As content marketers looking to rank in search, keyword targeting is our holy grail. Because the more discoverable your content is, the more business growth it can drive. But using keywords correctly in your content is an art in itself. If you get it wrong, your SEO strategy could backfire and cause your search rankings to shoot down rather than up. As a result, Google warns copywriters and web developers against using irrelevant keywords and keyword stuffing.

What is keyword stuffing?

According to Google, keyword stuffing is the practice of loading your content with lots of keywords in order to manipulate search engines and climb up the search engine results pages. Often these keywords don’t blend well with the content and can seem out of place. They may not even be very relevant to the context of the article or the audience’s search intent. As a result, keyword stuffing leads to a negative experience for the audience, which in turn causes your search rankings to drop.

But often keyword stuffing can be unintentional. For example, if you know that a certain word or phrase is essential to your content, you end up over-optimizing it. However, in the eyes of search engines and your audience, that is also keyword stuffing.

What is good keyword density?

When it comes to setting a keyword frequency for your content, there is no hard and fast rule. Every marketer has their preferences in this regard. But you’ll often hear SEO experts say that the optimal keyword density is 1 to 2 keywords per 100 words of content. That makes 1% to 2% an ideal density for your SEO keywords.

It’s also important to remember that while trying to avoid SEO keyword stuffing, you may end up underutilizing certain keywords. This can also affect search engine optimization. If you don’t have enough or in the right places for a target keyword, e.g. B. the meta tags, your content will not rank for it.

While keyword stuffing issues can lead to poor audience experiences, the lack of keywords can also lead to missed opportunities and dragging your content down.

So how do you avoid keyword stuffing and still ensure optimal, valuable keyword usage? Here are a few tips and tools that can help.

How to avoid keyword stuffing?

1. Choose a primary keyword and some important secondary keywords

Successful SEO and optimal keyword usage start with keyword research. First, it’s important to identify the right keywords for your content. If you use a keyword research tool for your topic, you will be faced with hundreds of related search terms. But not all are relevant or important. If you choose too many keywords, you will unknowingly fill your content with irrelevant terms and phrases that add no value in terms of SEO or quality.

The best approach is to identify a primary keyword you want to rank for and a few other secondary keywords related to the topic. The secondary keywords should also match the target audience’s search intent and the context of your article or copy.

A single primary keyword also makes it easier for your content to rank since you aren’t competing on too many fronts. In addition, it makes it easier for search engine crawlers to understand your content.

2. Find synonyms and related searches

Another great way to avoid keyword stuffing in your content is to look for synonyms for your target keywords. When a user searches Google for the information you shared, they don’t all have to use the exact search term. Instead, there can be more than one term with the same meaning that they could use. Find out what they are and distribute them well in your content. You can also identify some Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. These are terms related to the primary keyword and help the search engines understand that they are all pointing to the same topic.

You can also get inspiration from the “People Also Ask” or “Related Searches” section of Google, which shows other relevant searches from users. For example, using synonyms or related long-tail keywords can avoid over-optimizing for the same keyword. Also, nearly 50% of searches are typically 4 words or more, so long-tail keywords can actually help improve your content’s discoverability.

3. Increase the length of your content

If you still feel like your content is too keyword-heavy, try writing longer, more valuable content for your business blog. Increasing the word count allows you to easily space out the keywords without making them look forced. Additionally, you have more freedom to use your target keywords without worrying about how and where to place them.

Not only that, longer content has other SEO benefits as well. For example, SEO experts believe that Google prefers content that is 2000 words or more in length. Additionally, long-form content is considered more authoritative as it allows you to share more detailed information and has the potential to drive more traffic to your site. However, make sure that the content you add is genuinely valuable to your audience and isn’t just there to increase word count. Again, this requires some careful research.

4. Use keyword tools that show keyword count or density

Creating content without the right tools to support it is a challenge. Finding the right tools to help you create and optimize content can be a great way to avoid keyword stuffing. Here are a few tools you should try.

teller

Narrato is a content workflow platform that serves as an all-in-one solution for planning, creating, optimizing and publishing content. It has various tools and features like a grammar and readability checker and an AI writing assistant for different use cases, content collaboration features like comments and messages, content calendar, custom workflows and more.

But the one feature that can be particularly helpful with keyword optimization is the SEO content briefing generator on Narrato. You can automatically generate SEO content briefs by typing in your search term or topic. Then, within a few seconds, the tool will give you all relevant keyword suggestions with count, topics/questions to be covered, references and competitor links, ideal word count and other SEO parameters. The best part is that when you start writing your article in the content editor, the keyword counts will automatically update to show how many times they’ve been used.

This can be a great way to optimize your content as you write it without using keyword stuffing from the start.

Semrush On-Page SEO Tool

Semrush is a popular platform among content marketers for its complete suite of SEO tools. But a useful tool against keyword stuffing is the on-page SEO checker. Among many other insights, this SEO audit tool also gives you data on keyword usage on a specific page/URL.

You can also compare your keyword density to that of a competitor’s site to better inform your SEO strategy.

SEOquake

SEOquake is an SEO toolbox that helps you with on-page analysis to determine the performance of your website. The keyword analysis feature on this platform gives you a detailed report of all keywords used on the page, including keyword density, notoriety, repeats and more.

It’s available as a Google Chrome add-on that you can install to quickly perform SEO audits on your website.

SEO Review Tools – Keyword Density Checker

SEO Review Tools’ Keyword Density Checker is a free tool that’s extremely simple. All you have to do is enter your URL and do a verification. It gives you a high-level view of the keyword density on your page. While it doesn’t provide too much detailed information about your page’s SEO performance, it does the job in terms of keyword frequency. It also shows keyword density for combinations of one, two, and three word phrases.

5. Add target keywords to essential page elements

Instead of stuffing your content with the primary keyword, spread it out across the page including the other important elements. For example, use the primary keyword in the meta tags on the page – that is, the meta title and meta description. Also, add the primary keyword to the alt tags of your images.

It’s a good idea to always add the main keyword to your content’s title, introduction and conclusion, and subheadings. This would give you more visibility instead of cluttering the content with it.

6. Write for a real audience instead of search engines

This is probably the easiest but also the most challenging part of creating SEO content. All you have to do is remember that you are writing the content for people. So you need to share all the information in an easy to read format with an effortless flow for a human reader to enjoy reading it.

But it’s also extremely challenging because you know that a human reader will only find your content if it appears in the search results for the relevant search term. Hence the SEO obsession among content marketers.

As difficult as it may be, it’s not impossible to deliver value while maintaining search engine rankings. Just be a little vigilant about what and how you write. Make sure the sentences flow well. The best way to ensure this is to read your content thoroughly after you’ve written it. Look at it from a reader’s perspective and see how it all fits together. Eliminate or replace anything that looks out of place, improve on what could be better, and the end product is sure to be of superb quality.

Summarize

Creating content is hard work. But small mistakes like keyword stuffing can neutralize all the effort you put into ranking in search engines and winning the heart of your audience. Knowing how to use keywords tactfully and using the right tools to help you do so can save you from the penalties of spammy, keyword-stuffed content. So try these tips and tools the next time you create content for your website and see how much easier it gets.

Author’s bio: Neelam Goswami is a content specialist at a renowned content writing service – Godot Media. She has written for several renowned digital marketing blogs including Jeff Bullas, Neal Schaffer and others.