How important are keywords for SEO site optimization?

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How important are keywords for SEO site optimization?
Srdjan Kali

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Srdjan Kali

Sep 18, 2019

In the early days of digital marketing, good SEO meant keywords - and a lot of them.

In an attempt to rank as high as possible on the search engine results page, SEO experts flooded the site pages with keywords, many times without any context.

 

Times have changed.

Google now penalizes sites for "keyword overload," which it describes as "loading a website with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate the site's ranking in Google search results."

Keyword overload, Google says, "results in negative user experience and can harm your site's ranking.

"According to Google, the filling of keywords may include:

• Long lists of keywords without any context or value-added
• Blocks of text that referred to the cities and states where the website is trying to classify
• Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural

These days Google ranks pages based on how relevant and valuable they are to the reader, so a page with a list of keywords, but without any supporting content, or with content clearly written to use multiple keywords without providing useful information will be penalized by Google.

Keywords are less key to search rank than they used to be. A study of ranking factors by SEMRush found that keywords are less important than 11 other ranking factors, including site visits, time spent on the site, bounce rate, backlinks, and length of content.

According to the report, keyword usage is one of the most popular SEO techniques, but "the presence of keywords in the headline, meta description, and text section proved to be significantly less influential than other factors."

 

Keyword Efficiency

Keywords are still important, you just have to use them properly. According to Google, your goal should be to "focus on creating content that is useful, rich in information that uses keywords appropriately and in context."

Google is getting better at understanding user intentions and measuring the relevance of content, which means it can look beyond what the user types into the search box to understand what they are really looking for and deliver results that meet that need. Therefore, content should be written for the user, not for the keyword.

However, there is still a correlation between content and rank that contains keywords. According to a SEMRush report, "over 75% of the first 20 pages have keywords in their body, and over 60% have them in the headline."

So keep those keywords in your content, but make sure they appear in a natural context and that the content provides real value to your site visitors.

If you write valuable content that is useful to readers who came to your site through keyword searches, your keywords are likely to appear naturally in your content, and Google will reward you with a higher ranking on the search results page.

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