Placing Normal Styled Keyword between the HTML tag Strong or Bold Gets More SEO in Positive

Truslow 🎓
It's always been a thing. <strong> and <em> have never stopped being important to do – unless you do it wrong. For example, if you put an entire paragraph inside a <strong> to make it stand out – then just what are you saying is the important entity there?
All semantic and structural html elements can help.
People often tell me that Accessibility and SEO have nothing to do with each other – but those people are wrong, actually. If you think about it – accessibility and SEO go hand in hand.
Our objective with accessibility features is to help machines understand the purpose and functions on the page. The idea is so that alternate methods of accessing that data such as screen readers, tab or voice page and site navigation, skipping parts and generally understanding "what" everything on the page represents so that it can be presented properly. We are attempting to make it so machines can understand what we're saying on each part of the page.
Now… here's the shocker, for some… that's exactly what we're trying to do for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), too – make it so the Big Goo Machine can understand what we're saying on each part of the page.
Take a look at this post on ARIA labels for Accessibility: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Roles
Take a look at the "Document Structure Roles" (including the "Semantic HTML part which shows the proper semantic HTML to use instead of ARIA roles). Then go back to Mr. Mueller's post in the screenshot above and notice that he's mentioning a lot of these. Headings, bold, tables, lists, etc.
If used properly and consistently on your site – Google can (and will) take advantage of almost all of those. Widget, Live Region, and Window roles don't help much because they don't indicate things that are useful for ranking, I suppose – but the landmark roles definitely do.
One cool thing here is that since tables, depending upon their content volume, may not work particularly well on mobile devices, you can use "DIV" with the display:table/cell/etc and ARIA roles to transmit that same a formatted table would.
When you hear people say "Structured Data" – it is common to think of schema – which is, of course, structured data. But all this semantic markup, labeling, and yes – even <strong> and <em> tags – they're all structured data. They mean something. (PRO TIP: <b> and <i> are visual elements – they do not indicate importance – they just make it visually stand out – if you want "the machines" to know it's important, you should be using <strong> and <em> – and then only use it for the important things – not large swaths of content which, in essence, makes it so nothing stands out because you're trying to say that everything should stand out.)
When you hear people say, "The theme you choose is important," we often think – ah yeah, because of clean code and page speed. But it's not just speed and cleanliness, it's structural elements and labels within the framework that are important. Here's one quick tip on that. If you go to a theme demo and load a page and then hit the TAB key – if a little box that says "Skip to Content" doesn't appear – move along. The theme's structured data sucks. Now, just because it has that it doesn't necessarily mean that it's all good – but that's a quick, easy way to test and see if the theme creator has at least made an effort to structure things.
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Leon
Isolated by itself it fares no better/worse than having the keyword in most other tags. In combination with the keyword placed in other tags though- much bigger impact. The key takeaway from John's statement is to create diversity within the html of the page for your keyword
Friar
When was this ever in question? In Search Engine Optimization (SEO) we argue about pretty much everything, but I have never heard anyone debate this.

Rienzi
I still use b and strong tags even in headings.hmmm

Vladimir
Don't just bold the keywords. Bold sentences or paragraphs where the keywords are.
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KF Ng
No impact

Mike
These tags carry strong semantics, so you better study html5 standard documentation on what they mean

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Truslow 🎓
The h tags along with <strong> and <em> are designed to bring emphasis to things – but in different ways.
<strong> and <em> give import to the words themselves.
<hx> tags give import to the words inside, but in specific relation to the words in the section that follows. If the words within the section that your thing is a heading for don't clarify, explain, describe, disambiguate, or otherwise give meaning to the heading – the heading really has no value.
Now… Google is pretty smart and if you do these things properly (and most importantly, consistently) – it can benefit you. It you aren't doing it properly and/or consistently, then it's not really going to hurt things (i.e. there's no negative impact beyond the loss of positive impact).
Putting a <strong> inside a heading – not the entire heading (that would be redundant) – might just maybe possibly send a signal that the words in the strong tag are the ones that are of most import within the statement the heading is making. I would imagine that if it did manage to evolve into a signal Google could use – it would have to be done with consistency across the site and various Natural Language Processing (NLP) extractions (and maybe other things) would have to validate that those are, in fact, the most important words in there.
When considering a concept like this, I always look at it this way… Does it makes sense and follow the standards that the tags were designed for? Is there something that could be gained and is it something that I can do with consistency so that the signals are clear and focused – both for the users and a machine that might be trying to interpret what you do. And then finally – can it be done in an efficient and scalable way that won't cost more to execute, maintain, and continue than it could ever hope to generate in benefit for the site?
If you can answer yes to those things (and you can answer yes to the "meets standards" part of it) then it might be worth trying. I wouldn't go doing it on every client's site until I saw whether it worked or not – but it's a low risk thing so… maybe.
Of your 4 choices at the top, I would personally go to the third one. You've emphasized both entities in the title and given them a relationship with the words in between. That's what we call a Semantic Triple. <core web vitals> <is a ranking factor in> <SEO>. Typically we try to do that with our copy all the time and let it get picked up naturally, but if you're doing it right, I don't see a major risk in giving that triple some structure (the strong tags) to help signal that it's what you're trying to get across. Structure when used consistently and accurately so the same signal is being sent every time does nothing but help SEO.
But remember – it's not just the mere act of adding the <strong> to your headings that is helping. It's the value those labels give to structuring the information within and near those tags that is helping (if it helps at all).

Toto
Don't use strong or em in an h tag. If you're using strong you don't need em, if you're using em you don't need strong. Stick with one tag for a piece of text. Learn how to properly use these tags. w3schools.com is a good place to start.
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