How do you order similar keywords when writing content?
-
Let's say I sell widgets: plastic widgets, paper widgets, brass widgets and steel widgets.
These are in order by how popular they are but none is so popular to really stand on it's own.
When writing general content about widgets, lets say for the main Widgets page, would you write:
1. "We sell plastic, paper, brass and steel widgets."
-or-
2. "We sell plastic widgets, paper widgets, brass widgets and steel widgets."
I understand I can have specific pages for Plastic Widgets, Paper Widgets, etc., but like I said this would be for a main category page, maybe even for a quick "this is what we do" opening paragraph on the homepage.
Is it better to be concise like in example 1? Or to individually call out each type like in example 2?
I'm looking for SEO insight and the customer experience viewpoint as well.
-
Nice tip, thanks for sharing!
-
Spammy is what I want to avoid, but it unfortunately works in regards to SEO. Like you said, "Practically we aren't there yet."
I really like your suggestion of asking an English teacher to grade it. I'm having visions of every English teacher I ever had looking over my shoulder as I write now, kind of like Jedi masters of copy.
-
I also think it needs to be more like the first example. The SE are trying to move towards a more natural language recognition, and i would write in that manner. Remember too that you can utilize punctuation to split keywords up. For example:
"Many buyers prefer plastic widgets or paper widgets. Steel and brass widget are increasingly popular..." This would still hit all the keywords without seeming too spammy. Notice that the period here grammatically give a break to your content, but google will see the "widgets. Steel" together sometime, ignore the period and recognize it as "widgets steel", and then interpret that as the same as "steel widgets".
Just another small copy writing trick.
-
I'm looking for SEO insight and the customer experience viewpoint as well.
Ideally these are the same. Practically we aren't there yet, but you should design your site for the customer experience and for the most part you will do very well with respect to SEO.
Your second example seems spammy to me. I would suggest finding a way to naturally write the content. Write your content then ask an English teacher to grade it. I am quite serious.
The rules we learned in school: tell your audience what you are going to talk about (page title, meta description, H1 tag) then talk about it (content with keyword usage a few times) then tell them what you talked about (a summary which often is not relevant to short sales content).
I would also recommend using your keyword as early as possible in your content. "Widgets are available in many styles: plastic, paper, brass and steel."
-
I always write the way that I would talk or the way that I would write if the article would be in print instead of on the web.
The best way to turn a great article into a good article is trying to write it for search engines or try to hit a specific wordcount.
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
-
How to do proper keyword research to content URL-mapping?
Hi to all, If you can share your ideas on how to do a proper setup, it would be great. Cheers
Keyword Research | | joel.cortez0 -
Accuracy of search volume for keyword planner v old keyword tool?
Hi there, I'm (logged into Google Adwords) and researching search volume for keywords but I'm seeing weird results. I know that the term "outage notification" had between 1000 and 5000 monthly global searches when I last looked (I know this because I add a search volume tag to the keywords I track ranking of via Moz). Yet, now when I check global search volume via keyword planner I'm seeing only 70 global searches per month (AND low competition which I know is not true). Is this perhaps because only the exact match is reported or is something else going on? Very frustrated as I have now lost faith in the keyword research process via Google keyword planner....not sure where to go from here!! Thanks very much
Keyword Research | | SnapComms1 -
Tag usage based on Google keywords
We are making a site that will be a database of publicity stunts. We used the Google Keyword tool to find a bunch of words related to this. The term itself has similar keywords such as [pr campaigns]. And also there are some derivative keywords as [bad publicity stunts], [famous publicity stunts], [celebrity publicity stunts]. Each bringing in 20-50 monthly searches for the exact term. Some concepts appear slightly differently such as [famous pr stunts] and [famous pr campaigns]. We'd love our pages to appear on as much of these keyword searches as possible (overall we expect about 3k-4k searches /month on exact matching). And we're planning to use these keywords as a our taxonomy for our post tags. That way the keyword appears in each stunt page AND there is a page for each type of publicity stunt. As a general policy, what would be the best way to write our tags?
Keyword Research | | davhad
1. 'crazy', 'famous', 'bad'.
2. 'crazy publicity stunt', 'famous publicity stunt', 'bad publicity stunt'
3. 'crazy publicity stunt', 'famous pr campaign', 'bad marketing stunt' Thanks for sharing your expertise.0 -
E-Commerce keyword question
We sell ItemA. One of the phrases that brings people to our site is "ItemA for sale". Should I just try to target "ItemA" or should I try to get "for sale" in there? I have seen a few other variations such as "on clearance" or "to purchase" as well. Can I just focus on "ItemA" or do I need all of those variants as well?
Keyword Research | | EcommerceSite0 -
Website no.1 on Google for keyword but why?
Hi Guys, I'm trying to figure out why a site is ranking for a keyword. Keyword is "guitar strings" They have only implemented the following techniques: -Chosen keyword is within Meta title -Chosen keyword is used 8 times within content What else would make them rank so highly? Thanks, Dan
Keyword Research | | Sparkstone0 -
Meta Keywords Dilution?
In general, does having a large number of meta keywords listed in a page's meta keywords line dilute effort? On other words, should I focus on optimizing for 1 or 2 keywords per page to keep my efforts focused and increase the probability of ranking better for those 1 or 2.....or should I put down all the keywords I would "like" to rank for? Thank You
Keyword Research | | NiallTom0 -
Keyword Variations?
Hi, can anybody tell me if it is useful to optimize the following keyword in all 3 Versions?
Keyword Research | | mbase22
As I know google separates the 2 words as if using a hyphen - so it would be the same as if just using a space between the words.
But if you search for the different Versions in google there are different SERPS for every of this versions? Not many users will search using a hyphen between the words I guess - butt I saw some few keywords tipped in with hyphen in my google analytics report. And I want to be on top 😉 Piloten Ausbildung Piloten-Ausbildung Pilotenausbildung thx!0 -
Effective keyword grouping - any suggestions?
I have a specific question regarding keyword grouping. Whenever I've have compiled a (long) list of keywords, I create smaller groups of keywords that can be targeted by a category or page. However, I find this to be quite labour-intensive as I'm doing this work manually through filtering in Excel. To illustrate what I mean, here's an example of a keyword list: baby shirt
Keyword Research | | DeptAgency
t-shirt for baby
pregnancy shirts
pregnancy gifts Normally I would create a list of root words, like this: baby
shirt
pregnancy
gift I would then manually filter the list on each root word and copy the filtered list to separate tabs, which would result in lists like this: baby
baby shirt
t-shirt for baby shirt
baby shirt
t-shirt for baby
pregnancy shirts etc. As you can imagine, this is a lot of work. So my hope is that you can help me out with a smart tool / Excel formula / ??? to automate this process. Thanks for any suggestions!0