Do Keywords Still Matter for SEO?

Key Takeaways

so do keywords still matter for SEO well one thing's for sure is chat GPT and perplexity and all these large language models have changed the game when it comes to keywords because the length of a query has gotten much longer and I've I've experienced this myself when I'm trying to discover something inside of chat gbt sometimes my query could be a whole paragraph long but with that said when it comes to actually the practicality of executing SEO you still need to have a topic or a keyword to actually build a page around so in that regard although search behavior is changing we still need to identify these keywords and these topics to actually create content and pages around so this is never going to change as long as we have quantifiable demand which is search volume or even user signals around a particular idea we know that we need to build out an asset to support that idea to satisfy the intent of whatever that problem is so what you do is you identify keywords that your ideal clients are searching for and then you build out pages to ultimately fulfill the intent of those keywords that is not going to change the length of the query does not matter because even if I Target a keyword like blue shoes I'm still going to build a dedicated page specifically for blue shoes and what will happen is once that ranks it's going to end up ranking for all the longtail variations of that keyword as well and that includes in Google and other traditional search search engines but also in the large language models as well so you still need keywords to be able to build out proper optimiz pages and I don't see that changing in the near future