Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to Incorporate Awkward Keyword Phrases
-
Certain keywords are good choices for my website (high CTR, low difficulty, high volume), but they would be very awkward to use in my website content. For example, "therapist near me" is a popular search term, but it would be very strange for me to use those words in that order in my content (I am a therapist). Any thoughts about this are welcome.
-
Hi Lpantell
I think "near me" is a bit of a gotcha - searchers use this term, but Google understands that businesses don't describe themselves this way. If you search for "therapist near me", "restaurant near me", etc., you'll notice that the top ranking sites do not use the phrase "near me". Instead, they mention the location.
-
There are many ways to incorporate awkward keyword phrases. The most common way is to use a "meta description" which is the text you see when someone goes to your website's homepage and it will have some information about what they can expect from your site.
This text also includes any keywords that may be relevant to the content on your site, so make sure that you include those as well. You can also use "title tags" which are a little bit more technical but essentially the same thing: these are words or phrases that appear in bold on the top of each page of your website, in order for search engines like Google and Bing to understand what type of content you want them to index and rank highly for.
If you're looking for something more creative, there are tons of different options including adding images with captions or even videos into blog posts and articles so that people know exactly what kind of content they'll be getting.
-
@lpantell
Keywords don't have to be next to each other for Google to associate them and rank for them. Maybe just include them on a given subpage, not necessarily next to each other?You will then see on which position they will start ranking and then take the next steps?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Only my homepage ranks for my keywords, should I delete my other pages?
I am an independent artist and all of my business inquiries come through my website (www.ChrisCarlsonArt.com). Over the last 6 months I have been trying to get pages other than my homepage to rank for my keywords, but I haven't made any progress. I worry that I am cannibalizing my keywords since my pages all have similar information. Should I just delete my other pages and focus on ranking my homepage? Also, if I delete my other pages will that have a negative impact on my rankings?
SEO Tactics | | PunchyMcSkeletor0 -
Unsolved Keyword Volume Filtered By City Location?
Let's say I look up the keyword "plumber" in the Keyword Research tool. I get a monthly volume of 70.8k-118k. Now, I want to know how much of that volume comes from a specific city in the United States, like Kalamazoo, Michigan. Is there a way to identify this? My alternative is to look up the keyword "Kalamazoo plumber". This has two problems: People who search for local services will frequently leave off the location, with the expectation that the search engine will provide localized organic results. So, the search volume isn't very precise. That keyword has N/A volume, so the information doesn't help me anyway. Any alternative way to get at this data? Thanks!
Keyword Explorer | | Kevin_P1 -
URL keyword separator best practice
Hello. Wanted to reach out see what the consensus is re-keyword separators So just taken on a new client and all their urls are structured like /buybbqpacks rather than buy-bbq-packs - my understanding is that it comes down to readability, which influences click through, rather than search impact on the keyword. So we usually advise on a hyphen, but the guy's going to have to change ALLOT of pages & setup redirects to change it all wasn't sure if it was worth it? Thanks! Stu
On-Page Optimization | | bloomletsgrow0 -
Should I optimize my home-page or a sub-page for my most important keyword
Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!
On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A2 -
Fewer keywords in title tag?
Hello, I have a title tag that includes three keywords and has a total of 59 characters. The third keyword is not very important. If I eliminated the third keyword, leaving the first two (for a total of 48 characters), would the ranking value of the first two keywords increase? Does including the third keyword dilute the value of the first two? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Keywords in Navigation
Hi, What is best practice for main navigation links with regards to use of keywords in them. For example is it best to using the phrase 'Pricing", "Website Pricing" or "Website Design Pricing" To me 'Pricing' is more appropriate because to the user they know they are on a website designer's site so what else would pricing be for right?! Furthermore you use less 'real estate' on the nav bar! There is on page text around the site which has links to "see our website design pricing" etc so I assume that is perhaps a more natural place to include that phrase? Look forward to your insights 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | NeilD0 -
Do alt tags count towards on page keyword density?
Hello...I have written a bunch of content for my site using a useful tool called Scribe SEO which recommends keyword density at 5% if I remember correctly. So all my my newly written content is below this level but I am left wondering if by adding alt tags with my chosen keywords I will be considered to be over the limit and cause a red flag? Can anyone clarify this for me please?
On-Page Optimization | | Wallander0 -
301 redirect and then keywords in URL
Hi, Matt Cutts says that 301 redirects, including the ones on internal pages, causes the loss of a little bit of link juice. But also, I know that keywords in the URL are very important. On our site, we've got unoptimized URLs (few keywords) in the internal pages. Is it worth doing a 301 redirect in order to optimize the URLs for each main page. 301 redirects are the only way we can do it on our premade cart For example (just an example) say our main (1 of the 4) keywords for the page is "brown shoes". I'm wondering if I should redirect something like shoes.com/shoecolors.html to shoes.com/brown-shoes.html In other words, with the loss of juice would we come out ahead? In what instances would we come out ahead?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0