Are key words now irrelevant?

Thanks Steve for a very helpful explanation and set of links.

Sorry, am now hoping for a bit more spoon-feeding. You said:-


What's WMT please? Can I find it even though I don't use Chrome?

Have thought that if I go to my Google account the data highlighter tool will probably be there?

Will start investigating typical search terms for my site and see what the new approach "does" to them.

I worry there may be no particular benefit in the new system for a site like mine which is designed to appeal to the smallish minority of searchers thinly scattered in most English regions who're willing to pay for good careers counselling.

I still appear to be on page 1 of Google for most of the terms I'd expect to be but the new system seems a lot less useful than the old as a handy guide to my competitors.

What do others think?

Hi LInda, WMT is Googles administration tools for site owners, Web Master Tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

It's a pretty invaluable resource, and worth playing with if you are directly marketing your site. This combined with Google Analytics gives you so much information, you will prob be a bit bamboozled at first, but it is very important.

I wouldn't worry about the data highlighter tool at the moment, personally speaking. I suspect it's very much a stop gap tool while Google quenches it's thirst for more structured data, but thats just imho.


You need to rethink how people use search engines, and how the users query can be answered.

Career Counsellor Leicestershire is an obvious and easy one to anticipate.

But is that what people are typing into Google to find your services?

I suspect it's more of a case of: I need career adviser in Coalville

Now under the old system, you need keywords with career adviser and coalville to stand any chance of showing up. But in this new ordered and structured data world, Google already knows that Coalville is in Leicestershire. So if your site has citations from directories, confirming your address is in Leicestershire, and this is also on your site, then you stand a good chance of showing up.

That's the difference.

Take it a stage further, you advertise doing redundancy counselling, so in theory, Google knows this, from text on your site, and maybe other external references, and so you may show up if someone types in "lost my job in syston"

In this case, you may have none of those keywords on the page Google sends the visitor to, but it understands what your page is about, (as far as it can, we're not quite at AI yet!).

So this doesn't have to be a scary thing, it's a case of understanding that search queries aren't necessarily changing, its the way Google understands the queries that's changing. Then from this advanced way of interpreting the query, google will then decide on what results to show.

Where it get's a little messy is when carousal results are brought up, which Google has pulled form it's ever growing knowledge graph, and displays the answer within Google, by passing the reference site. But this approach doesn't affect people like yourself, as you don't care if someone gets your number from me, Google or your web site. A lead is a lead.

There's lots of scaremongering and flapping out in the SEO fringes, and plenty of cowboys looking to cash in.

Remember, this new way of doing searches has been live for a month. Have you seen a drastic drop in traffic or enquires? I suspect not.

But interesting times ahead

edit: I pasted in the wrong link in my first post. Just updated it, but if you want to learn more about this from someone who knows and understands this a lot better than me, then I would highly recommend reading up on articles by Aaron Bradley Semantic SEO: Making the Shift from Strings to Things or taking a look at his Semantic Search Community.

we say all this, but there are still PLENTY of websites which havent been affected by penguin/panda, spammy websites with hundreds of duplicate pages. It seems like google is 'behind itself' and needs to clean up on old algorithm updates before rolling out any more, quite frustrating for a white hat person like myself who struggles to navigate my way past those spammy sites...

I think the answer is yes keywords are still very relevant

True, but do you think theyre still relevant?

Yep I think so, plus variations of keywords to accommodate phrases.

You might find this thread interesting: Advanced On-Page Optimisation for your Web Pages