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Thanks Miriam

Thanks Ian - yes it seems a real struggle to deal with the difference between which search phrases have the most searches and which search phrases sound right in the context of a web page.

Thanks Jared

Thanks Ben - I'll be sure to check those out

Thanks Micah

Actually [painter new york] has an exact search volume of 140 whereas [new york painter] only has 22...

Thanks Ben - so you are saying that to target the difficult phrase 'painter new york' organically, I could optimise the page for 'new york painter' and that would work just as well.

Thanks Micah but this was just a made up example - it's the general point that I'm after - apologies for the confusion

Hi,

This may be a stupid question but...

Google ignores short/common words like 'in', so if I optimize a page for 'painter in new york' will it rank just as well for 'painter new york'?

In Google's keyword tool, exact match gives [painter new york] 140 searches per month but [painter in new york] gets < 10.

However, it is much more difficult to write 'painter new york' naturally into body copy than it is 'painter in new york'.

So what do I do?

Thanks

Thanks David - but wouldn't a home page or landing page with only 100 words on it fall foul of Google's Panda/Penguin changes - and look like thin content - and thus rank lower than it could do if it had more content?

The copywriter is saying that people don't want lots of text on these pages (as opposed to longer blog posts & informational pages) and that too much text could actually frighten people off reading and thus harm conversion.

So with sometimes 10 times more searches happening for the search phrase without the 'in' - then surely I should be using that version in the page?

Thanks Marko.

If 'in' is a stop word and ignored by Google, then why does Google's keyword tool give such different exact results for [builders manchester] and [builders in manchester]?

I'm very much interested in this question as well.

Someone told me that small words such as 'in' are stop words and as such ignored by Google and that [painters texas] would be the same as [painters in texas].

But in that case, why does Google's keyword tool give such different exact results for these 2 phrases?

Anyone else got any input on this?

Thanks

Hi,

I have employed a copywriter to write copy for client's new site and I need to make sure that I'm going to get SEO friendly copy. The client is a high end builder. I have a couple of questions...

1. At the moment, she is intending to keep the copy really brief for humans as the intention is just to get people to call up and book an introductory appointment and she believes that potential clients won't want to read a lot of text - just enough to get them to call. She is currently suggesting only 100 words per page (including the home page) but this seems really low to me - is this going to harm search rankings? What's the minimum number of words per page that I should ask for?

2. Doing keyword research using the Google keyword tool shows that the most popular keywords are for things like 'builders manchester' (i.e. service in plural followed by location). However, these phrases are quite difficult to write for. She wants to leave these phrases to be photo captions and then use much easier phrases such as 'builders in manchester' in the rest of the copy. She says that Google ingnores small words like 'in' so 'builders in manchester' will actually count as 'builders manchester'. Is this true? For the location I am targeting, the equivalent of 'builders in manchester' gets many less searches than 'builders manchester' according to Google's keyword tool set to exact match.

Are the recent Panda/Penguin updates likely to have changed the answers to the above questions (especially question 1)?

Thanks in advance for your help