If concepts are too similar when grouping keywords what do I do ?
-
I will summarise and then ty to explain :
When I group keyword with the keyword explorer if concepts (grouping keywords) that I find are too similar to each other how do I go about it...
Ldg me know explain.
When google doesn't have enough data to rank a website with content does it only use links ?
Let me give you an example. If I take "title tag" as a keyword people have a lots of questions that can be answered which will create numerous concepts.
However, let's take "hiking tours Italy" for example. If I go through the keyword explorer or all the other tools existing out there people don't have questions. All I find are variations or synonyms of my keyword and I group by low lexical similarity all the words are going to be very similar.
I know that each variation can be grouped and considered a different concepts but writing about various concepts that mean exactly the same thing because of lack of data not very smart and useful...
So in that case what does google do, does it rank a website only based on links or schema ? see that it has no way to rank it based on good quality content because of a lack of data (questions that could be answers that would lead to concepts).
Thank you,
-
I think there's a lot to be said for this approach, in general for content production. If you yourself can't 'get out there', there's always the option of temporarily hiring the services of someone who has been out that way
-
Ah I see what you are saying, sorry! Maybe try a different tool like this one: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1n03BfU2iS7eanuRwKWUDGrncRHOx7nkZpLSCB0V_F6E/copy (Google Sheets)
There are various tools you can use for keyword grouping, this is one which I sometimes make use of. It won't do a perfect job, but if you use it you can fix the 'noisy' data manually. It's still faster than doing everything manually from scratch, even though it will require some manual actions
-
Interesting ...
-
"hiking tours Italy" is really broad and there is a lot of fine detail.
I think that you need to go to Italy and do some hiking. Then you will have first-hand experience, know what people see, know the routes they take, know the destinations, have real photos... Each of these is a separate topic for content. You could spend a year hiking in Italy.
Spend a month hiking the vineyard country of Tuscany, another month hiking on Sicily and seeing volcanic landscapes, a month in Abruzzo with history and views of the Adriatic. Hike in the day, write every night.
People want more than a "hike". They want to see stuff, they want to learn things, they want experiences. Each part of Italy is unique and has different types of hiking.
-
Thank you for the information nut I think you misunderstood what I meant.
I am not talking about the search volume but I am talking about the keyword found when I group by lexical similarity.
For example when I group by high lexical similarity let's say "alsace bike tour" google doesn't have any data and keyword explorer is almost unable to create groups with sentences that "mean the same thing". In other words I have to try to guess what would be the sentences and create groups myself.
-
I think you just have to wait for Google to catch up, basically. If terms are basically synonyms, then it wouldn't make sense to consider them as separate concepts. I don't think Google, or users, would like to see more long pages where the author is trying to make very similar terms seem like different entities (when they are not)
By the way, Google have more data than the tools let on. Especially regarding their keyword data, where the search volumes are rounded up and down in 10s. So in reality, when Google says a keyword has zero search volume, it actually just means "less than five" - so it gets rounded down to 0
There have been many times where I have decided to build out along such keywords which 'seemingly' have no search volume, only to find that Search Console tells me I am getting clicks from keywords which (according to Keyword Planner / Keyword Explorer) have no search volume. I am pretty sure that Google's ranking algorithms, interact with non-averaged non-rounded searches, not the data which we see
In the end, sometimes you just have to say, "no! I don't believe this is a zero, I think people are searching for this question and others. I need to create content before search volumes show up in Google's tools, so that when search volume increases I am already on top and ahead of other marketers who are using a more basic approach". Sometimes this will work for you, sometimes your instincts will be wrong and you won't get as many searches as you think
Over time you will develop better instincts with regard to 'false-zero' keywords and it will become second nature
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
-
Will I loose from SEO if I rename my urls to be more keyword friendly?
As a good practice of SEO is to have your keywords in the links. I am thinking of doing some optimization and change my urls to more effective keywords. I am using shopify and there is an option (a tick) that you can check while changing the url (ex. for a category, for a product, for a blog post). This will give a redirection to the old post to the new. Is it good practice? Is it risky for losing SEO or it will help to rank higher because I will have better keywords in my links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Spiros.im0 -
Hyphens in Keyword
Hi everyone, I was wondering if anyone had any experience of whether Google treats keywords with hyphens differently. One of my websites main keywords is 'buy to let', however all across our website it is referred to as 'buy-to-let'. People always search without the hyphens. I recently heard that Google may only treat us as a highly relevant match and not an exact match for this keyword. I was wondering if anyone had any experience of this, and what is the best course of action to take. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Keep ranking homepage for target keyword, or switch to another page?
Hi Moz Community! I've researched Moz to find the answer to this question but nothing for my situation. I'm hoping some experienced SEOs can help me out. Here's the situation: I'm up against some fairly stiff competition for my main keyword - the front page is dominated by major manufacturers with high brand recognition and loads of money, where as my client is a much smaller manufacturer trying to compete. However, their DA is only 37-53 so not impossible to outrank... just many links and a significant advantage. We've honed in on a keyword that still drives good traffic, that's a great term to drive paying customers, and that we can get competitive with. My strategy was to attempt to rank my client's _homepage _for this term, rather than a specific product page, as I knew that they'd have many more links and social shares of their main site. (I've been successful with this strategy before). We've risen 60+ positions for the keyword in the past 3 months, to position 12, but we seem to have plateaued for the past month. We're ranking in top 5 positions for a number of our other keywords, so I know we're trending well. However, I'm concerned that despite our quick rise to #12, I may have made a seemingly fatal decision to rank their homepage for our target keyword term. After we had plateaued for a while, I did a more thorough side by side comparison and found that 8 out of 10 competitors on the front page have 2 main things we don't (and can't, because we're ranking the homepage)... 1- The keyword in the url (they're ranking for product pages, i.e. homepage.com/keyword-here/) 2- Their keyword comes first, or early in the meta title. Ours is _supposed to _, but as you know- Google can do what it likes with your homepage title as it's your brand, so they've put our company name- _then _the keyword we added in the title. e.g. Our Company | The Term We're Ranking For We've done a lot of work, and gained many reputable, high quality links, and we did see a significant rank increase across all our pages. My question is- did I shoot myself in the foot? Or is ranking the homepage still viable in this situation? If ultimately this is going to be impossible to get in the top #5 spots, what can I do to fix it? We've already gained a PA of 38 on the homepage from our work. Or would you let it go and just keep working at it, expecting that eventually we'll break onto the front page? Thanks in advance! Let me know if you need more info. I tried to be general with terms/site for my client's sake.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheatreSolutionsInc0 -
Title Length Vs Keywords
Hello all, I've been talking with an SEO expert who convinced me to add more keywords to my titles of a section of our site which is updated with products daily. I can see the logic and I do prefer having these additional keywords. The problem now is in Moz it says we have over 2,000 pages with title elements that are too long, which is true they are all over the 70 character limit. Is this a problem SEO wise? Speaking to our SEO expert they said it's not ideal from a user point of view as you can't see the full title, but are we going to be upsetting Google by having 150+ character titles? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB171 -
How to combine 2 pages (same domain) that rank for same keyword?
Hi Mozzers, A quick question. In the last few months I have noticed that for a number of keywords I am having 2 different pages on my domain show up in the SERP. Always right next to each other (for example, position #7 and #8 or #3 and #4). So in the SERP it looks something like: www.mycompetition1.com www.mycompetition2.com www.mywebsite.com/page1.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
4) www.mywebsite.com**/page2.html**
5) www.mycompetition3.com Now, I actually need both pages since the content on both pages is different - but on the same topic. Both pages have links to them, but page1.html always tends to have more. So, what is the best practice to tell Google that I only want 1 page to rank? Of course, the idea is that by combining the SEO Juice of both pages, I can push my way up to position 2 or 1. Does anybody have any experience in this? Any advice is much appreciated.0 -
Google Ranking Generally in Germany - Keywords & Umlauts
Hi Mozzers, I was hoping i could get some advice/opinions on a website ranking problem i have been working on, in particular one of the pages. This is our German language website which is hosted from Germany and a flaunt German speaking member of staff from our German office moderates the text content of the website for us.Our website seems to get good traffic ,visitor navigation and conversions. One of the keywords i focus building around is Schallpegelmessgerät which is one way of basically saying Sound level meter in German. The keyword uses an umlaut which i cannot use in the URL, but google is picking up and putting into the snippets, but apart from that our on-page optimization is good according to the moz tool. I have been trying to improve our content and we post many blog articles around the topic/keyword but google.de seems to choose not to even display this on the first couple of pages and sometimes ranks our blog articles around the third page. We are even been outranked by some low quality cheap online shop websites some of which with low quality content and low page and domain authorities. I had accepted this but after looking at bing.de and doing a search i find our page in the top 5 results, i understand that google and bing's algorhythms are different but just struggling to get my head around it all. Here is our website & page - http://www.cirrusresearch.de/produkte/schallpegelmessgerat/ Any advice on this situation would be greatly appreciated, thank you very much for reading this James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Building "keyword" backlinks
Looking for some opinions here please. Been involved in seo for a couple of years mainly working on my websites and picking up the odd client here and there through word of mouth. I must admit that up until a few months back I was guilty of using some grey methods of link building - linkvana, unique article wizard and the such. While no penalties were handed out to my domains and some decent rankings gained, I got tired of always being on the lookout for what the next Google update will do to my results and which networks were being hit, and so I moved a lot more into the 'proper' way of seoing. These days my primary sources for backlinks are much more respectable... myblogguest bloggerlinkup postjoint Guest Blog Finder http://ultramarketer.com/guest-blogger-finder/ - not sure where i came across this resource but it's very handy I use these sources alongside industry only directories and general word of mouth. Ironically I have found that doing the word by hand not only leads to results I can happyily show people (content wise) but also it's much quicker and cheaper. The increased authority of the sites means far fewer links are needed. The one area I still am having a little issue with is that of building keyword based backlinks. I now find it fairly easy to get my content on a reasonable quality site - DA to 40 and above, however the vast majority of these sites will allow the backlink only as the company name or as a generic read more type thing. This is fine and it is improving my website performance and authority. The trouble I am finding is that while i am ranking for the title tag and some keywords in the page, I am struggling to get backlinks for other keywords. In an ideal world every page on the site would be optimised for a different keyword and you could then just the site name as anchor text to build the authority of that page and make it rank for it's content, but what about when you (or the client) wants to rank the home for a number of different keywords, some not featured on the page. The keywords are too similar to go to the trouble of making unique pages for, and that would also add no value to the site. My question really then, after a very long winded way of getting there, is are others finding it much more difficult to gain keyword based backlinks these days? The great thing about the grey seo tools, as mentioned above, is that it was super easy to get the backlinks with whatever anchor text you wanted - even if you needed hundreds of the thing to compensate for the low value of each!! Thanks Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Cannot Identify Self Cannabilizing Keyword Anchor
I am struggling to locate on our website www.towelsrus.co.uk a self cannibalizing keyword. Can anyone help? http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/Bath-Linen-Bath-Pillows/Aztex/Luxury-Bath-Pillows-With-Suction-Cups-4-Embroidered-Designs_ct463bd182pd2818.htm void Keyword Self-Cannibalization Easy fix <dl> <dt>Cannibalizing link</dt> <dd>"Luxury Bath Pillows With Suction Cups, 4 Embroidered Designs"</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>It's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site (sometimes two if you've already achieved high rankings and are seeking a second, indented listing). To prevent engines from potentially seeing a signal that this page is not the intended ranking target and creating additional competition for your page, we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text. Note that using modified versions is sometimes fine (for example, if this page targeted the word 'elephants', using 'baby elephants' in anchor text would be just fine).</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Unless there is intent to rank multiple pages for the target keyword, it may be wise to modify the anchor text of this link so it is not an exact match.</dd> </dl>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0