An interesting article on MOZ blog about keywords and content writing. This is a must read and a must share for all non SEO/SEO people out there. https://moz.com/blog/can-seos-stop-worrying-keywords-focus-topics-whiteboard-friday
I think Keyword research is the first step in generating traffic, normally I start with keyword research and then seo. If you can work with good keywords you don't have to worry about traffic.
Trend is moving from keyword to topic. But still we need to place some focus on keywords. We don’t need to stuff the page with keywords, but need to have necessary ones.
In running tech Era everyone want results on little effort ,Now if we start a blog and don't focus on keywords in our title, URL and content than it is so difficult for search engine to give us a category or niche, and result is null. So if we want result than we should focus on keywords, phrases, synonyms and qualitative and unique content.
How would you know what your potential customers are searching for if you never do any keyword research? But, you need to focus more on long tail keywords which sounds more like a topic.
SEO don't attract visitors, topics does. Otherwise how can you get a visitor to visit your blog? SEO are hidden and are only used for search engines but creative or sensation in topics are visible and easily find while at same time it's being indexed reading the sensation title grabs people's attention. SEO = Where? Topics = Visible. That is pretty much your choice. Sure SEO helps your website to be ranked, but again without SEO your website will be indexed anyway. Only two things that I think important for SEO is the title of what and the description of what rather than rest like keys which is practically a obsolete. Sorry to say it but rankings are no longer in use since Google stops Pagerank and Alexa is becoming something different for a price instead of helping you to rank at no cost. So your priority should be thinking of a way to write a topic that is sensation and write description of what you're talking about. And as for the keywords. Whatever you write, they will becomes keywords anyway. Search Engines will pick up the keywords bases on what your topic is about. Just like this post, I am not adding any keywords and search engines will scan through the text then add keywords themselves in this post such as "SEO", "Topic", "Sensation" and others. Search Engines are getting smarter everyday to where they pretty much do the SEO for us without us doing the SEO for them.