How Are Keywords Used in SEO

Keywords are used in SEO to help flag to Google that content on a page is related to the term that someone is searching for.

Google crawls your website using a crawler or spider. This means it comes to your site and sees the HTML version of it and is able to quickly read or “skim read” through the code of the website:

Rather than seeing the pretty and “front end” version of it that you know and will take the time to read and find the things that catch your eye:

This means that Google will look at things like URL, headings, listicles, bullet points, starts and ends of paragraphs which should have keywords and phrases that signal to Google what this page is about and what it should rank for.

These crawlers that “skim read” your landing pages and keywords help them quickly digest the page and understand what it is about and what it should rank for. Google will also use its AI to quickly review the content and context of the copy to understand if it is informative and of quality to ensure it hasn’t been written “just for rankings.”

Your content’s informativeness, optimisation, formatting, and linking strategies (internal and external) will determine its position within Google search results for terms that might match the same keywords and phrases you’ve used on the page.