Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I exclude prepositions in tracked keywords of moz analytics?
-
I'm new to Moz. Just set up my trial campaign, and it had suggested many keywords. Many of the phrases that were suggested do not contain prepositions.
For example, instead of something like "sporting good stores in Chicago" it suggested "sporting good stores Chicago"
Today, I looked at the on-page optimization suggestions, which are (of course) suggesting that I remove prepositions from my page to rank well.
Well, as you know, that is unnatural to the reader. But I suspect people are searching in higher volume, leaving the prepositions out. I know that if I were to search for a sporting goods store in Chicago, I would probably leave out "in."
What should I do? Should I remove all the suggested keywords, and make them readable (which people are less like using in their search?) Do I go back to all my pages and try to optimize it for a keyword that is natural, but does not include a preposition (such as Chicago sporting goods stores) or should I be doing something else?
-
I agree with Joey. Most prepositions are stop words, so they may carry less weight in the search algorithm. That's not to say they aren't important. I just searched "sporting goods stores in Atlanta" and "sporting goods stores Atlanta" and got very slightly different results for each.
The on page optimization suggestions are just suggestions to point you in the right direction based on keywords you entered into the tool. You should never sacrifice usability for your readers in order to satisfy an SEO tool. The tool is just a starting point.
-
I would say let your keyword research do the talking. The tried and true method is to use your "seed" keywords, gather all the suggestions you can, measure which keywords hold the most value for you, and look for the opportunities. If one of your best opportunities has prepositions in it, there is your answer. I'm willing to bet you'll find valuable keywords that use them.
My observation is they don't carry much weight, but with voice searching on mobile, searches can be much more "conversational" when spoken into Siri or Google voice search. We tend to keep things short when we have to type it in, right? There is also Google's Hummingbird update, semantic search and natural language processing. WordStream did a great blog on this right after Google's Hummingbird update. I highly recommend you read the whole article. Here's an especially relevant quote:
"You only have to look at how accurate Google Now has become since its introduction to see that natural language processing is going to remain a major part of Google’s plans for search."
Overall, I'd use the prepositions. Natural language is important, sounds better, and the data is probably there suggesting you should keep it.
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
-
Unsolved Why is my website Backlinks Lower on Moz than on SEMRush?
Hi, I'm new to Moz and I am trying to find out why my website Birmingham Roofers has 7 backlinks on Moz it has 21 on SEMRush. However, I read somewhere online in one of your blog post that it crawls in real time.
Moz Bar | Nov 2, 2023, 5:39 PM | ajegunle1 -
How do you use Moz to research related topics?
Like most of the folks here I'm a pretty big fan of the content that comes out through Whiteboard Fridays, and I try to apply the things I learn, but one of the WBF videos that I'm following along with does not do a stellar job of detailing execution using Moz KW Explorer. https://moz.com/blog/related-topics-in-seo-whiteboard-friday Now granted, this came out in 2016, but I still feel the core principle and strategy results in a higher quality piece of content and is still relevant to discovering and understanding searcher task completion requirements, and drafting content that fulfills those requirements. Towards the end Rand sort of mentions that you'll be able to do this with KW explorer, but I'm not really seeing the functionality. The steps I followed were to enter in the keyword in kw explorer, went to keyword suggestions, and selected "based on closely related topics" and ran it, but received no suggestions - came up blank. I then selected "based on broadly related topics" and the same thing happened. I tried this out with the keyword r22, keeping it very broad to start but that didn't seem to work. So what do you all do to perform this sort of research within Moz? Or do you even feel it's relevant in today's Rank Brain driven world?
Moz Bar | May 24, 2018, 7:04 PM | brettmandoes0 -
Search volume discrepancies between keyword tools
I'm feeling like I'm basing all my research time on tools that I cannot necessarily trust. Between Google keyword planner, Keywords everywhere chrome extension, and Moz keyword explorer, I'm getting wildly different results on 2 simple keywords related to colleges with baking & pastry arts degrees. "baking college", "baking colleges" So Keyword planner won't give me any search volume for those 2 words, I don't even see them in the results. Instead, it decides I really meant "baker college" which has 33,100 global searches. I tried telling it use only closely related terms, but it keeps giving me "baker college" and refuses to show me the terms I asked for. Stubbornly useless. Keywords everywhere says both of these keywords bring in 33,100 searches. It does not tell me those searches were for "baker college." Totally misleading. Moz keyword explorer says baking college as 0-10 volume, baking colleges has 101-200 volume. So at least it's not trying to give me "baker college" numbers. Perhaps I can trust this, but it's not convenient to upload hundreds of various keywords at a time to pull the volume numbers like I do with the other tools. With Keyword planner making assumptions and grouping unrelated terms together, and Keywords everywhere using those numbers without pointing out the assumptions, I feel like I can't trust anything without taking time to dig into the discrepancies, which is impossible with hundreds of keywords. Do you know of any good search volume tools that don't force or hide assumptions? Thanks.
Moz Bar | Feb 2, 2018, 7:16 PM | JannetteP1 -
Moz tool bar shows "No markup schema" in webpage despites having proper schema code in page.
We have proper markup schema installed in webpage (validated using data structure tool by google) but moz tool bar says "Schema.org not found on this page." What should be the problem ?
Moz Bar | Aug 31, 2020, 1:12 PM | NortonSupportSEO1 -
Moz crawler only crawls one page?!
Hello there, I'm using Moz for a while and I'm very pleased with the tool and community. But for the first time I encountered a problem. We are trying to run a crawler for a client's website but only one page (only the homepage) was crawled. We tried to do a test on a more detailed level (maybe there is something wrong with the homepage). My campaign test's crawl came back for the Producten folder (level deeper than homepage), and it was also only a 1 page crawl with a 200 status. I did look at the robots.txt file now, and it is very restrictive, but there is nothing that I can clearly see that would explain why the crawl isn't working. Hopefully someone can point us at the right direction. Thanks in advance, Jeremy
Moz Bar | Sep 4, 2015, 2:18 PM | mediaxplain.nl0 -
I want to uninstall the Moz SEO toolbar. How do I do this?
I installed the Moz toolbar and I don't understand it and it covers up important parts of websites and makes them inaccessible. I want to get it off my computer. I installed it in chrome. How do I get it off?
Moz Bar | Sep 29, 2014, 6:28 PM | Bonnie761 -
Weird back link showed in moz crawl
Some time ago somebody from this site: http://dianibeach.com created a weird link to our site which had on the end db. Later we have realized that the link was coming from every footer on each page. I believe that the back links from footer does not have realy value and even the more of them the less value. We have asked the guy to remove that links as I thought it might harm our site more then help. Now I I was very surprised to find this link in moz crawl error as second top page on our site in current index??? Can somebody explain how is this possible?? The most ridiculous thing is that when I click on that link it realy opens our site! How is that possible, what is it? This is the link: http://villasdiani.com/?db Thank you very much for any help with this
Moz Bar | Oct 16, 2013, 1:36 PM | Rebeca10 -
How do you stop Moz crawling a page?
Hello, I have a contact form which generates thousands of duplicate crawl errors. I'm going to use to block Google indexing these pages. Will this also block MOZ from crawling these pages and displaying the error? Thanks!
Moz Bar | Nov 28, 2016, 7:23 PM | Seaward-Group0