No, You Don't Need Better SEO Keywords

By Frederick Lowe, Feb 12, 2025

What if I told you , in very convincing language, on a visually appealing Website , that you could achieve top search results by investing time and money in keyword research? What if I told you that you could improve your ranking even further by using that research to align your content with your audience?

If the success of your small business or publishing venture absolutely depended on it, you might consider paying for my service.

What if you later learned that some, or even most, of the money you've spent was wasted because your Web developer or hosting platform missed some very basic steps? You'd probably be upset. So, if you've heavily invested in keyword or content-based SEO and you're not seeing results, it might be good to take a deep breath before reading further.

The scale and complexity of modern Web search is considerable , ungraspably complex, actually. The interface to that complexity is Search. From a user experience perspective, Search is just a logo and a text box with a button. That means the only way for a Search provider to stand out from the other, identical "logo and text box with a button" experiences is to (a) produce relevant results quickly or (b) augment Search with AI. In either UX, fast and relevant isn't a mere goal, it's the whole enchilada.

For North American web users, page speed is often the most critical initial factor in assessing relevance. This metric, which Google calls "Performance," is strongly correlated with e-commerce conversions and other desirable user behaviors. While I'm not aware of any direct link, it's intuitive that fast, easy-to-use sites convert more users than slow, hard-to-use ones. However, focusing solely on speed overlooks many other important aspects of user experience affecting conversion.

A search engine provider's concern isn't whether the relationship between Performance and conversion is correlative or causal. What they care about is that a poor user experience on your website directly impacts a user's perception of the value of the search services they provide. I'll leave it to readers to infer what happens to a site's search engine ranking when its performance undermines Google's brand equity , and whether the content, keywords, or structured data on that site matter much if the site isn't usable according to Google's publicly documented standards.

In addition to Performance, Google provides three additional categories: Accessibility, Best Practices, and, lastly, SEO in the content sense of the word. Many of the Best Practices sub-metrics , asset preloading, image formats, caching policies , tie back to user perception of page speed. Others consider device impact (memory and main thread utilization). Accessibility covers things like color contrast, interactive element sizing and type sizing, and support for assistive devices. Like Performance, all of these are directly related to user experience.

So how can you tell if your Website is performant, best-practices compliant, and accessible? Luckily, there are amazing, free tools for that. The one that probably matters most , given the percentage of search traffic originating from Google , is Google Lighthouse. For developers and the curious, Lighthouse is integrated into Chrome, accessible through Developer Tools. For folks leery of opening the Chrome Developer Console , there are good reasons to be mindful when anyone tells you to do this , Google provides a Web-based version called PageSpeed Insights. There are numerous other tools, but they aren't owned by the largest search engine in the world.

Lighthouse and its Web-based sibling, PageSpeed Insights, provide clear, detailed feedback about what's right and wrong with a Website, along with reasonably detailed documentation on how to fix it. No matter how well-implemented you believe your Website is, pointing these tools at it is usually revelatory. Use them, and fix what you see, because if your site isn't performant, best-practices compliant, and accessible, great keywords and content won't close the gap.