Co-occurence and synonyms

[seoanalytics]

Hello,

Can you explain me what is the difference between co-occurence and synonoyms and how i can find co-occuring words to include in my content as well as synonyms ?

Thank you,

[seoanalytics]

Thank you for your detailed reply. It does make sense.

[ThompsonPaul]

Synonyms are different words that mean the same thing - like sneakers, trainers, running shoes.

Co-occurring words/phrases are words/phrases that typically get used in connection with specific words and help search engines better understand and differentiate between words that are spelled the same but have different meanings (called homonyms).

For example: a page contains the word "apple". Is that a page about a delicious, healthy fruit, or about a massive technology corporation? The search engines will look at additional words that occur around the word in question (co-occurrence) - like pick, sauce, peel, vitamins or phone, operating system, laptop, shares - to better understand which of the two meanings of the word "apple" the page is likely to be about.

In my opinion, the best way to insure both synonyms and co-occurring words are included in your content is to write thoroughly and naturally about the topic of the page. Natural writing seldom uses the exact same phrase over and over again - good writers are always looking for ways to vary the terms they use for the same thing to keep the writing interesting and engaging (hence synonyms). And thoroughly covering a topic means the co-occurring words will naturally be part of the content.

That's why it's so easy to detect content that has been artificially written to target a specific "keyword density" for example. An attempt to artificially use certain words for the search engines harms the enjoyment of the reader, which then harms the website. The furthest I usually go to insure use of synonyms is to use basic keyword research to find the more popular synonyms for a term and keep them in mind to improve the quality/variety of the writing where appropriate.

At a basic level, you can use something like thesaurus.com to look up synonyms of your term, then put those terms into Google Keyword Planner to assess the volume and value of those synonyms and to find more related terms. Many keyword research tools offer this capability too. The challenge is that many of the synonyms may not register in the volume/competition measurements, which might mislead you into thinking they shouldn't be used.

Hope that all makes sense?

Paul