Why Exact Match Keywords Don’t Matter (anymore) in SEO

As Google is becoming smarter and more personalized than ever, exact match keywords are (mostly) becoming a thing of the past in SEO. Does this mean that keyword research is not useful anymore? Absolutely not!

In this article, we’ll talk about what exact match keywords are, why they don’t matter anymore and how you can (and should) still use keywords in order to guide your SEO content strategy.

What is an exact match keyword?

First thing first, let’s define what exactly an exact match keyword is.

Let say you have a website that provides Math courses to students. You’ve opted for a freemium business model: the beginner classes are free and the most advanced ones are only accessible once the user has paid a monthly subscription.

You’re doing a keyword research and found that “free online math classes” has enough search volume to be interesting to target. If you choose to include “free math online classes” in this exact order on your website, then you are technically using an exact match keyword.

Should you use “free math online classes” then?

Well, you could — after all, enough users are actively looking for this keyword, so why not using it? But what about “free online math classes” and “free math classes online” which independently also have a similar monthly search volume?

This is where the headache generally starts: which variant(s) to use? The right answer is all of them, one of them or none of them! Use the variant(s) that makes sense in your copy because the truth is… it’s not about the keyword. SEO is all about having the right landing pages for the topics that matter for your business.

How to use keywords to guide your SEO content strategy?

By using tools such as SEMRush or Google Ads, you can find keywords that are actively typed by users.

Here is an example of the first five keywords SEMRush gave me when I searched for “free online math classes”:

With this information, what should I do? Should I create a dedicated landing page for each one of these five keywords? You technically could, but it would not be advisable for the following reasons:

1. You’d end up with duplicate content on your site which would not bring any value to your visitors. Changing a few sentences or even the whole copy would not matter as each page would be about the same topic (the page targeted at adults looking for free math classes potentially being the exception, more on this later). Remember, it’s not about the words, it’s about the meaning being the words.

2. Each duplicate page would probably end up doing poorly because the link equity gained by these pages overtime would be diluted, as opposed to having only one page which would accumulate all the authority by itself.

3. Even though Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content (yes, this is a common SEO myth), you could be wasting crawl budget on irrelevant pages.

4. The amount of effort to come up with different wording for each one of these pages would probably be higher than focusing all your work on a single page.

Okay, what should I do then?

Simple: create a page that talks about free online math classes and use whatever keyword variation or synonyms sounds the best for you. You can also “mix and match” the different keywords in order to avoid repetitions.

Let me prove it to you: here is what I get when I type “free online math classes” on Google (note: your search results are probably different depending on your location, the device you’re using and your search history):

As you can see, only the last result is targeting the exact match keyword “free online math classes.” The rest use synonyms such as “lessons” or “courses”. What matters in the eyes of Google is that each one of these pages answer the search intent behind the words typed: finding a free online math course.

Now, the tricky part here would be to decide what to do with the “free math classes for adults” keyword: should you build a dedicated landing page to target “adults”? The answer is: it depends! If you’re offering math classes to a lot of different age groups, then you could technically have a page dedicated at adults. You could specifically target the content to answer adult needs when it comes to learning Math — which are probably different than children’s or teenagers’ still in high school.

To Recap

Here is a quick recap of what has been said in this article:

1. Create a landing page per topic, not per keyword.

2. When assessing if a topic is worth covering, add up the sum of the volume of all its keyword variants to get a better understanding of the search volume you could be capturing by building this page.

3. Make sure you understand what the intent behind a keyword is and build a page around it. The goal is to serve users with a page that answer their problem: remember that they’re actively looking for a solution to their problem.

I hope this information was useful to you! Feel free to connect on LinkedIn if you need any SEO or content marketing work done and I’d be more than happy to help you out.

Until next time!