A fairly widespread belief is that Google simply searches for what the user writes in the search field or pronounces to their mobile device.
In fact, one of the main tactics used by search engines to produce more accurate SERPs is to use the user’s keywords only as starting point to understand what the engine needs to search.
The keywords given by the user to Google goes into what has been called a “revision engine”. This is where the search query of the user is reviewed and possibly expanded with new words / concepts, or simplified. This reviewed query is then used to identify the relevant documents in the search engine index.
When SEOs are facing the task of optimizing a page for a certain search phrase, they should not only consider the keywords in it, but also try to understand which other keywords and concepts Google might use to give better meaning to the query.
This is easier said than done, as there is no way of knowing how Google reviews queries; many SEOs are prone to adding related words and synonyms when writing text, in the hope that they will be used by Google in the review process.
This post is the English translation of a chapter of the italian ebook “Mitologia SEO” written by Enrico Altavilla.