Building a Narrative, not Writing for SEO

Readers like a natural narrative, so why allow anything to distract you from providing one? There will always be a place for keywords as long as the search engines are reliant on them for rankings purposes – nobody can dispute that. However, whether that place is within the content that is designed to inspire and inform ought to be questioned. Will repeating a phrase a dozen times really mean that a page will have more context or earn a better ranking than another that only has a couple?

Google can’t measure quality by reading the text, but it can use social signals, bounce rates and time spent on a page as indicators. Now, whether it does, and to what extent, is a known unknown. That’s why the logical approach, for many years now in fact, has been to write for your audience first. But despite all of this, everything that has been mentioned above and in countless other blogs, keywords live on. Maybe their time is coming to an end, or perhaps they’ll outlast me and all other active Content Marketers. However, when the search engines do finally get their act together, I very much doubt anybody would be remotely saddened by their ultimate demise.
Maybe the knowledge graph, authorship, localisation and personalisation will all one day develop to an extent where keywords can be forgotten about. But now would certainly be a good time to stop spoiling perfectly decent copy with entirely unnecessary phrases.