A lot of things have changed over the years in regards to how a website should get organic or unpaid search placement particularly on Google. One of the tactics that SEO’s are having the hardest time letting go of is keyword density.
I have to say that in my own personal experience, this used to be a very usable approach and one that really bumped a website up in the organic results – but no longer! In fact, have too heavy of a keyword density on your page and you may now actually trigger a Google penalty for keyword stuffing.
If you have not updated your website content in the last two years and you have seen your search placement drop, I would recommend that you have a careful review done of your page content. You may actually need to be proactively revising the content to remove instances of keywords that you had previously added.
We typically would strive for about a 7% keyword density on the home page of a website, but now if you mention the keyword phrases you are targeting more than three times in your content you may be getting yourself in trouble.
Here are a few important thoughts I’d like to share on this topic:
1. Don’t build keyword density in your pages at this point in time.
2. If you previously have built up keyword density, now’s the time to start removing density proactively.
3. It’s time to review the length of your pages. If you have to scroll more than once to read page content your page is too long and needs to be made more concise. The key to understand here is that mentioning a phrase three times in a page of 250 to 300 words of content is way different than mentioning a phrase three times in a page of 1,200 words. Although we are not talking keyword density per say, pages with too much content will be trying to cover too many topics and that length now may actually work against you both in not being a narrow enough focus and being too long for mobile device use.
4. So now big concerns are keyword density, page content topics, AND page length!
If you need real help on your website content, I encourage you to review our services to see how consulting with us will bring clarity to a change in approach for your website and content creation strategy.