The power of the human brain
Our brains are amazing things. If we’re talking and I tell you I want to find a red dress to wear to a party, you understand that I’m looking for festive, dressy apparel to wear to a social gathering. You understand that cocktail party dresses and elegant attire are also substitutions for the same needs. Though I would never say it that way, you understand it. And you’d probably also understand that while red is the color I named, other names for red are crimson, scarlet, magenta, carmine, burgundy, and brick.
Searching, parsing, deciding what’s important
Google wants to be just like our brain. Google’s intention is to provide every web user with the information they seek and need within a single click. So as we search the web, Google emulates how our brains work and provides us with options which are synonymous and which expand our search results. One of Google’s innovations has been the development of latent semantic indexing.
Latent semantic indexing removes need to keyword stuff
As Tina Courtney-Brown notes in her article The Top 5 SEO Tactics You can Drop:
“…this means that you don’t have to litter your content with all the keyword phrases you want to rank on; LSI will assume that similar phrases are also relevant.
Google will suggest alternative and commonly executed searches in a list of drop down terms in their Chrome browser.
Being there in the “I want to” moment
When you’re developing content for your website, you must integrate Google’s manner of indexing and returning relevant content to their users. Integrating Google-awareness into your content’s development means that you will be creating robust content that meets the needs of your customer by answering their questions, extending their knowledge, or solving a problem. Google tells us, for every customer, there is an “I want to…” moment. Google also terms these “micro-moments.”
In these moments, consumers’ expectations are higher than ever. The powerful computers we carry in our pockets have trained us to expect brands to immediately deliver exactly what we are looking for when we are looking. We want things right, and we want things right away.
It’s that “I want to…” which drives the individual’s search. Being served to searchers in results means that you’ve directly met their criteria in a non-spammy, intelligent, unique way that is a direct fit or fits an analogous search result.
Now that you know this, you can quit dithering on about the precise keywords you need and focus instead on the “I want to…” questions of your core customers.
