When it comes to good writing for SEO, there is one thing you really don’t want your piece of content to look like – a Christmas turkey.
You see, when it comes to turkey, there is nothing better than a properly stuffed bird – whether you want it with cranberry sauce, walnuts or even brie as one very experimental recipe told me to try.
Anyway, I digress.
Basically, if, when you’re writing content for either your blog or website, or even if it’s to be guest-posted or hosted on a client’s site, you’ve got turkey on the brain – something is not going right.
You see, when it comes to keywords, the one thing that a good digital marketing agency knows – and you really should not be aiming for, is a piece of writing when they are stuffed throughout.
There are a couple of reasons for this.
The first?
Well, to put it nice and simply, when you stuff keywords throughout the body of an article, it’s like asking readers to click off the page. It’s unappealing to read, difficult to digest any sense from and just downright silly.
The thing is, it is really easy to spot when writers are trying to user keywords over and over again.
This is Google’s example:
“We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at [email protected].”
Clearly, we know what this particular business is trying to sell, but as a consumer, rather than that making you want to purchase a ‘custom cigar humidor’, you just want to laugh.
It’s like when you repeat a word so many times that it starts to lose meaning, or, as all writers will know, when you write or stare at a word on a computer screen too many times – you just start to question if you’ve been spelling and using it correctly the whole time.
Believe me, if you haven’t experienced this yet, you will one day and it will truly make you question everything.
Another reason you really shouldn’t be stuffing keywords in your content is because Google themselves will punish you for it. You see, the search engine is a pretty intelligent thing these days, and can sniff this kind of bad behaviour from a mile off.
They also have the ability to impose fines and to manually drop your rankings – ouch. The key takeaway from all of that? Just don’t do it.
And the third and final reason that you shouldn’t keyword stuff. Well, dear reader – you actually don’t need to repeat the same keyword or phrase (whether long-tail or not) because Google can understand semantics better than ever before.
If it’s clear from your content that it’s about a particular subject, your page will score well when users type in the keyword you’re trying to rank for as well as any synonyms that are often used.
Likewise, if they type in a related search term, if Google thinks your content is better – they will rank your content highly, no matter whether or not it uses the exact match keyword.
Google has even come out repeatedly to say that they are moving away from exact match keywords on purpose because their systems are simply too intelligent for this to be necessary anymore.
Of course, you still need to be picking keywords wisely – whether that’s using a tool to conduct keyword research or going at it the old-fashioned way and just having a look at what your competitors are up to.
So, how then do you include keywords in a way that is seamless, flawless and just impossible for site visitors to pick up on?
I’ve got a couple of hot tips.
Firstly, when you’ve decided on your keyword – think about synonyms for it. Make sure you sprinkle all of these throughout the article. Look at what Google Analytics tells you, or their Keyword Planner. What do real life users actually search for and what is the user intent behind search queries?
Remember your goal is to satisfy the needs of real people, not just to rank highly.
Like with all marketing activities – your strategy needs to have and serve a real purpose – and that purpose should never be to just simply rank highly on Google.
The second tip is to use my best friend, CTRL+F on Windows or COMMAND + F on Macs to check that you haven’t simply fallen prey to repeating yourself too often.
Have a think about either using synonyms or rewording sentences so that you just don’t need the keyword.
A good rule of thumb is to not have an exact match keyword more than twice in each section of text. Obviously, this varies as some keywords are more difficult to replace and it’s also highly dependent on how long your article is overall.
Another badly kept SEO writing secret is to simply ask somebody else to have a read of your article to see if they notice any glaring over-use of a particular word or phrase.
If they can spot this, chances are, you’ve written a turkey article, rather than a great one.
My last tip is to think about using keywords in headings and subheadings in order to alleviate some of the need to have them in the article’s body so often. There is clearly a particular density that you’re going to be after (just over 1% is usually okay with search engines), but if you incorporate them this way, it’s much less jarring for the reader.
So there you have it, my hot tips on how to include keywords in your content in a beautiful, flawless way. With that, you’ll be well on your way to the Booker!
