Rand Fishkin, at MOZ Whiteboard Friday, says that a page intelligently optimized for 4 keywords will outrank one optimized for a single keyword... but will it?
We don't believe everything we hear, and you shouldn't either, so we put it to the test and more. We share which ranked best and what it means for your silo structure. This is going to give you information you need to build your websites for the most bang for the goals you have.
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Transcription Below
Myth: Optimize for multiple keywords (not just 1)
This one is from another MOZ Whiteboard Friday. The idea is that, is it better to optimize a page for one keyword or would it be better to optimize for four, somewhat related keywords?
In this test, I set it up as one page that we have standardly optimized and then another page that we are putting that against a page that has four keywords in the sense that each keyword has its own h2 and has its own little section.
Each time that this was run, the page that was optimized for one keyword won. It makes sense because we know that word count up to 1000 words is all you can eat. The more that you can do 1000 words is better for a particular page and then we were looking also at optimization signals in on-page optimization. The page that is optimized for one keyword would have more signals.
Of course, you would have different variations for a particular keyword and different ways to say it.
There might also be related keywords. You can win those terms by winning a top level term if you work those into text. Where I would deviate is from Rand’s point is that, if you have a particular term and it is something you need to win. It is a money terms and it is a high priority, you should have a page for it. One main keyword equals one page and I wouldn’t put multiple keywords even if they were close variations.
The follow up to this test is, we look into duplicate content which ties to this because if you look into multiple versions of a very similar keyword, you probably would have a lot of duplicate content in the page.