What is a keyword?
A keyword is a search, written down. Despite the name it is usually a phrase rather than a single word: creative agency new york, how long does a brand film take, best running shoes for flat feet. On the searcher's side a keyword is what they typed; on the site's side it is the term a page targets, the one it hopes to appear for. SEO and paid search both run on the match between the two.
Keywords are classified in several ways. By length: short-tail terms of one or two words with large volume and vague intent, and long-tail phrases with small volume and precise intent. By intent: informational, navigational, commercial, transactional. By role on a page: the primary keyword the page is built around, and the secondary terms it also covers. By brand: branded terms that include a company's name, and non-branded ones that do not.
Why it matters
Why keywords matter
Because they are the only connection between a question and an answer. A page that does not use the words people search for, somewhere, is not found by them, however good it is. Keywords are also demand made countable: a term's search volume says how many people want something each month, and a brand that reads those numbers knows more about its market than one that does not.
They matter to creative work in a quieter way. The phrases people search are the phrases people think in, and copy that borrows them, in headlines, in product names, in the first line of a film's description, lands in a way that invented language does not.
In practice
How keywords work in practice
- 01
Keywords are researched, clustered and mapped. Research finds the terms and their volumes; clustering groups the ones that mean the same thing; mapping assigns each cluster to a page. On the page, the primary keyword goes in the title tag, the H1, the opening paragraph and the URL, and the secondaries and natural variations appear through the body. Internal links to the page use related anchor text. That is the whole of on-page keyword use, and it has not changed much in a decade.
- 02
In paid search the same terms are bid on, with match types that decide how loosely a search can vary from the keyword and still trigger the ad. Performance is tracked by keyword in both channels, and the two lists inform each other: organic rankings show which terms are winnable for free, and paid data shows which terms convert.
Watch out
What people get wrong about keywords
Treating them as magic words. Repeating a term does not rank a page; answering the question behind it does, and Google's systems have read meaning rather than strings for years. The other mistake is targeting the biggest term in sight and ignoring the long tail, where most useful traffic lives. The third is choosing keywords from inside the company, using the words the business likes, rather than from the search data, using the words customers use. The gap between those two vocabularies is usually the first thing research reveals.
