Repeating the same keyword over and over again (known as keyword stuffing) in your website content is likely to mark it out as poor quality – with some consequences. The way to go is to use synonyms and other related keywords alongside a few well-placed, broader keywords.
In this post we have answered the most common questions related to using synonyms and related keywords in your content strategy.
What are synonyms and related keywords?
Synonyms are words that have similar meanings. Remember your primary school teacher encouraging you to use kind, lovely, and friendly instead of just plain nice? Or later on in high school, when you were astounded to learn that essay and composition are both long writing tasks? Those are all synonyms.
Keyword synonyms, it follows, would be words that mean the same as a particular keyword. For example, if your webshop sells women’s clothes, keyword synonyms for women’s clothes might be ladies’ apparel or ladies’ garments.
This leads to concepts related to your keywords, which are known as latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords. Related keywords for women’s clothes could be pencil skirts, stilettos or outfit ideas for women.
Why should I use synonyms on my webpage?
Related keywords and synonyms make a website more discoverable to visitors, as well-written, engaging content is proven to be considered more visit-worthy by Google. Furthermore, if you are careful enough to include some long-tail keywords, you will attract niche audiences.
Using synonyms will also make your content more enjoyable to read, and high-quality content is more likely to be shared by readers. This will boost your credibility with Google’s crawl bots sky-high.
Can search engines recognise related keywords and synonyms?
Although repeating your focus keyword still remains rather important, Google is able to recognise related keywords and synonyms in your website content. How? Ever since Google was granted its related entities patent, keywords no longer need to be an exact match to affect your page’s visibility in SERPs. In fact, Google can now easily connect related concepts and ideas. As an example, check out how punching in tagliatelle in the search bar brought up a variety of suggestions, all of which you could cleverly integrate into your content as related keywords.
How many synonyms and related keywords is the right amount?
The good news is that, by using synonyms, worrying about keyword density is now a thing of the past. Gone are the days when keyword stuffing made a text irksome to read. Nowadays, a good content writer can naturally include a variety of synonyms in your content. This will guarantee high-quality content and a high ranking.
How to decide which synonyms to use?
Finding the right synonyms and related keywords may seem a bit daunting at first, but there are a few good ways which can help you discover them.
- Brainstorm!
There’s nothing like some good old-fashioned brainstorming to get the creative juices flowing! Get out a pen and paper and start thinking of words with a similar meaning to your focus keywords. For example, some good synonyms you could use to replace dog are four-legged companion, pooch, mutt, man’s best friend or tail-wagger.
- Use Google
Another, almost laughably simple way of discovering related keywords is by using Google itself. When a user types in a few words in the Google search bar, a list of suggested topics is automatically generated. This is a highly useful tool that any webshop owner could use to their advantage. In the example below, we’ve used the word tagliatelle again to pull up a few related phrases:
You’ll also find a list of other suggestions at the bottom of your search results page:
- Use a web tool
If you have a tough time coming up with related keywords on your own, you can use a web tool such as LSI graph or Ubersuggest. You can use both these tools to generate suggestions for good synonyms and related keywords, with some websites even lustrating search volumes.
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