Stupid Question?? Is [painter new york] the same keyword as [painter in new york]?
-
Hi,
This may be a stupid question but...
Google ignores short/common words like 'in', so if I optimize a page for 'painter in new york' will it rank just as well for 'painter new york'?
In Google's keyword tool, exact match gives [painter new york] 140 searches per month but [painter in new york] gets < 10.
However, it is much more difficult to write 'painter new york' naturally into body copy than it is 'painter in new york'.
So what do I do?
Thanks
-
Thanks Miriam
-
Hi Stray Cat,Your question isn't stupid at all and there is a great discussion happening here. I'd like to throw in a few details for your consideration.First of all, you cannot rely on the numbers provided by keyword research tools if you are including geo terms (like ny) in your phrases. There is currently no tool that provides accurate numbers for local keyword research. So, you can use things like Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Google Insights to give you an idea of search volumes, but numbers are not to be viewed as accurate. Most Local SEOs do their keyword research without geo modifiers and then add these terms back into the list of discovered product, service and brand terms.If you were my client and were a NY painter, we would be targeting all 3 variations of your example terms. So, in the body copy, we might find sentences like:"Call The Painter New York Schools Have Hired 234 Times Since 2003 For A Beautiful Job!"and"When Hiring A Painter In New York, Always Request A License Number Before You Sign A Contract."and "A Professional New York Painter Will Always Present Documents Proving That He Is Licensed, Bonded and Insured."You can come up with better sentences than these which I've just reeled off, but the point is that you need to find ways to incorporate all of your core phrases into the copy. I further believe that it's not necessary to group keyword phrases together every time. If one line in your copy is talking about New York and the next is talking about painters, you are still using your keywords and signifying to bots and humans what your business does and where it is. Go with the lighter touch when you can, to avoid having copy that reads like a robot wrote it, and remember that your local search rankings are dependent on tons of different factors. The optimization of your pages is definitely a core factor, but it is only one factor.
-
Thanks Ian - yes it seems a real struggle to deal with the difference between which search phrases have the most searches and which search phrases sound right in the context of a web page.
-
Not a stupid question at all, and to be honest something I really struggle with. Stopwords are somewhat important because the results are different based on the search the user enters.
For example (real), I have a page and the title is "The Writer's Stop at Disney's Hollywood Studios". My site ranks differently based on the following permutations.
The Writer's Stop at Disney's Hollywood Studios = Position 10
Writer's Stop at Disney's Hollywood Studios = Position 12
Writer's Stop Disney's Hollywood Studios = Position 14Interestingly removing the apostrophe's didn't appear to affect the search results. Only one test, so nothing conclusive I guess.
Ultimately my titles etc contain the proper phrase because from a user perspective it makes more sense.
-
Thanks Jared
-
Pay close attention to what Ben mentions about Local SEO. If you poke around long enough with your keywords you'll notice obvious trends in your area (that may not equate to other regions) particularly with the words "in" or "near".
You'll start to notice how certain prepositions trigger the map packs. It's just something to pay attention to depending on your keyword + locale.
-
Thanks Ben - I'll be sure to check those out
-
Thanks Micah
-
-
Ah, I misunderstood. In that case, the short answer is that "painter in new york" and "painter new york" are not exactly the same. However, as far as targeting it with your on-page SEO and your anchor text links, it makes little difference. "painter new york" and "painter in new york" hits the same 3 keywords either way. One does look much more natural than the other inside copy & anchor text, though.
-
That's why I used the words "usually" and "generally" lol
-
"painter new york" is what is referred to as a "head" phrase. That is, a phrase that has a high search volume but a high competition.
So on your home page's title; yes, I would target your head phrase. However you need to be building content in the longtail to rank well for that head phrase.
One of my favorite SEO Moz videos that talks about the longtail is back from 2009. It's dated but it's a great intro, and is still relevant for instruction purposes.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-ignore-the-tail-at-your-peril
If you really want to digg deep into SEO I reccomend watching all of SEO Moz's old videos on Vimeo and You Tube. The 5 year old ones get into a bunch of great ideas that are still useful today, but no one is talking about.
-
Actually [painter new york] has an exact search volume of 140 whereas [new york painter] only has 22...
-
Thanks Ben - so you are saying that to target the difficult phrase 'painter new york' organically, I could optimise the page for 'new york painter' and that would work just as well.
-
Thanks Micah but this was just a made up example - it's the general point that I'm after - apologies for the confusion
-
I'm going to make a leap and assume that your business & website isn't about art. If this assumption is correct, then the answer to your question is that it doesn't matter. Neither of those are money keywords. Google thinks those keywords are about art. See the images from Google Insights.
See also the image of a universal search for "new york painters". Google Organic Search clearly believes that it's about art. Google Local Search believes it's about painting companies. This isn't a keyphrase you should be targeting organically. You should be doing some Local SEO, though.
-
Hi
Generally I find that phrases contain "in" "of" "near" are more difficult to rank because Google usually displays local business listing, where if you exclude those words you have a "normal" page.
So it's safe to say is there are:
- Different search volumes
- Different SERP results
The keywords are not the same.
You'll usually find that if you have a phrase like:
painter new york
Google will treat the swaping of words as having the same search volume for example:
new york painter
Hope this helps
@bnspak
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
-
Website can't break into Google Top100 for main keywords, considering 301 Redirect to a new domain
A little background on our case. Our website, ex: http://ourwebsite.com was officially live in December 2015 but it wasn't On-Site optimized and we haven't done any Off-site SEO to it. In April we decided to do a small redesign and we did it an online development server. Unfortunately, the developers didn't disallow crawlers and the website got indexed while we were developing it on the development server. The development version that got indexed in Google was http://dev.web.com/ourwebsite We learned that it got indexed when we migrated the new redesigned website to the initial domain. When we did the migration we decided to add www and now it looks like: http://www.ourwebsite.com Meanwhile, we deleted the development version from the development server and submitted "Remove outdated content" from the development server's Search Console. This was back in early May. It took about 15-20 days for the development version to get de-indexed and around 30 days for the original website (http://www.ourwebsite.com) to get indexed. Since then we have started our SEO campaign with Press Releases, Outreach to bloggers for Guest and Sponsored Posts etc. The website currently has 55 Backlinks from 44 Referring domains (ahrefs: UR25, DR37) moz DA:6 PA:1 with various anchor text. We are tracking our main keywords and our brand keyword in the SERPs and for our brand keyword we are position #10 in Google, but for the rest of the main (money) keywords we are not in the Top 100 results in Google. It is very frustrating to see no movement in the rankings for the past couple of months and our bosses are demanding rankings and traffic. We are currently exploring the option of using another similar domain of ours and doing a complete 301 Redirect from the original http://www.ourwebsite.com to http://www.ournewebsite.com Does this sound like a good option to you? If we do the 301 Redirect, will the link-juice be passed from the backlinks that we already have from the referring domains to the new domain? Or because the site seems "stuck," would it not pass any power to the new domain? Also, please share any other suggestions that we might use to at least break into the Top 100 results in Google? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielGorsky0 -
HTTPS 301 Redirect Question
Hi, I've just migrated our previous site (siteA) to our new url (siteB) and I've setup 301 redirects from the old url (siteA) to the new (siteB). However, the old url operated on https and users who try to go to the old url with https (https://siteA.com) receive a message that the server cannot be reached, while the users who go to http://siteA.com are redirected to siteB. Is there a way to 301 redirect https traffic? Also, from an SEO perspective if the site and all the references on Google search are https://siteA.com does a 301 redirect of http pass the domain authority, etc. or is https required? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | opstart0 -
Name change to include a keyword?
Hello All...Just signed up for the 30 day trial with Moz. I am a wedding photographer here in the UK. If I was to change my company name to Simon Cook Wedding Photography from Simon Cook Photography, will this help my presence in anyway?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Simon_Cook0 -
How to improve visibility of new content
What are best SEO practices to improve visibility in SERP for new content apart from meta data.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aliciaporrata10090 -
Multiple Keywords for a site
I have a client that is OBSESSED with KWP ranking (don't go there...I know) This client offers multiple services, dog boarding, dog grooming, dog training, dog daycare and dog walking. Essentially these are our focus. She ranks on page one for all of these words (locally of course) BUT she wants to rank in positions 1 and 2 for all of these words. Here's my rub, with her limited budget, we focus on 1 word (and associated long tails like "dog boarding in the south loop) and it takes a couple of months to zoom up to positions 1 or 2 (not counting map pack....she wants ORGANIC) While we're focusing on this 1 word, the others maintain their ranking or slip a few spots (like from 6 to 😎 Conversions average about about 1 a day, organic traffic is roughly 1000 hits a month. In your opinion is it better to split this focus between the 5 target words every month, more slowly building ranking, but maintaining it for longer periods of time. Or do it the way we have been chase dog boarding, then chase training, and so on. It just seems like we are CONSTANTLY chasing something while something else falls. Thanks Tracy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lkilera0 -
Google News sitemap keywords
My company is a Theater news and reviews site. We're building a google news sitemap and Google suggests some recommended keywords we can use with their <keywords>tag: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/116037</keywords> Our writers also tag their stories with relevant keywords. What should we populate the <keywords>tag with?</keywords> We were thinking we'd automatically populate it with author-added tags, in addition to one or more of the recommended ones suggested by Google, such as Theater, Arts, and Culture (all of our articles are related to these topics). Finally, many of our articles are about say, celebrities. An author may tag an article with 'Bryan Cranston,' and when this is the case we're considering also tagging it with the 'Celebrities' tag. Are all or any of these worthwhile?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
New Section On Site Worth It?
We have been kicking around this idea for a while now, and I wanted to get the communities honest opinion before we begin building it. So we create a lot of posts on social media showcasing articles we find on SEO, tips and tricks, reviews, etc. We were thinking rather than always linking out to the other sites, we are going to create a section on our site called "From Around The Web" and have brief breakdowns of what was covered, then provide a link to the full article. Most of these would be between 300-500 words, and be optimized around what we were linking to and writing about. So since the content would not be "in-depth" would this hurt us in any way? To me, it doesnt not make sense to send people to the other article right away, when we can summarize it and link to the full articles from our site. (Most people dont want to read a 3000 word article on SEO, especially small business owners who just want the breakdown) Thoughts? Think it will help, or not be useful enough to invest labor in?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-Kley0 -
Targeting combination of keywords
Hi, On our website Vliegtickets.nl we are now targeting one combination of keywords " flights + destination". We are working on a new website and we are rewriting texts for the launch. Our idea is to target again on the combination " flights + destination", but also target other combinations. Our intention is to have a first introduction text targeted on " flights + destination" and have lower parts of texts (descriptions) targeted on the long tail, with use of keywords like flight / fly to / cheap tickets to etc. Our page will be divided like this: 1. introduction text max 150 words (h1 + h2) targeted on " flights + destination"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vliegticketsnl
2. box 2 Cityguide snippets / content in context of destination - targeted on city name
3. box 3. Question: target on new generic keywords + combination of destination What is your point of view on box 3? Is it the right way to target a broader range of keywords? Should we use these long tail keywords (fly to / flights / cheap flights...) also in meta title / meta description / strong kwds, etc? Or will it be sufficient if we target on one combination and use those synonyms in a lower density? Or is it best to keep the focus on one main combination and other pages on other keyword combinations? Best regards, Vliegtickets.nl0