What Does the Rumored Death of Keywords Imply?

The whole online marketing industry is deeply concerned over the death of keywords. The marketers are not sure how the SEO landscape is going to look in the future, but keywords losing their importance is something that they are all acknowledging.

What it implies?

Let’s say the death of keywords is real. It implies ranking on Google will change. On today’s date, search engine ranking stands for a site ranking against a keyword or a set of keywords. But if the importance of keywords falls down on the floor, so would ranking.

No quantifiable parameters

This sounds contra-intuitive. Keyword ranking helps to measure a site’s success. A site that’s coming on top SERPs gets more visits and resulting clicks than another site that doesn’t rank that high. If keyword-ranking ceases to be relevant, marketers would have a terribly difficult time identifying how to show a site the road to success.

The search-box

If SEO stops revolving around ranking against keywords, the search-box would be completely redundant. It may seem far-fetched as Google will stop being Google in the absence of the search-box, but if industry sources are to believe, this is what Google’s engineers are aiming for.

Conversational search

This is what Google is reportedly trying to bring; the Voice Search feature is the first step taken towards achieving this goal. Remember the Star Trek computer? It communicated with the passengers of the spaceship and outlaid information based on questions asked.

Google is letting users the ability to voice search. Do you have something in mind? Click on the voice search and say it.

That’s all good, but when it comes to displaying results based on the voice activated conversational search, it’s same as a keyword-based search. You enunciate “soda” and Google will lay out results that feature soda manufacturing companies. You specify the search by adding the name of a soda brand and Google will then show you results carrying information on branded soda products.

It’s safe to say the soil is ready but laying the stone will take time.

The handheld devices

Everything starts to fall in the place once you consider the mobile statistics for 2015. I won’t feel surprised if dump yards starts to run out of space for desktop computers because Smart devices assure ease, comfort and the ability to use on-the-go internet.

Smart devices have small screens. Such small screens not only create trouble for accessing the search-box, but also at the time of going through the results displayed; catching on to the growing number of Smartphone users is possible, when you have a voice-driven search interface.

Nonstop interaction

The smart devices are getting smarter. A year ago, they were available only in the form of Smartphones and Tablets. But now the list of Smart devices includes wearables. Apple and Google have been contributing to it. A glance at the product lists of these two companies explains how.

Google’s eye-glass and Apple’s iWatch are two devices that qualify as wearables. You need to have separate strategies for these devices; the wearables are things and a new internet called the Internet of Things (IoT) is in the making for them. The bottomline is these devices make non-stop interaction with the search engine possible, which is impossible for desktop devices.

Traffic, not ranking

This is another angle to look at the rumored death of keywords. Why does a site want to rank high on a search engine? Because it wants organic traffic, which comes from search engines. What if the site gets traffic without ranking? That cuts short a long story. The latest content marketing techniques, endorsed by technical people as well as by users can fetch a site enough organic traffic.

As a matter of fact, some online marketers have articulated how Google has moved from the erstwhile ways to assign a ranking. The technicalities don’t matter that much anymore, what matters is content and if a site has informative and captivating content on it, then on that virtue, the site gets high ranking on Google.

Hence, make content your priority, not ranking against a few keywords.

Problem for SEOs

If keywords die, selling SEO packages would be outrageously difficult. In my opinion, online marketing firms will continue to exist, but they’d have to completely overhaul their ranking strategies.