Keyword research historically has been the initial content planning task: We would identify which keywords we wanted to rank and what kind of organic search competition we faced.
Nowadays, it’s not only risky to focus on certain keywords (remember the notorious over-optimization penalties?), but it’s counterproductive: In theHummingbird era, Google is trying to understand your content beyond keywords. It wants to understand “things (concepts) instead of strings (the exact sequence of words you type).”
Further reading: If you are not sure what the “things, not strings” concept means for content creation, read this great article by Bill Slawski.
In this era, expanding your keyword research to social media also is a great idea because it:
- Lets you brainstorm more interesting content
- Improves your chances to do better on social media (since you are basing your content on what the social media crowd is currently interested in)
- Lets you target both search and social media making your traffic sources more varied
In most cases, I don’t even do traditional keyword research any more when writing articles. I mean I don’t do it to optimize my content. I feel like keyword optimization is limiting me and holding me back as a writer.
