Do you still need to use keywords?

d0sa said:

I've just been looking over a competitors blogs and was intrigued.. They don't seem to be using keywords in many of their blogs.

For example.. they have a blog titled "Why spicy hot dogs are da bomb", but then they don't include the keyword "spicy hot dogs" once.

Do they not know what they're doing for SEO? Or am I missing something?

I understand that over the years SEO has moved on from being able to rank #1 with "The thing about spicy hot dogs is that spicy hots dogs are great for you, and spicy hot dogs.." to more nuanced approaches, but surely you still need to include at least a few instances of the main keyword?

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d0sa said:

I've just been looking over a competitors blogs and was intrigued.. They don't seem to be using keywords in many of their blogs.

For example.. they have a blog titled "Why spicy hot dogs are da bomb", but then they don't include the keyword "spicy hot dogs" once.

Do they not know what they're doing for SEO? Or am I missing something?

I understand that over the years SEO has moved on from being able to rank #1 with "The thing about spicy hot dogs is that spicy hots dogs are great for you, and spicy hot dogs.." to more nuanced approaches, but surely you still need to include at least a few instances of the main keyword?

Click to expand...

safeSEOboost said:

Yes, SEO has changed when it comes to keywords, and AI is able to see what the content is about, without using the exact keyword in the text.

In any case, "spicy hot dogs" is both in the <h1> and the URL, and it is enough for google to understand what the page is about.

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d0sa said:

Thanks, safeSEOboost. Is this something that has changed in the past year? And do you happen to have any further reading on it?

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d0sa said:

I've just been looking over a competitors blogs and was intrigued.. They don't seem to be using keywords in many of their blogs.

For example.. they have a blog titled "Why spicy hot dogs are da bomb", but then they don't include the keyword "spicy hot dogs" once.

Do they not know what they're doing for SEO? Or am I missing something?

I understand that over the years SEO has moved on from being able to rank #1 with "The thing about spicy hot dogs is that spicy hots dogs are great for you, and spicy hot dogs.." to more nuanced approaches, but surely you still need to include at least a few instances of the main keyword?

Click to expand...

4440 said:

It depends.

I'll give you an example.

If the site is new york times, or Wikipedia, which is already a top authority. Everything they say should/must have value.
In this case, Google will use more NLP resources in detecting their content and get far more detailed information/entities/KP about the article.
Even if the article does not include any exact keyword like "spicy hot dogs ", Google still knows they are talking about spicy, hot dogs from NLP analysis.

If the site is a nobody, Google will not try to use NLP resources into analyzing your content, because computing resources are limited and cost money, even for Google. So if your content has the exact keyword "spicy hot dogs", google will know what your content is about.

So the conclusion is keyword is still important. You should include them at least a few times if possible.

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safeSEOboost said:

this has been happening over the past few years, with the implementation of more AI by Google - this is not a too well-known fact, but keyword stuffing is a thing of the past, as many search results indicate - it is common for a page to rank without the (exact) keyword on it, as Google understands semantics.

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