The Truth About Keyword Rankings
Updated September 2025
This article was originally published in March 2019
The importance behind keyword rankings and what they mean for your website continues to shift. While we have long preached that keyword rankings are not the end-all be-all that some believed they were, there are some insights that can be garnered based on how your business is showing up.
But First, What are Keywords and Why are They Important?
Keywords are terms that are relevant to your business, and naturally, to your business’ website as well. It is what visitors search for on Google, Bing, or LLM-powered chatbots to find what they are looking for. The best keywords for your site are the terms that are actually being searched. Sometimes, what you think is a good keyword for your business may not be, which is why you should always do keyword research.
Keywords are important because they help people find you in the specific way that they are searching for you. Keyword research now goes beyond high-volume terms and moves into understanding the problems, questions, and intents people have around a topic and providing valuable content that serves them.
The best thing to do is to keep the visitor in mind by asking yourself the following questions and building your content around those answers:
What are my ideal customers looking for?
What problems do they have?
What questions are they trying to answer?
What are they trying to achieve?’
What authority do I have in this space that would help?
What value can I add to aid my ideal customers?
What is missing from the content that currently exists around these topics?
After you conduct your research, you should plan your content calendar around the information your audience is actually searching for. You should definitely still optimize your site so that the pages, products, and content are using keywords that are relevant to your business, but that is no longer the baseline. And just so we are clear: You should not be stuffing keywords into your site for the sake of it.
With the emergence of AI and LLM-powered chatbots into everyday life, your keyword research needs to evolve into keyphrase and query-based inputs. The questions above that you should ask yourself still hold true, but we need to go deeper.
How Do I Measure Rankings Visibility in 2025?
Measuring the performance of your strategies has always been crucial, but there are some new tactics to employ in order to fully understand how your website is stacking up in the age of AI. Google Search Console is a great free resource for understanding how your site is showing up and for what queries. You can combine this data with tools like SEMrush to assess the following:
What questions does our site answer well?
Are we cited in AI-generated responses?
What percentage of branded vs non-branded queries include us?
How often do we appear in “related questions” or conversational queries?
Next Steps for Your Marketing Strategy in the AI Era?
We say it all the time that you should absolutely be looking at your site’s analytics on a regular basis and ensure you are measuring the items we called out above. If you need help understanding your analytics reports, you can learn more about our customized reporting here. Understanding what your site does and doesn’t do well combined with an understanding of your ideal customers will help you to build out your strategy effectively.
TL;DR
Remember - you need to know what queries are bringing visitors to your site AND what queries your ideal customers are searching for to be able to attract them. Keywords are no longer as straightforward as they once were, but you are still able to track the information you need to understand your clients. If you have any questions about how to create a better experience for your site visitor, be sure to contact us.