Keyword Stemming in the Past
Traditional keyword stemming in SEO means using prefixes, suffixes and (ooh, fancy) adding the letter S. car, cars. Legendary research went into that.
No, seriously.
Wiki says Google search adopted word stemming in 2003. Previously a search for “fish” would not have returned “fishing”. Other software search algorithms vary in their use of word stemming. Programs that simply search for substrings obviously will find “fish” in “fishing” but when searching for “fishes” will not find occurrences of the word “fish”.
Prior to 2003, stemming was even worse than it currently is. Fishes wouldn’t return fish but sometimes fish returns fishes (because the whole word appears.)
Google’s inclusion of modern keyword stemming in 2003 meant SEO consultants could focus on the meaning of words, as well. Searches for photograph started matching photographers and a search for photographers sometimes matches “photography” (Google bolds the word you searched so it’s easy enough to see when you search photographers that “Photography” is their way of saying “got it!”
The Present of Keyword Stemming
Now, Google’s attempt to diversify search results and make sure you find at least one related site means you find these gems on page 1 for fish:
- Fish – wiki page on the animal
- FISH! – Philosophy and team building of some sort
- Sydney Fish Market – dead versions of the animal mentioned above
- Fish N Kids – a government website meant to scare kids into never eating seafood … or something. (Yes, I linked that one. I’m an evil scientist.)
Diversity in search results is the current rage. Queen gets you monarchs, a band, some youtube football videos, news on Rihanna and a Melbourne clothing store (queenclothing.com.au, which we’re going to talk about more.)
This tells you simply that when you enter one word into Google, they have no idea what you’re actually searching for. Most users realize this and search more specifically. Google does a better job with “queen monarch” and directs you to 8 sites about the Queen, 1 clothing store (they must have a fantastic SEO team) and 1 result about a marine vessel named the Monarch Queen. That’s fair.
Let’s say you want to find that clothing store, you’d go one more word in to find more results. In a result that makes absolutely no sense, “queen clothing store” shows 2 results above the clothing store that returns for “queen” and “queen monarch.”
Which brings us to the present. It’s “nice” that Google can return “queens” when you type queen or monarchy when you type monarch. But realistically if you search queen and get a clothing store in the top 10 and then you search queen clothing 5 minutes later, you VERY PROBABLY want to find that store.
So why does it only appear 3rd?
Queen’s University campus bookstore sells clothing. Keyword stemming leads Google from queen to Queen’s even though our predicted winner is Queen Clothing. Ironically, it’s the word “store” that throws our query into crazy land. A search for queen clothing returns queenclothing.com.au and Queen’s University doesn’t rank for this query (Here, at least. I’m sure it does in Kingston, Ontario.)
So why does “store” not appear in the title of their page?
<title>Queen Clothing</title>
A little research shows us some interesting stats.
Queen clothing store, on the other hand, gets 46 local queries a month. So while ranking for queen clothing is good, and “clothing store” would be better, it seems that specificity doesn’t help in this case. (Although it does seem more like you’d want to go after the medium competition clothing store rather than the high competition queen clothing.)
What does this mean for keyword stemming? How does it have anything to do with prefixes and suffixes?
We’ve talked at length before about long tail keywords so we won’t get into how searches can bring you customers you weren’t expecting. Let’s talk about optimizing those you can.
In the present, keyword stemming can create paradoxes. Can you find the paradox?
How’s the present of keyword stemming look now?
For those of you skimming, TL;DR – Queen’s University matches “queen clothing store” better than QueenClothing.com.au but QueenClothing.com.au matches “queens clothing store” better than Queen’s University. WHAT?!?
The Future of Keyword Stemming
This may be difficult to believe, but stemming will improve. Your keyword research needs to focus on “other ways of saying the same thing.” If photography matches photographers now, maybe one day it will also match “picture taker.” (None of the current top 30 results on Bing or Google show photographer in bold for that term.
Search engines are trying to get to the true searcher’s intent. This means if you can’t think of the word for photographer, “picture takers in Melbourne” should match the most relevant photographers. (SEO for photographers note: ”picture taker” has low competition and 14,100 global monthly searches. You can rank for it next week and get all that traffic for yourself. Of course, people searching “picture taker” may not be your ideal client but hey, who are we to judge?)
How can you plan for this future? I would suggest that instead of “long tail” and only related keywords, we start migrating to “long tail versions of the same keywords.” Don’t expect Google to be able to determine relevancy as well as you’d like, yet. Think about it like a camera – you see something very different than the camera can possibly perceive. But digital cameras used to see a much smaller dynamic range per image. Wiki says the human eye can see 14 stops. An LCD display can see 9.5. Old compact digital cameras saw 4 or 5 while new ones may see up to 11. They will eventually match the eye.
What does this all mean? Keep improving your keyword research and even if you can’t understand why things happen the way they do now, technology isn’t that far behind our own creativity.
Hyperbole and incredulity aside, Google does understand that “picture takers” are photographers. How do I know? I’ll leave you with this Adwords tool research. Apparently, if you’re an advertiser they’ll help you find photography so you can spend money … but if you are actually searching for the term, you get people who used “picture takers” and not photographers. Someday, this will all make sense.
