SEOmoz member Michael Janik wrote to me last week and asked about how to optimize for multiple word order search phrases. I think it's an excellent topic, and one that we haven't covered well in the past.
The issue arises from keyword phrases that receive search queries in different formats, for example:
- Restaurant Reviews Seattle
- Reviews Seattle Restaurants
- Seattle Restaurant Reviews
Looking at the search results, each of these queries produces different ordering in the results. When this happens, an SEO campaign focused on getting traffic for each can be very frustrating. You're optimizing for one phrase configuration in the title and text, but others are getting queries and traffic that has the same intent match. What to do?
STEP ONE: Determine Relative Traffic Levels
This is best accomplished using Google AdWords' Traffic Estimator Tool, which allows for exact phrase match volume searches.
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You can see above that by using "quotes" around the phrase, I can request the traffic estimates for a precise phrase order. The tool then gives back some predictions:
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This data isn't terrific, but it's better than nothing, and by sorting by "search volume" I can see some visibility about order of popularity/demand (even though the green bars on the bottom two appear to be the same length).
Conceptually, you could also try the more basic Keyword Tool from AdWords, but you'll often get results like these:
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Bizarre, right? Although these tools should obviously be pulling data from the same source, they're directly contradicting one another. Intuition and experience tell me to trust the Traffic Estimator - "Seattle Restaurant Reviews" almost certainly has more searches each month than "Restaurant Reviews Seattle." Even the number of advertisers would appear to support this conclusion.
STEP TWO: Make the Higher Traffic Phrase Priority One
Although it may seem obvious, you should go after the highest traffic phrase ordering first. I say this even if you're thinking the competition is stiff and you might have a better shot with some of the less high demand orderings - those will come later.
You'll want to not only do great on-page optimization (which I'll get to in step 3), but also get a lot of good anchor text links pointing in with the right phrase. For this specific example, I'd be issuing web badges to all the restaurants we reviewed that point back to both our reviews page for their restaurant and an anchor text link below to the reviews page. It's the equivalent of businesses that put up the "people love us on Yelp" sticker decal in the window :-)
STEP THREE: Optimize on the Page (& Site) for the Different Phrase Ordering
For on-page optimization of something like this, I'd go with:
Title: Seattle Restaurant Reviews | Citymoz Reviews Seattle's Top Restaurants
URL: citymoz.org/reviews-seattle-restaurants (This is the toughest of the phrases to target with on-page copy and getting anchor text like that is going to be very difficult; hence, by using it in the URL, we can kill two birds with one stone and have another edge on the competition.)
Meta Description: Restaurant Reviews for Seattle, WA. Citymoz tackles deals, dining & decor in our Seattle restaurant review extravaganza – get the best (& worst) Seattle has to offer.
Headline (H1): Seattle Restaurant Reviews
Headline (H2): The Best & Worst Restaurant Reviews in Seattle
Use of Phrase: "Seattle Restaurant Reviews" at least 3-4X on the page, in sensible ways, where it makes sense for users (I hate reading anything that looks "SEO'd"). Probably 2-3X mentions of each "Reviews Seattle Restaurants" and "Restaurant Reviews Seattle"
Image/Graphic with Alt Text: Citymoz Reviews Seattle Restaurants
A final note on on-page optimization for this - I don't like to abuse internal anchor text. I've seen it have negative effects. I'd probably link to this page internally with "Seattle Restaurant Reviews" or, if my entire site was about reviews, maybe just "Seattle" to be organic and natural. I would, however, link to it from places like the blog or other articles with the more optimized anchor text, as it makes more sense in a non-navigational element.
STEP FOUR: Link Building with Alternate Anchor Text
This is one of the best ways to earn those top rankings for the different phrase orders. Chances are, most of the folks who currently rank well have very little external anchor text pointing to their pages with the less common anchor text variances, making this a prime area to be competitive. Even 5-10 instances of the anchor text from low PageRank (but indexed and relatively frequently crawled) pages will usually give you the boost you need to get into the top spots.
I'd love to get discussion started about other strategies you've used to help with the multiple word order phrases - it's one of the subtleties of SEO that rarely gets a public mention.
These are always the fun ones.
This is a good area to test as well to see what combinations not only boost the rankings, but also brings in the traffic.
To that end, assuming my second most important phrase couldn't stand on its own on another page, I might also try using my primary phrase alone in the title, then my key secondary phrase in the H1...monitor and measure.
If was still targeting the 2 phrases in the title like you have, I might try for stronger proximity and less word count first:
This gets us there in 7 instead of 8 words, but also decreases the reinforcement of "Reviews," so may have to test and see the impact.
But this way, the hyphen is mostly ignored, so it still gets us essentially the same phrasing.
I think it is also worth looking at a phrase usage though to see what overall patterns jump out. I'd still probably lead with the primary phrase in the title, but if I saw that a larger number of long tail phrases matched the secondary phrase, then again it might be worth leading with that and testing, especially if this was an ecommerce or other conversion type site. Why? Because those longer, detailed searches may be more indicative of a searcher who is deeper into the buying cycle and may be more likely to convert. At the end of the day, most retailers will be much more excited about higher revenue than higher traffic.
Rand, your choice on URL was interesting. In general I'd disagree for a couple reasons:
I think this is a weaker signal anyway, which is why the determining factor is probably more on site architecture and scalability. Then again, it may also be the one that could be ordered the most uniquely without question, lending to your thoughts -- food for thought.
Depending on the magnitude or complexity of the secondary phrase, or especially if the primary phrase is "less logical," then I think creative copywriting is something that optimizers have to keep in mind. Creatively dancing around punctuation, which will mostly be ignored by the search engines, allows a way to bring in challenging phrases without sounding like an idiot.
For example, assuming that "restaurant reviews seattle" was actually the leading search phrase, here are some approaches that might be incorporated, though maybe not all at once:
Title: Restaurant Reviews: Seattle restaurants reviewed by Citymoz
H1: Restaurant Reviews: Seattle, WA
Copy: Citymoz taps into everyday diners for its frank and honest restaurant reviews. Seattle is home to some of the finest restaurants and features and endless array of cuisine and dining experiences.
Of course the titles, headings and inbound anchor text carry much of the load, but body copy and creatively breaking phrases across punctuation is often overlooked.
Creatively dancing around punctuation, which will mostly be ignored by the search engines, allows a way to bring in challenging phrases without sounding like an idiot
that is a very inteligent way to go around the challenge of writing something which would sound stupid to the readers! Great Tip !
Bizarre, right? Although these tools should obviously be pulling data from the same source, they're directly contradicting one another.
Rand I am afraid I am going to have to correct you here - although my perception may be wrong too. But as I see it - the traffic estimater provides usage for the exact term - remember you can use quotes to specify the exact search string, which includes the priority of the word in the string.
The keyword tool actually provides broad match and not exact match results - which means that it diesnt care the order or layout of the string. It will show identical data for the traffic.
So although in my opinion your intuition is right, the above statment is incorrect. :)
Oh - "first"
Bizarre, right? Although these tools should obviously be pulling data from the same source, they're directly contradicting one another.
As Rishil just mentionned, you are trying those expression with broad match, so whatever order you write them you still should have the same amount of search volume.
However, the advertiser competition tells you that more people are bidding on the first expression's order. I would says that this is where you need to focus, and then try the phrase match, in order to get a good estimated search volume. This is also the expression you need to include for your KW in your page.
rishil - you're suggesting that phrase orders will never differ in the Keyword Tool? Does that mean the only way to get "phrase match" or "exact match" estimates is with Traffic Estimator? I could have sworn that the KW tool provides some level of differentiation in phrase ordering <runs off to check>
umm - actually there is a tab that you can specify the exact - or broad match data - its just that on yours you havent done that. It would show up in [] if its exact match.
However, I revise my original opinion, the keyword tool is better - if you get sensible data - it kind of lets you know which ones not to bother with - and suggests more stuff you may have missed out :)
I'd love to get discussion started about other strategies you've used to help with the multiple word order phrases - it's one of the subtleties of SEO that rarely gets a public mention
For Small Clients, I actually switch insite anchor text order around to target the situ - however I do use alternate title tags for separate pages that refer to a similar topic.
This is one of SEO issues we come across almost daily but surprizingly seldom discuss throughout blogs and forums.
I've personally seen this problem with each site I've dealt with - yet I wasn't able to make up any single solution so far. Usually I go with the easiest way to handle individual word ordering:
I choose one (grammatically / semantically) correct OR most searched one and optimize the whole page for it. After that I just sit and watch if other searches pop up or how I am doing and if I have to switch to another (less competitive) variant.
The hardest thing about that is that with large dynamic websites, analytics is a too difficult process and patterns not always work: while I manage to come up with some great solutiof for Seattle Reviews, things might be different with reviews in any other city.
I agree as we get clients who specify keywords such as the ones Rand talked about and like you, I always tell the client to choose the one that is grammatically correct unless there is a huge difference in traffic.
The reason I go with the correct version is that you want to be sure your content reads correctly to the client's readers.
Granted, the keywords that Rand chose were somewhat easier than the normal ones we get i.e. north carolina real estate and real estate north carolina. Just seems like it would be easier to target north carolina real estate.
Great post Rand!
Great topic for a post Rand!
So I haven't read through all the comments, but i wanted to note that content can be written in a way so that you cover many of the permutations of a keyword.
For instance, "Cha Taquria has been voted a top seattle restaurant. Reviews of our cusinse have been featured in..."
This accomplishes placing variations throughout content while maintaining readability, in this case "Seattle restaurant reviews" is used.
Hi Everyone,
This is a really interesting topic and thanks Rand you have let all of us to share our opinion.
This topic actually covers two basic things:
As I am always working on keyword research for many websites in different niches, I just thought to do a little practice work for the "Seattle Restaurant Reviews" terms and here is my strategy and my results.
STEP 1
Defining the theme of the page:
- reviews of restaurants in Seattle
This can be split to three main parts (just in case we are planning to build a whole bunch of review pages of the restaurants in all cities):
STEP 2
We can also name this "the first step of the keyword research". Since Google AdWords Keyword Tool provides more accurate estimated data, I
am using this more often than any other tool.
First of all I am adding the term "Seattle Restaurant Reviews" and check with Broad Match type (United States - English).
Here is the list of the terms which came out:
Searched term Apr. Av. Search Volume
seattle restaurant reviews 1300seattle restaurant review 720seattle restaurants reviews 140restaurant reviews in seattle 91seattle times restaurant reviews 91restaurant reviews seattle wa 58seattle restaurants review 58seattle times restaurant review 58seattle resturant reviews 28seattle pi restaurant reviews 22seattle weekly restaurant reviews 22restaurant reviews for seattle -1
STEP 3
This is the filtering process. In order to get more accurate data, I am checking the Exact Match type which will turn the following data:
Searched term Apr. Av. Search Volume
seattle restaurant reviews 480seattle restaurant review 140seattle times restaurant reviews 73restaurant reviews in seattle 46seattle restaurants reviews 36seattle times restaurant review 28restaurant reviews seattle wa 22seattle resturant reviews 16seattle weekly restaurant reviews 16seattle pi restaurant reviews 12restaurant reviews for seattle -1seattle restaurants review -1
STEP 4
In step 4 we are selecting our main primary keyword phrase, secondary and tertiary ones if appropriate. Of course, for all this we should
also check number of competitors using the intitle: operator. I will skip this one, as my letter is already too long :)
Let's assume competition is very high for the primary keyword phrase, but we have a long term plan to achieve results ie getting top ranked in SERPs.
Primary Keyword Phrase Appearing inseattle restaurant reviews FN, T, MD, H1, BC
FN=file name, T=Title, MD=Meta Description, H1= Heading 1, BC=Body Content
I agree with identity:
"Because the URLs are the hardest to change, I'd probably look for using my primary phrase first and foremost and figure out how to optimize for the secondary one some other way."
As the two main phrases would generate 2.5 times more traffic than the following ones alltogether, the Primary keyword phrase would be:
"seattle restaurant reviews"
and of course the filename: seattle-restaurant-reviews.[ext]
In the keyword list we can see a few terms with the "times" in it. At first it sounded unfamiliar for me as I am not a US citizen, so I just did a little research on Google.
Now it was more clear for me, and I personally would not include these "time" combination terms. Most probably would refer to another page with this anchored text and dedicate a
separate page for it (probably).
Of course our secondary term would be: seattle restaurant review
I WOULD PERSONALLY NOT BOTHER WITH KEYWORD ORDERS, ONLY FOR THE PRIMARY ONE.
I would rather have the other words included in Meta Description only if appropriate and making it sound natural. Most of the words found in these terms
can be included in the body content naturally by a professional SEO copywriter.
And you are right Rand:
" I'd run test campaigns in the paid search services and bid high enough to be on page 1 95%+ of the time, then take the impression counts."
Of course, all this is a strategy I am following, never did mixing of word orders ie different filenames and title tags, it just makes rank harder for the main keyword term.
This is an interesting topic, so any comments are welcome.:)
sherlock
URL: citymoz.org/reviews-seattle-restaurants (This is the toughest of the phrases to target with on-page copy and getting anchor text like that is going to be very difficult; hence, by using it in the URL, we can kill two birds with one stone and have another edge on the competition.)
Could we go with "reviews of seattle restaurants" in copy and effectively hit this keyord that way? "Of" is a stop word correct? Does that mean it is ignored or that it degrades the "quality" of the match of "reviews settle restaurants" to "reviews of seattle restaurants"?
Ward
Still confused
Why should "reviews seattle restaurants" be the toughest phrase?
Nr of searches for this phrase is very low compared to "seattle restaurant reviews" .
Any comment regarding this?
sherlock
He is calling it the toughest because it doesn't make sense in a sentence - it wouldn't be correct grammar. I.e. you couldn't use this keyphrase in your copy and maintain proper use of the English language.
That brings to mind other ideas I've had regarding grammatically incorrect phrases by using a comma inside them. Search bots pay no attention to commas I would think - or maybe the treat it like a stop word?
Example
"I love reading reviews, seattle restaurants have some real hidden gems among them and ... "
Technically that is probably not correct grammar but its not horrible and doesn't stick out like a sore thumb.
Thoughts anyone?
Ward
Well, its easy enough to get anchor text with that phrase you just specify it. As for on page copy what I have done in the past is add something to the effect of Related Content: Reviews Seattle Restaurants to a paragraph using the wording in various coherant sentences. It has worked and being that the search volume is low if you have decent links pointing back with that anchor text the page will rank well.
Couldn't you use something like..
Our website reviews seattle restaurants. That's right. People wine and dine and speak their thoughts. Then we put the reviews of seattle restaurants up for your review.
Good summary on how to handle this. It's nice to have it written out.
As far as figuring out which phrase order to really focus on, I use the keyword competition mixed with some serp evaluation for the innitial set up (things like url, internal linking, body copy. However, I find that after about a week in the listings (which for competative queries its still not "settled" to the top) I can cross reference traffic numbers with serp placements to get a more realistic idea of what phrases will return the most results when they hit top ranks. Using this it gives a good indicator of which way to lean the link building anchor text (although Im not advising de-deversification).
This has payed off in maximizing effords on an ecommerce site with MANY (title) + hyphenated/pluralized(at times) keywords.
As a side note, who ever set up the comment application to save our text if you accidentally close it is awesome!
I am so excited that you mentioned me. Thanks Rand. I love USA citizens!
Great topic.
I have two things to say:
A really very good post!
You Said,
Yes, it is very annoying. Back in 2007 I remember visiting one website, which was optimizing for the key phrase "New York Web Design Services". They have put these words so many times in so many places (Left Navigation Bar, about 15-20 spammy footer links, and probably 20 times in page copy) it was downright annoying. Their sentences were something like this,
A very good example of writing only for Search Engines and totally ignoring users. I know the key phrase is extremely competitive, but using it a hundred times in page copy is way too much. In fact I was so annoyed that I put it down in my "Never Do This..." journal.
I always write for search engines but in English, search engines are computers not humans.
You're right Pritam,
I still see it on many sites and it's almost 2012. Maybe it worked 5-7 years ago but now? Come on ;-)
We also have it on our "never do" list.
Rand has mentioned this before, but one other thing you could do to get your chosen phrases on the page without it looking spammy is to make a box on on the left or right titled 'Did You Mean?' or 'Similar Search Phrases:'. Inside it, simply list the re-ordered phrases you want to highlight.
Thanks for bringing that up Rand.
As far as I understand, the data provided by Google Adwords Traffic Estimator (GATE) is related to paid search, which varies in comparison to organic results. Being said that, the traffic driven by organic search tends to be more than those estimates by X number of times in my experience.
For low volume search keywords, GATE tends to obfuscate the results. I’ve seen that especially for Spanish keywords that showed zero traffic in GATE, when in reality there was traffic above 1k visits per month. Don’t you think Google shows more precise data for high volume search keywords that also tend to have higher bids?
Depending on the keyword research tool, estimates will present an abysmal difference for a keyword phrase. Let’s say, Keyword Discovery, Word Tracker and GATE show different results for the keyword phrases you mentioned in your example. If they are high volume searches, then most likely I’ll go with GATE/WT combo, but what to choose for low volume searches?
This is where the overall understanding of the web comes in place, as suggested by Aaron Wall in a similar discussion.
Moreover, these topics apply more than anything to mutliple word search phrases and the order of relevancy the word order have in the rankings.
I would also consider additional keywords which would help the Search Engines ascertain the theme of your page. You may consider researching which Chef works in the restaurants you are writting about. This would help the SEs ascertain your page IS about resturants.
This much is true:
LSI Keywords are paramount to staying a step ahead of your competition and can make search engines put you in the Front Page, and thus get you tons of unique visitors.LSI = RELEVANCY = RANKINGSTo sum up LSI Keywords are important because:
So understand this, major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN try to ascertain keyword "kinship" while rating pages for a give term. The articles with themed phrases rank higher even if those pages are not tightly optimized for your target keyword.Pages that are optimized around one phrase tend to rank lower that one would expect (sometimes even being filtered out for over optimization). Yet, pages that are optimized for a smorgasbord of related keywords tend to have more stable rankings for the primary keyword and rank for a variety or related keywords as well.
Hello,
Just wanted to introduce ourself to the community. There is a lot of useful and interesting discussions on this site. Could someone tell me how long it would take to get a site optimized to be number one for a certin key word?
I totally agree. Target the main keyword phrase (with the most traffic) and grammatically correct and don't worry much about permutations. Google is smart enough to rank you well on these if you're worth it.
Hi Rand, thank you for this excellent article. I am glad to be part of the MOZ community as a user and reader. It's helpful. The subject in this page is essential, so, would you recommend exactly the same strategy 8 years later and after all the refinements Google algos have received? And what if these keywords variant had all the same search volume, would you create more than one page? How would it be different? Thank you.
But in the above,
Headline (H2): The Best & Worst Restaurant Reviews in Seattle
H2 contains, in and The which are stop words. Doesn't this effect ranking?
What about if you're trying to market your service and you're not from a metro area, but not exactly from out in the sticks.
Bottom line if you're offering a service and there isn't much data to go by in your local search area, can you still gain some traffic and convert?
https://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6902379270204769711
Using a mixture of keywords can extremely benefit your website.
The use of unique word combinations can greatly increase your chances of becoming page rank #1 on Google. This article is very informative and addresses the key elements of search engine optimisation. As a designer myself, I feel that GoogleAdwords can help determine which keyword/phrase is most effective as it sources all of its information from the search engines itself.
Tip: Try using areas within your keywords.
Nice article Rand.
I think during optimization best practise is choosing best logically true keywords like seattle restaurant reviews and optimizing it, not spammy looking phrases like restaurant reviews seattle. Because most of traffic will come from these keywords.
But of course who doesnt want loosing their other ordered keyword searching costumers, can use your steps.
I also try to vary the order of the internal link anchor texts for 2-and-3-word key phrases on different pages to cover multiple orders. We rank well for these phrases in any order but I don't know if it is down to this or other on/off page factors.
Identity makes an excellent point on looking to seperate your secondary phrase to another page. This particular case seems to be an all or nothing proposition with one getting lots of searches and the others having negligible searchs. At what point do you decide to break out the content into two seperate pages that each stand strong for their specific phrasing? Then how do you make the content unique enough to not end up as an "omitted result".
I would agree with Identity on the URL rewrites. Looking at the local search pattern to determin what is the optimum pattern make the most sense. When I search for New York will I search New York, New York (state), NYC, or just the city, or maybe even just the burrough? Being consistent in your URL structure while also being optimized can be challenging.
Excellent article Mr. Randfish. I do have a question though. Which keyword tool do you consider the most accurate and which ones do you use the most for your keyword research?
I don't actually trust any one individual tool when doing client work. I take the estimate numbers from Google, MSN, Wordtracker, KWDiscovery and look for general agreement vs. discord. I don't think any of them provides a truly accurate picture of demand, but together, they do a relatively good job of pointing you in the direction of what's more popular vs. less popular (which is really all you need to know for the SEO process). If you want to get true volume estimations, I'd run test campaigns in the paid search services and bid high enough to be on page 1 95%+ of the time, then take the impression counts.
i treat the numbers similarly but i find myself continually having to answer client’s questions about the keyword research and exact numbers. it's always so hard to get them to understand that none of the tools give real numbers and should only be used to determine general popularity of one term over another. they just don't get it. i'll try explaining it like you did. :)
Rand hit this one on the head. Especially when fine tuning at a category or page level, it is beneficial to at least take a peek at a couple other sources. They all get data from different sources, may be suspect to some kind of skewing, etc.
In the end, what you are looking for is the relation between terms and how different phrases compare to one another. Is phrase X searched for 2 or 7 times more than phrase Z?
Something that I think is also often overlooked is what results come up for searches to begin with. Are the overall results on target and relevant? If they aren't, then does that mean we want to target a phrase because it may mean that we'll drive high numbers of relevant traffic because we are the only listing of relevance, or it really isn't as relevant to our topic as we thought compared to something else, so no one else is optimizing for it or the engines have dampened those results because they always appeared to be off target and a poor user experience?
This is extremely similar to how I attack multiple, but similar, phrases.
I tried something similar... with mix results. It has a lot to do with size of the competition for that term.
I came up with the "perfect" (at least what I considered perfect) combo and balance between highly searched terms and their variations. But it did not work very well for all scenarios.
I could not pull this off for all clients and all keywords...
In a very competitive arena, when I get to top spots it is usually by a nose.
In these situations I simply cannot afford to let go of an H4 tag in order to cover a variation term with the risk of loosing a good placement on the best keyword(s)
I dunno; in my recent experience, Google has been getting smarter about figuring this stuff out.
I have a site about fireworks displays in the state of michigan. This was my top month, as you can imagine, so it gave me a perfect way to see what you're talking about in action.
In my log files, I saw tons of strings like
michigan fireworks
fireworks michigan
fireworks in mich
michigan fireworks displays
fireworks displays mi
fire work mi
and so on. Hundreds of terms like that, including longer strings with city names as well. Pretty much all of them returned my site at the top - the only place it would fall off would be some cities with three or more words in the name. I'd love to take credit for it, but it's nothing I did - it just seems to happen that way.
The site's been around for a while, but I didn't get anywhere near as many of these alternate strings in previous years.
OK, I'm about to release the most TOP secret SEO tip EVER... wait, maybe I should save this for the SEOmoz seminar coming up here in August with the nature of it's advanced content.
This is where you can not take for granted that the ANCIENT, long time discounted, most important meta tag ever has an important role.
You guessed it! The keyword meta tag. Well, not the most important meta tag, but still useful IMO.
19/20 top SEO experts claim it's useless and completely ignored. Why give away all your keyword research for a useless meta tag?
I'll tell you why! Reinforcing keyword relationships throughout your website for situations just such as this. I know, you're all ROFL thinking that this is completely absurd and nonsense. Believe it or not we have continuously used this technique on most of our 48 clients' websites with great success, including our own web properties.
Obviously, the keyword tag alone won't do much in any sort of competitive environment. Varying the keyword relationship throughout your on page SEO is essential as many have stated such as alt text, meta description, internal anchor text, body content, strong and bold content, h1, h2, etc.
Also, diversify your inbound link anchor text when link building. This looks more natural anyway.
Funny you chose tihs subject because I have just been trying to understand why I have "financial background" on a page once and it comes up on top in a search. Good info.