is looking for in its its search algorithms. Worry less about individual keywords, worry much more about topical expertise. So use those use those subject matter experts. Really good question. Look into some of those natural language processing tools that I mentioned.

Most of them are relatively inexpensive. I would shy away from uh people offering like individual point solutions because they will tend to be expensive and they will tend to be things that if you invested some time and money in yourself and developing the capabilities yourself, you would have them and could use them in an unlimited fashion rather than paying you know $599 a month for you know a tool that does one thing. So be on the lookout for that. As always, please leave your c follow up comments and questions below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care.ai today and let us know how we can help you.