Over the years, how search marketers view and treat keywords have changed. While some are still trying to “game” the keywords, most of us are focusing more to create content that provides benefits to the searchers and site visitors. But, it doesn’t mean that the keywords became irrelevant to the search marketers, especially to the SEOs.

The keywords are great indications of the searcher’s intent. They tell us what people are trying to find out, their interests, concerns, goals, etc. Even in 2022 and on, keyword research should be a part of content planning.

During the last 10 years, Google and other search engines have been limiting the available keyword data. Currently, most of my clients see only 1% of the search query data which brought the organic visits to their site. You can only get the sampling data from their keyword tools. Is this the end of keyword research? Google encourages site owners to create quality content for their audience. How do you do that without understanding what the audience wants?

I have written many articles about keyword research on many industry publisher sites as well as on my blog here. In those articles, I’ve mentioned several sources of information to understand the audience. The list includes on-site search queries, paid ads queries (not the keywords), feedback from the customers (events, customer service desk, bot chat, etc.), and the latest trends and news in the industry.

I also think that collecting the # (hashtag) data from social media would be very helpful to understand the audience. Especially since some age groups spend more time on social media than on any other channels. I’m sure that it works better for certain industries than others. If you are targeting younger audiences, the information would be very valuable to your business as you don’t see much of their data from any other sources.