Your chosen keywords and phrases are instrumental to your SEO ranking. Did you know, 69.7% of search queries entered by users on Google contain four words or more.
A crucial element of on-page SEO is to ensure you have a good keyword density percentage. Keyword density, also known as keyword frequency, is a component of keyword optimisation and refers to the number of times your keyword is mentioned in your specific webpage. For example, if you use your keyword 10 times and your entire word count of your post is 1000, you keyword density would be 1%. Let’s take a look at the maths below so you can work out your keyword density.
10 (your keyword count) ÷ 1000 (your total word count) = 0.001 (your keyword density as a decimal)
Then you want to turn the decimal into a percentage by multiplying the decimal by 100. 0.001 (keyword density decimal) X 100 = 1%
So now you know how to calculate your SEO keyword density, what should be your percentage aim? Most SEO experts agree the sweet spot for keyword density percentage is between 1 – 2%. So between 1-2 keyword per 100 words. This can seem like a challenge so let’s look at some tips below to incorporate more keywords into your webpage.1. Choose your Keyword:
First step is to identify your dominant keyword or two. Take a moment to think about your product or service. What would you type into Google to find this? What’s the first few keywords that pop into your head? Narrow down these keywords to one or two, do they accurately and relevantly sum up what you’re trying to sell? Speak to your friends and family, ask them what keywords they would search if they wanted your product or service.2. Keyword Synonyms:
Spend some time coming up with synonyms for your keyword. Google’s algorithm recognises similar words to your keyword and associate these synonyms with your keyword thereby helping to increase your keyword density. Don’t forget to include keyword stemming such as adding prefixes, suffixes, and pluralisation of your keyword. These all give some variety to the reader to keep your webpage captivating, engaging, and authentic whilst also increasing keyword density. Top Tip: Search your keyword into Google, scroll to the bottom of Google’s SERP to find the “searches related to” section. You’ve just discovered the most searched synonyms to your keyword – use these wisely!3. Keywords in Meta Tags and Descriptions:
Once you drafted your webpage, check through the url, tags, summaries, descriptions, taglines. All your metadata must match your keyword theme. Keyword density is evidently important for your content, but don’t forget to include keywords in your metadata as these all help to gain user click-through from SERP and land your user onto the relevant and correct page they are looking for.4. Keywords in Titles and Subheadings:
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, your keyword absolutely must be in the title of the page and subheadings. Easy to forget if you get carried away with your content, keeping the keyword in the title is instrumental for your page to rank high on Google’s SERP. In fact, 36% of SEO experts think the headline/title tag is the most important SEO element.SEO Keyword density stuffing
You now know how to optimise your keywords by meeting the optimal keyword density percentage in your webpage. Over simplified, it’s easy to correlate more keyword = better SEO visibility. However, this is not always the case. When keywords and put into a webpage excessively, this is known as keyword stuffing, and can get your website penalised or even taken down by Google.
Keyword density is an element of SEO. After all, if your keywords are hardly on your page, why would a user, or Google, believe it is relevant?
Unsurprisingly, the first 5 organic results in the SERPs account for 67.6% of all clicks.
Boost your user engagement and increase your total sales by utilising your best keywords with a good keyword density percentage on each of your webpages.
In turn, this will all help to boost your ranking on Google’s SERP, generate more customers, and build up your business.
Without the proper knowledge on SEO, it can feel like a catch-22 situation, but with the tips and tricks above, you should be able to ride ahead of the wave of millions of sites on Google by increasing your SEO keyword density.