Individual pages on our websites can rank for thousands of terms, and it’s perhaps the performance of the pages we should be monitoring.
An interesting article on Search Engine Journal a few weeks ago has had me thinking, largely in agreement. Death Of The Keyword argues that to monitor and manage SEO, we need to move away from looking at specific keywords, as their performance can vary in ways we can’t predict, due to the varied nature of the search presentations and the different elements on the results page.
For example, imagine there’s a popular search which takes place hundreds of times a day, and for which we’re the top natural result. Great, right? Not so much, if the first thing people see on the results page is one of those AI-generated ‘answers’ that gives them the information they need. Google Search Console might tell us that our efforts to get the top spot were largely pointless, because we got 0 clickthroughs from our top ranking. But even that information can easily pass us by.
The article suggests that individual pages on our websites can rank for thousands of terms, and it’s perhaps the performance of the pages we should be monitoring, rather than how well we’re doing for keywords. The author says it’s all about “the flow (intent) of the game instead of counting cards (keywords).” Worth some thought.