How AI Is Changing the SEO Outlook on Keywords

Not long ago, I discussed AI and SEO, and how I think AI will require SEO specialists to be even more content-minded than they are now. Since then, I’ve noticed some interesting things happening with keywords.

If links are the conduit that makes the internet possible, then keywords are the semantic  signposts. This world of keywords is a very complex and mercurial one indeed. Because of both the sheer amount of data and the sheer amount of searches on the internet today, each day could witness the birth of keywords your company has never seen.

Last year, Google said 15 percent of searches it sees daily are brand new. And that’s just Google. Combined, Bing and Yahoo see nearly 198 million searches per day, and DuckDuckGo sees over 20 million, which helped the fledgling search engine grow by 55 percent in 2017.

There’s no telling how many of those Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo searches are semantically unique; if and when they are, they generate new keywords that go into a search engine’s database. Because of relatively advanced AI, Google may have a better handle on unique searches, which may encourage people to make more of them on Google. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the other search engines are experiencing something similar.  

How can you strategize when there are new keywords generated by users and websites in your niche all the time? Right now, when it comes to website optimization, you would look at the following keyword analysis factors:

• Intent: Users are either looking for information, navigation tips, shopping tips, or the opportunity to buy something.
• Metrics: For every keyword, there’s a daily, weekly, and monthly number of searches (volume); there’s also a metric for difficulty, which reflects how much competition there is to rank for that keyword.
• Results: Each keyword has a search engine results page (SERP) that tells you what the top contenders for that keyword are up to.
• Rank: If the keyword is in your wheelhouse, you may have a page or pages that rank for it, meaning you will show up somewhere in the SERP.

You would use user intent, keyword metrics, SERPs, and your current rankings to inform strategy. These are already plenty of variables to account for. Plus there’s one very interesting factor at play here: the evolving activities of users. You may be seeking to rank for a keyword like pet insurance, but users are becoming more likely to ask something like, what does pet insurance cover’ ” and that’s just the tip of the longtail iceberg.

Why? Two words: voice search. As voice recognition software improves and more people conduct searches on their smartphones, keywords change. When you query an AI assistant, it’s more natural to say something like what’s the capital of Japan than it is to say Japan capital.

By 2020, about half of searches will be voice searches. Any SEO specialist will agree that since more and more searches are voice searches, more and more keywords are longtail ” meaning you should optimize your content for longtail keywords.

But when you’re writing an informational blog post, for example, it doesn’t sound natural to insert the phrase what does pet insurance cover a bunch of times in the content. In the past, SEO specialists tried using keywords a certain number of times throughout the content in order to help rankings.

But if you use a longtail phrase in places where it seems unnatural, the search engine AI is training itself to catch that, and you may end up getting penalized. At the very least, your page won’t rank well because somebody else out there realized all they had to do is pose the longtail question once and then provide a lot of relevant and valuable information.

While you’re busy inserting keywords, they’re busy offering value ” which is what search engines reward. 

It feels natural to use a longtail keyword as a heading and then answer the question in the subsequent content. In that case, you’re not going to be repeating the longtail keyword more than once or twice throughout an article.

So how can you strategize for longtail keywords and the new keywords that are popping up every day? Think of the questions users are most likely to ask regarding your product, service, niche, and content. Then, answer these questions. It’s that simple. But it’s hard, because it requires you to use both data and intuition as you work toward putting yourself in the user’s shoes.