Does anyone have any experience in trying to rank for terms that are 100% similar in meaning but different words?
-
I will be using street signs and road signs as an example to make it clearer.
We previously only targeted street signs and then we realized that there is another keyword – road signs - that has twice as much traffic (more competitive too). Now we are trying to incorporate both in our onsite SEO.
If you had a similar case - how did you work with this? Did incorporating the keyword help rankings go up for that word? Does adding another keyword to the mix make the rankings go down for the keyword you previously ranked for?
-
Thanks for the response, Dana. I feel like if I'm more specific I will be a lot more clear. We are an e commerce site that sells trash bags, recycling bags, contractor bags etc. When the site was built (7 years ago) the entire site used the word "garbage bags". Now we are trying to incorporate the word "trash bag" but so far the rankings for trash bags and garbage bags are dropping lower and lower...
Do you think that's because we are targeting more keywords and it's causing a drop in our original rankings?
-
Hi Rachel,
I thought this was a great question. I do SEO for a niche site that runs into this all of the time. The site sells religious products. Ss you might imagine, there are Catholic church products, Protestant church products and non-denominational church products and everything in between. Each of these may have a completely different name for exactly the same item. For example, a mainline Protestant church will call a communion wafer a "wafer" while the Catholic church often refers to them as "hosts." In America we refer to the part of a church service where people break bread together and share wine or juice, Communion, but it's also referred to as the Eucharist in Catholica, Episcopal and Lutheran churches.
You can see this opens up a huge number of possibilities. Some searched more than other. I think it's a matter of having such intimate knowledge of your customers and product lines that you know exactly when to use which variations of the keywords. In certain situations they make perfect sense, but use the wrong combination of keywords with the wrong product, and you might succeed in getting search but could end up severely alienating your potential customers once they get to your site.
Great question!
Dana
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
No difference anymore between 301 and 302
According to http://searchengineland.com/google-no-pagerank-dilution-using-301-302-30x-redirects-anymore-254608 What do you think?
On-Page Optimization | | nans0 -
2 Similar Pages
Hello, I have two very similar pages. The first page is an apartment rental page with a map, rental listings and some neighborhood data below. The neighborhood data includes useful info about the area with photos, text about the area, crime rates, avg. rental rates, etc. The second page is a neighbourhood guide that includes virtually the same data as the rental page, but in longer form ie. more photos, more text, etc. I want the rental page to rank, while ranking the neighborhood page is not important as it would be used more for link bait. But since the information on the two pages is the same, I don't want them to compete with each other. I'm thinking of putting a cannonical tag on the neighborhood page pointing back to the rental page. Is that the correct thing to do in this instance? Thanks for your help. J
On-Page Optimization | | torontojon0 -
Do Search Engines Try To Follow Phone Number Links
Any SEO thoughts on using rel="nofollow" when inserting a link to a phone number? To make a phone number click to call we use (555) 555-1234 Wondering if search engines are trying to follow that link or if this is standard and not to worry. Any thoughts on if I should add rel="nofollow" to these or does it not matter? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Lions-Pro0 -
Lost all comments on our blog...will it hurt rankings?
We recently installed Facebook comments into our blog and now we lost all of our old comments. Does this have any affect on SEO? Will this hurt our rankings? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | TMI.com0 -
Does a phone number in the title tag hurt your rankings in SERP?
Hi Mozzers, One of my client is a carpet cleaner and I was wondering if adding a phone number into the title tags would hurt our rankings . I am asking because the client has mentioned it and that we do have some space to add a phone number into the tag. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Anyone done SEO with on-page ONLY?
I read this blog post: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/let-onpage-optimization-change-your-life The author claims they have increased the visitors 50 fold doing on-page seo ONLY. So they just added content, and optimized the site structure. Anyone have seen similar results? Not outreach whatsoever, just adding content to site. Technically, this should be true, article directories has tons of visitors and they were giving out links.
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseseo0 -
Has anyone had experience with the Wix platform and it's SEO qualities?
Wix offers an inexpensive, user friendly platform for building websites. Most of the site is flash, but Wix claims to be SEO friendly. I'm all ears for your feedback and experience with Wix.
On-Page Optimization | | ksracer0 -
Does anyone have any experience with using Altruik for optimizing a retail site?
Greetings - can anyone offer an opinion on the services of http://www.Altruik.com/? They claim to be able to effectively optimize the deep pages of online retailers. I welcome any and all feedback! Eric
On-Page Optimization | | Ericc220