Kelly Stanze’s Post

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Consultant & Freelancer | SEO, Content Strategy, On-Site Search, and More

Pssssst. This is for the upper-level folks out there. The ones who may be managing SEOs but have never specialized in it themselves, or the ones that have been out of the IC chair for a long time. This is really important, so come here and listen closely. You don't need to micromanage your SEO folks at the keyword level. While we tend to think of "exact match" on the paid side of things, the reality is that SEO has long drawn a relationship between keywords, exactly as they are typed, matching with pages. So...yeah, "exact match" but make it organic. While keyword strategy and tracking is still a vital part of our business model, I keep hearing stories about decision-makers requiring SEOs to toil over page-level keyword strategies -- both integration and tracking/reporting. The BERT algo update came out in 2019, pushing Google's understanding of search terms further into conversational, natural language and away from verbatim queries. Additionally, personalized search makes it a heck of a lot harder to accurately track individual keywords at the page level. If you're still over-emphasizing exact keywords that don't weave into the content in a reader-friendly way, shoehorning them in because THIS IS THE KEYWORD, and then expecting your SEO team to track them closely...please stop. You're doing a disservice to your users, you're likely harming the morale of your SEO team, and you're probably making some Google programmer responsible for the search engine's semantic language understanding cry because of the insult to the machine's intelligence. I'm not saying you abandon keyword tracking altogether. But take a more intuitive, holistic approach to SEO. I've seen sites lose horribly in organic because of over-reliance on a few specific "exact match" keywords and neglect of the big picture. There are better ways to structure your strategy and track your performance and growth -- ones that aren't more than half a decade old.

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