Topics and keywords.
This is a debate many SEOs have been anticipating for years. To understand the basis of this debate, one needs to understand how SEO and search engines have evolved in the past two decades.
SEO – A Brief History
When search engines first came out, the algorithms they used to rank content on their results page wasn’t very sophisticated. Typically, a search engine was not able to grasp the qualitative aspects of the content written by a website. It ranked webpages based on two key aspects – backlinks and keyword frequency.
A webpage that mentioned a particular keyword more (and added related keywords) and had a decent number of backlinks would rank higher. These two factors were enough to rank a website high on SERPs.
With this set of incentives in place, the outcome was obvious. SEOs began using bad link schemes and adopted keyword spamming tactics to rank their webpages high on SERPs.
Over the years, search engines have evolved to understand content at a more basic level. Understanding the context of content has been a priority of search engines.
In 2020, we are at a stage where Google has become very good at gauging searcher intent at matching it with the content. Criteria like keyword frequency have become less important.
This is the reason why keyword-based content writing has come under the spotlight. In order to rank first on Google, writing the right keywords is not enough. Writers need to dive deeper into the topic they are writing on. We are already seeing the consequences of this approach in digital marketing institutes where students are being given lessons on topical research rather than keywords.
Difference Between Keyword and Topical Approach
Keyword research is based on raw data from search engines. It gives an idea about what people tend to search on Google or any other search engine. Topic research, on the other hand, is based on what people want to know about the topic. It is not focused on what search engines think the keywords are.
In essence, topical research mandates writers to present whatever content people want to read about. For example, let’s assume the topic of a given piece of content is ‘egg sandwich’. A quick dive into keyword research would show ten different keyword suggestions related to the topic.
In topical research, a writer will instead look at the top five search results on Google. What is common in each of them? In this case, each of them shows a recipe for making an egg sandwich. Thus, writers have to write an egg sandwich recipe. That’s it.
Digital marketing professionals will take time to evolve to this new approach to content writing. While topical research does seem easy on paper, it is a tedious practice and not always as simple as shown in the example above.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, this article covered the difference between topics and keywords-oriented SEO content writing.
About the Author – Tanmay Bhatia is a content writer currently working as a guest author at Delhi Courses Academy, a well-known as the best digital marketing institute in Delhi.