Do Keywords or Key Phrases Still Matter for Online Search Marketing?
Hello and welcome back to AI on the Fly. I’m Ryan Kelly, your host, and today I’m answering the question: do keywords or key phrases still matter for your online search marketing?
The TLDR answer, and I love doing this at the beginning of my videos, is kinda, sorta.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing have cared deeply, forever, about the key phrases in your website and in your content. They’ve cared about how many key phrases you use, the variations of key phrases on your pages, the proximity of how close they were together, and the saturation, how many appear on a page or across a website.
Let’s define the terms. A keyword might be “insurance.” A key phrase might be “group insurance near me.” Phrases like “furnace repair near me,” “restaurants in Sonoma County,” or “law firms that specialize in this area of practice” are key phrases. That’s how people used to search. The goal was: how few keystrokes do I need to type to get the information I want?
I’ve talked in other videos about how search behavior has shifted from short phrases like “furnace repair near me” to what’s now called a prompt phrase. Not a key phrase. A prompt phrase. Something like: “Who’s the best family mediation attorney in Sonoma County and why?” That’s a semantic search. It’s a long phrase with lots of words because AI understands intent.
So when someone asks me, “Ryan, are key phrases dead?” I think key phrases in the traditional sense are dead. People aren’t searching the way they used to. It’s shifting away from those short-tail phrases toward long-tail prompt phrases.
Should you still be using prompt phrases in your content the way you used to use key phrases? Yes. Gone are the days of writing blogs that target key phrases. Here are the days of answering people’s questions with robust, clear content, good words, well-crafted prompt phrases, thoughtful answers, and supporting videos, all designed to make you the resource, the cited trusted source that AI points to when someone asks a question.
So the real TLDR: key phrases have evolved into prompt phrases, and prompt phrases are critical if you want to be found in AI. It’s that simple.
In a future episode, I’ll cover how to write content using prompt phrases, how to research them, and how to format content so it gets indexed by answer engines more effectively. Stay tuned for that.
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Until next time, buckle up.