Originally published on LinkedIn.com on May 24, 2016 By Kevin Carney
I don’t mean to say keyword research was always over rated. There was a day when it showed you the short cut to higher search rankings.
I also don’t mean to say keyword research is totally useless today. It’s not totally useless.
What I do mean to say is people who are new to SEO spend way too much time stressing keywords and too little time publishing.
What I mean to say is publishing is where it’s at, while a strong focus keywords are non essential.
People who publish a lot get found whether or not they care a whit about keyword research (for real). On the other hand, people who focus strongly on keyword research but don’t publish much, rarely get found (also for real).
Below is SERP for the search term “Travel to India” which I will use to illustrate my point.
The top results for organic search are:
- lonelyplanet.com
- roughguides.com
- cdc.gov
- journeywoman.com
- traveller.com.au
- travel.state.gov
- asherfergusson.com
- nomadicmatt.com
Those sites are either online magazine style sites or government agency sites. Even the askherfergusson site which I had previously never heard of, is an online magazine. Those types of sites tend to do zero keyword research.
What they do is to publish good stuff that addresses questions and interests people have.
And they keep doing it.
You want your business blog to be found? You need to turn it into an online magazine, publish good stuff, and keep publishing.
Publishing daily trumps keyword research every day.