6
votes
I think Keyword Research doesn't work at all. Prove me otherwise!
Keyword Research and SEO are entire industries today. There are tools like ahrefs and semrush that promise to give you "trending" topic keywords for a sum of monthly subscription money.
However, you can discard all their claims using a similar logic that you use to discard the claims of Astrologers, Voodooists, Stock Experts who "recommend" stocks, etc:
- If an Astrologer knows the future of everyone, wouldn't they profit massively from it themselves using the information rather than telling the trick to everyone else (just for a pittance)?
- If a Stock Expert knew that a stock's price will go up (and how much), won't they invest thousands and make millions themselves instead of giving those "tips" to "subscribers" and again, earn only a pittance?
- If SEO and Search Marketing companies knew exactly which keywords can rank your blog or site in the Google Search Engine, won't they write articles on those topics/keywords themselves and profit massively with the page views instead of revealing that secret to you for merely a few cents!
The funny thing about SEO is that Google itself is actually pretty helpful in that regard. My sister was having search results visibility issues with her site, and since she has a Google Workspace account she decided to just contact them directly to ask for help. They gave her all sorts of excellent advice, and once I implemented all their suggestions, and the site got re-indexed, her visibility/rankings significantly improved.
And ironically, none of their suggestions involved fiddling with keywords. Instead, they recommended simply adding appropriate meta and accessibility related HTML tags to everything, as well as various other ancillary things, like setting up a Google My Business profile. So it seems that these days Google cares far more about sites adhering to the full spread of HTML standards, and those willing to provide them more relevant info on their other services, than they do about any "keywords" found on said sites.
That’s more or less always been the case though. Google caring about keywords etc was always kind of a side effect to how their algorithms worked, not the main focus.
People game everything though.
Anecdotally the company I work for was trying hard to get us into one of those proprietary “we keep secrets from you” advertising deals and the results were notably worse than it was with basic Google keyword ads.
Keyword research is probably 10% of the effort of an advertising campaign. 20% is tracking how much you are spending and how often you get outbid. The rest is simply making sure you have a quality website to begin with.