Top-quality content that resonates with audiences helps you climb to the top of search engine rankings. Marketer, Heidi Cohen, defines content as “high quality, useful information that conveys a story presented in a contextually relevant manner with the goal of soliciting an emotion or engagement.”
One of the primary ways to accelerate your website ranking is through keywords. A keyword is a single word or phrase that informs search engine algorithms on how relevant your website is for organic traffic. When keywords are efficiently researched and optimized, they connect a target audience with your website.
As a way of achieving their goals faster, brands will use as many keywords as possible within their on-page content. While, in principle, this is what they need to do, some run the risk of losing the key motivation for writing content; high-quality and useful. The overuse of keywords has the potential to negatively impact your content, losing its relevance to the reader, known as keyword stuffing.
In this post, we look at what keyword stuffing is and five reasons why it is bad for your website.
Keyword stuffing is when a web page becomes filled with the same target terms with the hope of ranking higher within search engine results. In the past, keyword stuffing was a popular technique to improve brand visibility for particular search phrases, but the method has dwindled in use for the reasons we will talk about in this article.
Types of keyword stuffing include:
– Using words or phrases unnecessarily and repeating them
– Adding words even when they are out of context with the content
– Using blocks of the same keyword
– Utilizing keywords that are not relevant to the page topic to add visibility
As an example, imagine you are a brand selling designer red shoes and what to rank better for the product in search engines. Content stuffed with keywords would look like the below:
“Come to Company XYZ for the best designer red shoes on the market. We offer designer red shoes that you can use during the day or for elegant evening events. Our designer red shoes come at a great value and are better quality than other designer red shoes from our competitors. Come and get your designer red shoes from us today.“
You have likely seen content like above on affiliate sites, attempting to earn a commission from selling products. While the example is a little extreme, you can see how the content becomes irrelevant, repetitive, and unnecessary as keywords stuff into every sentence.
A decade or so ago, Google and other search engine algorithms may have picked up on the keywords and positively influenced your ranking. However, the technique is generally frowned upon now by crawlers, which look for useful, relevant, and high-quality content, over keyword density.
Keyword density is the amount that a keyword appears within the content. As a calculation, it is the total number of words in copy, divided by the total times a keyword appears in that copy. As a rule, a 2% density should be the optimal amount for effective content optimization. Our example above has 61 words, of which 15 are keywords, at almost a 25% keyword density.
Sometimes, keyword stuffing will not be as blatant as our example. Brands often use text that is the same color as the background to hide the words or repeats them in scripts and meta-tags to avoid making the visible content untidy. However, these tricks don’t work any better than the more obvious approach, with search algorithms still looking at them negatively.
Stuffing with keywords is condemned by search engines, whereby it creates such a poor user experience. While keywords are meant to drive visitors to your website, stuffing them will have the opposite effect.
Here are five reasons why keyword stuffing is bad for your website and how to mitigate those problems.
Finally, search engines will penalize content that does not comply with best practices. Google can remove websites that rely on keyword stuffing from its search engine results. Web crawlers will spot pages that overuse a word or phrases, sending an alert to the algorithm, and demoting the site. Ultimately, keyword stuffing can lead to you losing out on new customers, as they won’t be able to find you.
Google prides itself on providing useful and quality results to its searchers. On that basis, they won’t want to present something that looks like spam or repetition. In the same way that you wouldn’t buy a product from a spam email, consumers won’t buy products from spam content.
01
Rather than piling keywords into a small amount of content, find ways to increase the volume of content with reader-focused, useful material. As you put keywords into long-form content, the density will decrease, it will become more readable, improve engagement, and make the pages more likely to rank highly.
02
Don’t focus too much on the keyword. Make informative content the main driver of the webpage and let the keywords flow naturally. If you try to force words in, that’s when it starts to become out of context and unreadable.
03
As well as your main keyword, use others that are related. For example, if you are writing about the importance of data quality, terms like “assessing your data,” “data integrity,” “data accuracy,” “enhancing data analytics,” and others will also help your search engine optimization. Using related keywords helps to avoid stuffing while also positively impacting search engine rankings.
An excellent way to try and avoid keyword stuffing on your pages is to assign a primary phrase to each bit of content. Once a target keyword has been used on a page, do not use it on subsequent pages, ensuring everything is unique, and you don’t have content competing against each other. A keyword difficulty tool can help you work out which to assign to your pages, factoring in the competition and popularity.
Finally, search engines will penalize content that does not comply with best practices. Google can remove websites that rely on keyword stuffing from its search engine results. Web crawlers will spot pages that overuse a word or phrases, sending an alert to the algorithm, and demoting the site. Ultimately, keyword stuffing can lead to you losing out on new customers, as they won’t be able to find you.
Google prides itself on providing useful and quality results to its searchers. On that basis, they won’t want to present something that looks like spam or repetition. In the same way that you wouldn’t buy a product from a spam email, consumers won’t buy products from spam content.
If your content appears robotic and challenging to read, people will not stay on your site. The time spent on a site is a ranking metric in itself, and drop-offs will negatively affect your position in results.
Instead of using the same keyword repetitively, add variations of the same word or phrase to drive down the density. Google can also recognize content that uses synonyms, such as the difference between a mini when it refers to a car and a mini referring to a skirt. The crawlers review the content around the word mini, to work out the relevancy of the content to a searcher. Terms related to your keyword can be a huge help, as opposed to repeating the word or phrase itself, ensuring Google knows what your content is about.
The “red apples” example above shows how keyword stuffing lacks end-user focus and portrays the same characteristics as typical email spam. Such campaigns are notorious for lacking any credibility and only serve to put the user off your content.
Rather than only having a primary keyword, you can choose four or five secondary keywords. A secondary keyword is one that closely relates to the primary word or phrase, adding extra signals to the content for optimization.
Tools like Ubersuggest help you find secondary keywords for your content. It is a free keyword tool that provides a list of phrases as suggestions to follow a primary keyword. For example, if I enter “red apple,” it returns other terms that link to it, which may be relevant to my content.
Let’s stick with our red apple example. If you were scrolling through Facebook and saw the post, how likely would you be to share it with your friends and followers? The answer is highly unlikely. At a time where social presence is vital to the success of a brand, you need to create content that stands out and builds brand authority. The content that businesses post can make or break them very quickly in a fast-moving social ecosystem.
Just like website content, social media should follow the same journey of keyword research, to create highly relevant, shareable posts. Brands should start by ascertaining what their audience is searching for and create content to match. The keywords will flow naturally into the content, rather than forming content around keywords.
Just like website content, social media should follow the same journey of keyword research, to create highly relevant, shareable posts. Brands should start by ascertaining what their audience is searching for and create content to match. The keywords will flow naturally into the content, rather than forming content around keywords.
For example, if you are trying to sell red apples, your content subjects could be:
– Why red apples are essential for health and wellbeing
– How to find the best red apples in Florida
– Things to look out for when picking fruit
The content provides something that the reader will find informative and more likely to share.
Finally, search engines will penalize content that does not comply with best practices. Google can remove websites that rely on keyword stuffing from its search engine results. Web crawlers will spot pages that overuse a word or phrases, sending an alert to the algorithm, and demoting the site. Ultimately, keyword stuffing can lead to you losing out on new customers, as they won’t be able to find you.
Google prides itself on providing useful and quality results to its searchers. On that basis, they won’t want to present something that looks like spam or repetition. In the same way that you wouldn’t buy a product from a spam email, consumers won’t buy products from spam content.
Search engine optimization is a fundamental part of digital marketing. The key takeaway from this article is that there is no way to trick the system. The best way to rank highly and increase the volume of lead and conversions to your website is through high-quality, readable content. Keyword stuffing may have worked ten years ago, but the digital world is evolving quickly.
Modern-day consumers demand the best information. Use the methods and tools in this post to avoid keyword stuffing and get the most out of your content SEO firm to give you the best approach to writing blogs and content.
