Search engines such as Google crawl, parse and index websites along the lines of keywords and the respective URLs. Despite the rise of deep learning algorithms and certain experts claiming the death of keywords, keywords are very much relevant.
SEO keyword research is an important part of the content creation process. How would you feel spending hours writing a blog or a web copy that will generate no site visit? I bet this will be frustrating and lead you to question the relevance of content marketing. An in-depth keyword research is usually carried out before contents are created to ascertain search volumes and competitiveness.
Very recently, Google made certain changes to its popular Keyword planner. Google displayed keywords in ranges to low spending AdWords accounts with this example adapted from Search Engine Land.
The keyword forecasting tool is not affected by these changes at the time of writing this blog. Here are some interesting insights about how Google is grouping similar words in its Keyword Planner tool.
Google Keyword planner groupings and insights
As such, getting worked up over optimising a site for the root or stemmed keyword is a bit unnecessary but paid keyword tools like that from Moz make attempts to split the search volume from root words and their stems. Using the ‘bake-off’ and ‘bake off’ example from the Moz Keyword Explorer, it clearly indicates that there is a search volume for ‘bake off’ but none for ‘bake-off’.
Google Keyword planner is one of the most robust keyword tools in the world due to the pool of data available. The above groupings give you a bit of an idea on how keywords are grouped and search volume aggregated. Keywords are an integral part of your SEO strategy and understanding the process of finding the gem words is not just important but golden.