SEO was a lot simpler in a less-crowded marketplace; you could optimize by keyword for your product, industry, or customer demographics and watch your traffic grow. In 2021, however, not only is the online space left with little metaphorical keyword elbow room, but search engines have gotten smarter to keep up with consumer demand. People search more conversationally due to voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, and AI-powered chatbots learn more as they’re being searched, which also contributes to a natural semantic search style. If marketers want to make sure their SEO efforts are being noticed, there are several ways to do this, all of which embrace this more casual way of searching consumers are employing – “long-tail keywords,” those with fewer search results but a higher conversion rate; “keyword clusters,” which group product identifiers that can single out your brand; “natural language processing (or NLP)” which rely on qualifiers like “what” and “where” to make a search less-robotic, and the overall conversational style that voice search and chatbots have made more prominent as of late.