Keyword Targeting

[UK2Group]

If I am currently ranking well for "Lawn Mowers" and I also want to target "Cheap Lawn Mowers" will it affect my ranking for "Lawn Mowers" if I change my on page optimization by adding "Cheap" to the title, H1, etc. or will it effectively target both.

[SEO5Team]

Hi Dustin,

By adding additional characters to your keywords, this can have the effect of “splitting the vote” with crawlers. If the initial keyword has a strong ranking, then adding additional text to complement it likely will not affect the main keyword ranking. Crawlers are fairly adept at finding keywords within other keywords, but for more precise effect, it may prove beneficial to use both the main keyword and the additional keyword as separate entities (e.g. “Lawn Mowers | Cheap Lawn Mowers”) to cover the most amount of ground. Use this tactic only with proper meta tags, and do not repeat phrases more than once to avoid keyword stuffing.

[starkSEO]

Adding cheap to the h1 title could possibly affect ranking of the other keyword; however, it would probably be recommended to test it out. There is a lot more to ranking another search term than just the h1 tag. I would suggest creating a page featuring "cheap lawn mowers" in the title, meta tags, alt images and have a high keyword density within the page. If you can throw up a video and put alt tags and description tags in it as well that would be huge as well.

[krissy-cca]

I would say it would effectively target both but then again you're adding another word in to your title so pushing your main keyword further down.

I'd perform a small test if I was you and track any change. If it changes for the worse then remove the word 'Cheap'. Try also doing a test on one of your other indexed pages if you're worried about knocking your position.

DD