Both Matt and Jody were looking at sets of data from Experian Hitwise, a well respected source of internet usage data. However, both were coming to fairly different conclusions. My initial thought on reading the articles was to wonder how the ongoing changes to Google, Bing and the others over the last year had affected our traffic, specifically in relation to keyword lengths. My supposition was that the keywords would be getting shorter, not longer, especially due to the roll out of localised search results on Google.

I was wrong.

Keyword Length vs Traffic

As you can see over the course of the year the length of the keywords that people are using to find our site is getting longer, not shorter. The proportion of traffic resulting from keywords with 1 or 2 words in them has dropped significantly, while proportion from keywords of length 4 and up have all increased, in some cases quite dramatically.

Why Should This Matter To You?

So, what if anything does this all mean for you and your website? Well, first of all I’d say that whatever SEO related research you read on the web, you need to think carefully about how it relates to your site. RevaHealth.com is a site with millions of pages of varying complexity. We know that our success thus far comes from successfully capturing large parts of the long tail in relation to health clinics, so our keyword length graph has always been skewed. In February of this year less that 2% of our traffic came from searches involving single word keywords. Hitwise on the other hand is saying that in general over 20% of searches involve just one keyword.

We’re clearly not yet winning the race for single keywords like “dentists” or “doctors”, but thinking about it for a minute what would we do if we were? Without knowing exactly where the user is we couldn’t even return a decent search result for them. We are normally able to determine the country they are in, but after that it is hit and miss. So a person in Hartlepool who searches for “dentists” would likely land on our dentists worldwide or dentists in the UK pages. Neither of these are really what they’re looking for, so they’ll probably bounce. This then is a problem for both the search engines and ourselves. How do they connect the user who uses just one keyword to the information they need?

The answer has to lie with the user making their actual location available to the browser they are using more often, but until this does happen, I would have to agree with a point Jody made; as web users get more search engine savvy, they are going to use more keywords not less to find exactly what they want. For us at least, the long tail is getting longer, not shorter.

Are you noticing the keywords that drive your traffic getting any longer or shorter, or are you even looking at them?

We often get asked about our experiences with SEO, usually about what worked for us and what didn’t. Keywords are a topic that come up again and again. The video above comes from Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, and it neatly summarises the fact that when it comes to Google’s main search product, meta keywords are completely ignored.

That should be the end of that then. But it isn’t.

A lot of people seem to get mixed up between keywords and meta keywords, thinking they are exactly the same thing, so the video above might be taken by some people to mean that ALL keywords are ignored by Google. That just isn’t the case.

The word “keywords” can mean many things interchangeably, but for the purposes of this blog post, let’s  refer to a set of keywords as the most important words, phrases or acronyms that your potential visitors will use to find a particular page of content on your site.

For these potential visitors to find your page, the keywords they use, or their synonyms or related keywords will have to appear on or pointing to the page somewhere. These keywords can  appear in:

• the body text of your page
• the URL of the page, including the domain name
• the page title of the page
• the meta description of the page
• the H1 tag on the page
• the alt text of images on the page
• the links to the page

And that’s just off the top of my head. They can also still appear in your meta keywords, even if Google currently chooses to ignore them THERE.

You should still be doing your keyword research for each page (or set of pages) and using those keywords you identify as being the most important in the page elements listed in the paragraph above. Google even offer some good free tools to help you find out what keywords to use. I’d recommend Google’s Search Insights, Google Analytics, their free AdWords Keyword Tool, and even Google Trends. Add your own favourite keyword research tools in the comments below.