The concerning future of the resilient keyword It’s time for PPC professionals to rethink keyword targeting strategies, asserts Kirk Williams of ZATO Marketing. Changes in user behavior, which stem from Google’s own search improvements and a shift from desktop to mobile, along with Google Ads’ close variants mean that customers may be using queries that don’t necessarily have a clear-cut intent — at least to marketers. “Understanding this is important for our industry to move forward, because if the keyword is not telling us as much as we think it is, then we have an obligation to evolve with Google’s system for the good of the accounts we manage,” Williams wrote, noting that Google uses over a million signals to determine bids for an advertiser within a single auction. Google is also the only entity (other than the user) with access to a user’s search history, and can thus tailor its results, including the ads it shows, to reach customers wherever they are in the funnel. However, this doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater, it just means we might benefit from thinking of keywords more as topics or categories than intent-revealing silver bullets.