Your keywords are great, but are they relevant?

Since Google cornered the market on everything to do with searching the web, the use and selection of keywords has been the lifeblood of SEO. Even now, despite the many different factors involved in grading and ranking websites, the usage of keywords is still at the forefront of the concept process.

So let’s take into account a situation where you’ve gone to great lengths to get the juiciest, most searched for keywords. You’ve taken great care to avoid stuffing them into the content, and you’ve even spread them throughout the page so that the copy doesn’t become lopsided. All that time and effort, and you’re still struggling to get your website up the SERPs.

Keyword relevancy. It’s the name of why it didn’t work. In this article, we’re going to provide information and a few examples on how to get your keywords working for you, and not the other way around.

What is keyword relevancy?

Keyword relevancy is all about how your content relates to the searchable keyword that you’ve optimised it for. It was a tool implemented by search engines long ago to avoid situations where unscrupulous webmasters would splatter keywords throughout content which was largely babel. Whilst this saw the end of junk sites, its focus is now solely on quality of the content, not quantity.

So part of Google’s infamous search algorithm is tuned to scanning through your content and determining how much of a factor the keyword relevancy is to your copy. Scary, huh? It’s nothing to be afraid of though, and if anything, awareness of keyword relevancy will help you achieve better content and greater results from your pages.

Relevant and irrelevant content examples

For the purpose of these examples, we’re going to make up a few businesses, starting off with one of our favourite subjects in pizza. An Italian restaurant in Echuca is wanting to optimise their pizza menu page for the bolded keyword, whilst mentioning the fact that they are both open, and deliver until late. Taking but a snippet from their page, they’ve written:

Our pizza restaurant in Echuca can deliver the finest Italian cuisine to anywhere in Echuca, and we are open until late for your convenience

As you can notice, there’s a fair bit of information happening here. If we put our SEO glasses on, we can clearly understand that their pizza restaurant is infact in Echuca, that they are open late, and that they deliver. Great for SEO, seemingly, but when we look at the tone of the sentence, we can see that the onus is actually on “finest Italian cuisine”, and this will affect its relevance.

This is all down to the structure of the sentence. Emotion of the language is placed on their Italian cuisine, and the fact that they are a pizza restaurant in Echuca has taken a backseat. If we were to grade the keyword relevancy based on order, they would be:

● Finest Italian cuisine.
● Echuca.
● Pizza restaurant.

This isn’t to say that this is necessarily bad, everything that needs to be there is there, but what if we slightly rejigged the sentence?

Our pizza restaurant in Echuca is open until late for your convenience. We can also deliver to anywhere in Echuca.

Now, the onus of the sentence has changed completely. Pizza restaurant in Echuca is the focus, whilst their late trading hours is fresh in the mind from the start. Placing their trading hours at the beginning of the sentence hasn’t affected the structure, however, and the ranking of the keyword relevancy is now:

● Echuca.
● Pizza restaurant.

Again, this is purely just an example of a relevant sentence, and not applicable to any set goals. You may also notice that there’s a slight overtone of “keeping it simple” to a certain degree, where we dropped the buzzword of finest cuisine to simply focus on the core subject. So that’s a relevant sentence, but what about something larger?

Take this auto repair service in Ouyen. They’re optimising for auto repair, car care, and Ouyen.

Since 1983, we have been the leading auto repair shop in Ouyen. We specialise in a total car care service on all car brands, and can make sure that it runs as good as it did when you first bought it. Our auto repair shop in Ouyen is committed to not only giving your car the care that it deserves, but also making our prices affordable for the entire community.

Same story again, everything that is important is there in the copy. Again though, we see that the keyword relevancy is lost in description. Read the third sentence again, does the keyword “auto repair” stick more in the mind than the latter half of the sentence where it talks about their affordability?

It sadly doesn’t, search engines think likewise, and this copy once again gets lost in description. Let’s look at a different form of grading this time, in terms of the percentage of relevancy, to see exactly what went wrong:

● Auto repair (100%).
● Car care (50%).
● Ouyen (40%).

This tells us that, whilst the copy has been optimised well for auto repair, it hasn’t been the case for car care and Ouyen. So is there a way that we can use keyword relevancy to boost the latter up to a high level, or do we have to be content with a one­-out-­of-­three success rate?

Since 1983, we have been the leading auto repair shop in Ouyen, specialising in servicing a wide range of car brands. We are focused on giving your car the care that it deserves, making sure that it runs as good as it did when you first bought it. We offer a total car care service, and are committed to making our prices affordable for the entire Ouyen community.

We can hear you saying already “but you just removed one auto repair keyword!” Yes, we did, however, let’s look at the keyword relevancy again in percentages:

● Auto repair (100%).
● Car care (100%).
● Ouyen (100%).

So we’ve actually removed a keyword, linked descriptive copy with the actual keyword itself, and boosted all three accordingly. Search engines will now recognise all three of these keywords, as opposed to one in the example prior, and all we really did was just restructure the content. Everything is still there, and all of the marketing buzzwords have remained. This is the power that keyword relevancy can provide for you.

Where are you getting all of these numbers from?

The percentages used have been derived from a particular keyword relevancy tool that we use. A simple google search for a tool similar to this will bring up plenty of hits, so try playing around with them, and see how your copy is affected by what it says. As we’ve proven in the examples, it only requires a few, simple tweaks of your content to get your keywords working harder and more efficient for your website.

Before you go, and in case you were wondering, “keyword relevancy” and “keywords” rank 99% and 92% respectively in this article.