Picture this scenario.

You’ve just made yourself a new website complete with fresh, relevant and enticing content that you can’t wait to share with the world. Your content is so good, you’re sure your website will be a hit in no time. But after a couple weeks there’s nothing but crickets.

What gives?

You’ve done your keyword research, but you still can’t figure out what where you went wrong.

A Word on the Way We’re Currently Using Keywords

Each update is different and Google likes to keep us on our toes. The most recent Penguin update made it more difficult for black hat SEOs. Basically, you can’t cheat the system as easily or at all anymore. If you want your site to rank, you’ll have to do it the old fashioned way with good ol’ relevant and fresh content.

And keywords—but the way you used keywords in the past is changing.

When you log onto your Keyword Planner Tool in AdWords, do you search for five individual keywords to see how they rank?

It turns out, according to Moz, this is no longer the most efficient way to do keyword research. The most efficient way to find your top ranking buzzwords is to search for them in groups.

When you search for them individually, you’re actually missing 50-80% of the action.

“Back in the days, when we actually had keyword data in Google Analytics, you could see that the keywords you were tracking only comprised a small portion of the keywords that you were actually ranking in your keyword ranking report. You were actually missing out on 50% to 80% of that data. So no matter how good your keyword ranking report is, it’s always going to be missing a lot of that essential traffic, and it completely misses the long tail, which is another problem, because generally when you do keyword ranking reports, you’re generally choosing those high traffic or you’re trying to choose those high traffic terms,” Feb. 7 Whiteboard Friday author, Cyrus Shepard said.

Using Keywords is Changing

We’re not saying not to use keyword research because we think you absolutely should use keyword research, but the way we use it is changing.

Instead of searching for keywords individually, search for them in groups.

This helps simplify the results because instead of tracking 50 keywords, you’re just tracking one index.

“We’re seeing more and more instances of Google returning results that don’t actually contain all of the keywords you type in. It will be pretty close. But if you’re tracking this keyword and it’s being sort of rewritten or triggering different results by Google, it makes it slightly less valuable to be reporting on every week,” Shepard says.

We hope this helped. Let us know how searching for keywords in groups is working for you in the comments section below!