Two for the price of one: Can I rank for multiple keywords when only targeting one keyword?

[derrickkuhn]

If I'm optimizing for a specific keyword, is it accurate to assume that by ranking for that specific keyword that I will also be able to rank for similar or root keywords merely by ranking for the original keyword?

For example, if I'm targeting 'free online bucket list' is it safe to assume that I will also be able to inadvertently rank for 'online bucket list' or 'free bucket list'? Can I assure clients of this?

Or if I'm targeting 'Colorado grocery store' should I also naturally rank for 'grocery store Colorado' and not need to make both of these my targeted keywords?

[JamesNorquay]

When you are doing your link building target the following things:

• Both terms in varied anchor texts

• Target on page content to target both terms

• Target internal link building for each term.

You can mix up techniques to achieve many positives

[EGOL]

Something else....  You have the potential to pull search engine traffic for almost any word combination that appears on your page.  In fact, many websites get more traffic from these "long tail" search queries than they get from their primary keywords.

The more different words that you have on a page the more of this type of traffic you will receive.  We once upgraded a lot of our content from short descriptions of about 50 words to 300-500 word articles and the traffic went up 3x.  Then upgraded to 1000+ word articles and traffic doubled.

[Dekoda_Jones]

Hey Derrick,

That is absolutely correct and for a couple of reasons.

1.) The onpage text supports all of those keywords

2.) Anchor text of inbound links can be exact match or partial match and benefit multiple terms therein (ask me if this doesn't make sense, there is a great whiteboard Friday session on this)

3.) As you improve your domain/page authority you will be mroe relevant in the eyes of Google and start ranking for more and more keywords you weren't even expecting to rank for.

One this I like to do is go through Google analytics and copy out all the keywords users have accessed our sites through, then throw them into the rank checker and keep an eye on the movements.  This tactic gives you a holistic view of how the website is improving as you work on it.

Josh