Do keywords ride solo or do they have sidecars?
-
"No man is an island", so say brother John Donne. But, my fellow SEO-ers, is the same true of keywords?
That is... deep breath...
If I am ranking as number one for a short-tail keyword, like for example: "fruit salad", does that have any sway on the rankings for other longer tail keywords, like for example, "tropical fruit salad london" or "cheap fruit salad", or is every keyword that we would track in our campaigns completely independent with rankings dependant on work done on that sole keyword?
Thanks for your advice in advance.
-
Just to add a bit to what Joe shared, your "fruit salad" page will surely appear in the organic results for a "cheap fruit salad search". The difference is you are ranking as #1 for "fruit salad" where you may rank well for "cheap fruit salad" or you may be the 10,000th result. There are many factors involved including if the word "cheap" is used somewhere on the page, your competition, etc.
In a perfect world your site will have one quality page dedicated to each key phrases you wish to target.
-
Yes and no.
I imagine search engines don't consider your ranking for other keywords (fruit salad) when calculating the ranking for other keywords (tropical fruit salad london), but it would be difficult and unwise to optimize your site for a head term in a way that wouldn't help keyword variations.
Good optimization for a head term will mostly involve content and optimization that benefits a range of long-tail terms related to your target keyword.
I hope that helps.
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
-
After 301 redirection non-English keyword points to English language pages
We had multilingual website on .co.uk domain and somewhere in April, we've done 301 redirection from domain1.co.uk pages which were in Polish language to domain2.com/pl domain and now for some Polish keywords Google SERP sometimes shows English pages (.com) and sometimes polish pages (.com/pl). Previously co.uk/en had English content and that got redirected to .com. What could be the reason? Thank you for all responses.
On-Page Optimization | | Optimal_Strategies0 -
Simple on-site SEO - bet practice for keywords in content
Hello, The Moz on-page grader will give a grade of A if the keyword appears exactly in the content at least one time. If there are 500 words and a lot of it is about the main keyword, what have you found to be important to look for beyond the on-page grader - beyond the one exact instance of the keyword? I'm specifically talking just about keywords in the content. My guess is that it needs to occur 3 or 4 times in different forms and at least once exactly, but the on-page grader doesn't require it. What have you found?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Properly changing title, URL and content for new keywords without harming other rankings.
Hello - We are looking to try to bring up some keywords in the SERPs that we are currently ranking fairly low for. We sell Christening clothing for children and people will use both Christening and Baptism to search for the same thing. We currently rank very high for Christening (#1 on Google for certain combinations) but we are fairly low on Baptism.
On-Page Optimization | | BabyBeauBelle
I am trying to figure out the best way to start getting Baptism up by changing some title, URL and content pages to include more Baptism keywords. My concern is messing with the existing because we rank so well for Christening. Since we are ecommerce we can vary this quite a bit on our products, but again I'm nervous to do so fearing changing the wrong things, too many products etc and in the process of trying to raise one set of keywords (baptism) we harm the other set (christening).
Any advice would be appreciated!0 -
Duplicate lower and uppercase keywords
I get significantly different report cards for the same keywords with and without uppercase letters on the same URL. The only difference between the two sets of keywords is the first letters of every keywords, e.g.: "Air freight" - results in an "F"
On-Page Optimization | | DigiTeamatDSV
"air freigth" - results in an "A" Should I stick to lowercase keywords only - and won't the search engines ignore the case anyway?0 -
Home Page Keyword Retargeting
Hi Guys! I have a question regarding the risk of **re-targeting **your homepage to another **keyword. ** To give a little background: I am working on a clients site that targets a keyword we initially thought during the keyword research phase, would be an appropriate target. What we found out is that it is not. Everything in analytics points to this keyword not performing well. We now want to re target the homepage to another keyword target. My questions are: How risky is it to do this given we have already done a fair amount of link building to the home page with anchor text from the initial keyword target? Will this look suspicious to google? What sort of things should we consider before moving forward with this change?
On-Page Optimization | | gravityseo0 -
Strategy for dealing with keyword variants
I'd like your opinion on the strategy of dealing with key phrase variants: I've got a page that is ranking in the top 10 and top 3 for about 10 different variations of the same phrase. Seomoz gives it terrible grades for all but one of the keyphrases. Which course of action do you recommend : ----------- create new pages ------------ Create new pages for each variant and get them to grade A. If I go this route what sort of cross linking scheme should I use between this pages? ---------- improve existing page ----------- Try to make my single page rank better for all the phrases by doing extra on-page work so the page has a better grade for all of the variants? Many thanks for your ideas and opinions.
On-Page Optimization | | PillarMarketing0 -
Keyword issue
On this site filmeonlinenoi.com the keyphrase "filme online gratis" its auto-cannibalizating?
On-Page Optimization | | Alexsmenaru0 -
Why home page ranks higher than keyword-optimized page
We have a page that is optimized for the keyword "job scheduling". A search on the keyword "job scheduling" results in this page not ranking at all, while our home page (uc4.com) ranks third. Could you provide some ideas/suggestions as to why this would be the case and how to make our job scheduling page rank higher? Thanks, claudia
On-Page Optimization | | claudmar0