Keywords hold great value for SEO. This is the reason that SEO professionals are quite concerned about the keyword research they do. But times have changed now. A few years back, keyword-focused strategy may have been effective but now the search engines use updated algorithms that primarily focus on what users want. This is the reason that focusing on topics instead of keywords may be the best approach.

Difference between topics and keywords

You may wonder what the difference between a topic and a keyword is. In simple words, we can describe topic as a more holistic way of approaching keyword research. You can describe a topic as a combination of difference terms which may be used at different phases during a buyer’s journey. And that makes it pretty easy for you to create content because you will know well about the type of content required based on what the topic is demanding.

Start with a strategy

While you are building your site or rethinking its structure, you are going to have to step back and develop a strategy for the topics that you need to focus on. For this purpose, you will first have to look at the broader perspective of your offerings. This way, you will be able identify the topics that you need to cover.

The best thing that can happen as a result of this approach is that you can get ideas about more semantically relevant terms related to the topic.

Research your competitors

After you have understood what content you are going to need to develop, now you have to look within the industry to find out who ranks well with that type of content. The reason they are ranking well means they are doing something right. If you want to stand out, you will have to keep this competition in focus.

After you have analyzed the competition, you will have to run the competitors’ site through a tool to see how well they are performing against certain terms over a period of time. This will give you an idea about what your competitors are doing. Now look at the structure of their content which is ranking.

Intent

Search engines have become smarter enough to know what a user is searching for. They have been basically programmed to identify the user intent. It means that if you want your content to rank well, you are going to have to focus on the user intent instead of just keywords.

While you can use many tools to get a list of search phrases, there is another way you can find search intent behind a query. You can simply search in incognito or private windows of web browsers.

You will be surprised. You will just enter the basic keyword, and the results are going to be more educational.