Targeting Multiple Keywords on a Single Page

Let’s learn about targeting multiple keywords on a single page. A lot of times, in the SEO world, you have a list of terms and phrases, keywords that you're going after. You want people to come to your site for those particular terms and phrases. You want to rank well in search engines for them. There can be times when it pays to connect and have multiple terms that you might be targeting simultaneously on the same page.

I'll talk about the conditions that are prerequisites, required for that to be the case. Most of the time you do want to have some separation and here's why.

Searcher Intent

First off, the searcher's intent, think about the person who's performing the search query. You want their search intent to have considerable overlap between the two keywords or three keywords, if you're doing that, to make multi-keyword targeting on a single page viable.

Mismatched Keywords

I'll show you an example. Here I've got a page, and if I'm targeting terms like sleeping pills and hair care products on the same page, that doesn't make a lot of sense. I recognize that an online drugstore might actually carry both of those products and might indeed want to rank for both of them. But it doesn't make logical sense from a searcher's perspective. A searcher who's looking for hair care products has very different needs and a very different intent and wants very different content than what a searcher looking for sleeping pills does. It's extremely hard to serve both of those intents well on a single page, as compared to breaking them up.

If I have the second condition, shampoo and conditioner, well, there's still a little bit of difference. The intent behind conditioner, someone has clearly expressed intent. There are not a lot of people who search for shampoo and conditioner simultaneously at the same time, even though people might buy them together. So this is an edge case or a case right in the middle. I might consider doing it, or I might not.

Matching Keywords

Number three is my ideal one -- sleeping pills and sleep aids. Now these ones clearly make sense together. A sleeping pill is a type of sleep aid. It's probably the most popular search query around sleep aids, but I could have a page that is a sleep aids and sleeping pills page that makes sense together, where someone with the intent for one would want to find things that are on the other as well.

Don’t Hinder Your Conversions

Second thing here, the ability to market the content externally and achieve conversions on the page, and engagement on the page can't be hindered by the use of multiple keywords. So if I know, for example, that having a shampoo and conditioner page converts less well than having a shampoo page and a conditioner page, I probably shouldn't do it. Likewise, if I know that it's going to be harder to market that content externally, to earn links, to earn shares, to earn attention and awareness outside of my own website to other people on the web, again I should break up those pages.

If however, you feel like, "Hey, you know what, my sleeping pills and sleep aids page can actually be the best expression of that content with those two keywords combined," great, go for it.

Don’t Target Too Many Keywords

This is the common excuse that you'll hear and that you might be thinking to yourself in the SEO world, which is, "But this page has a lot of links to it," which means, "Oh with those links and high page rank, or whatever it is, I could rank much better if only I used my powerful, well-linked to page to target all 10 of the keywords I'm going after or 2 or 3." This is not a viable excuse. This is not a reason to do this. In fact, in the long term, you're probably going to hurt yourself more. Even in the short term, SEO is not what it was 5 or 10 years ago, where a page ranks purely on link signals alone. There's a lot more context and content analysis and a lot of user and usage data signals.

So if you've got a page with a lot of great links pointing to it and you manage to rank it for both sleeping pills and hair care products, you might find that that page rapidly falls in the rankings as visitors search, click, and pogo stick away, leave it and go back to the search results to look for something else. Google interprets that as a signal of this is a bad quality page that we don't want to show to users.

Best Practices for Ranking for Two Keywords

Here are some of our best practices that can help you rank for two keywords one page.

Headline

Number one, make the title and headline intelligent, creative, and a compelling combination of the terms, not a common separated list. What you shouldn't do is do something like "shampoo, conditioner, hair care." That doesn't work. But if you say, "the very best organic shampoo and conditioner, selected from manufacturers we trust," okay, great. Now you're targeting both the keywords, and you have a compelling thing. It's like, 'Huh, they trust and they're organic." All right, there's a compelling value proposition for a searcher to want to click on that page in the search results. Think of that title and the headline as really being your advertisement to try and earn that click.

Repetition Doesn’t Matter

Second thing, keyword use, it matters, but repetition is not particularly important. In fact, compared to things like the content quality that you can achieve on the page, the usage metrics, getting people to seriously engage, to stay there, to want to convert, want to share, etc, and topic relevancy, keyword repetition is kind of useless. I wouldn't worry about it.

You should make sure that the words sleeping pills and sleep aids are on the page, in the title and the headline. Maybe on the page once or twice, that's fine. But even if you don't get that, even if you only get them in the title and the headline, and then you have extremely compelling content quality, great user and usage data metrics and topic relevancy, meaning the page is really about great shampoo, great conditioner, or great sleeping pills, great sleeping aids, you're doing your job.

Anchor Text

Finally, be cautious with anchor text when you do multiple keyword targeting because it can look really unnatural. If you've got in the footer of every page or in your menu item things like organic shampoo and organic conditioner, it's like, "What? That's kind of an odd page. Why don't they just call that hair care, or shampoo and conditioner, or something like that?"

This especially can be dangerous when you get to external anchor text, because if you're managing to get that perfect, exact match, anchor text externally and it looks very awkward, that can be a signal to the engines you're doing something manipulative.

Dealing with Plural Keywords

Plurals are their own special case. So, for example, if someone is looking for sleep aids versus a sleep aid, those probably have pretty similar overlap in terms of searcher intent. But there's oftentimes when people are actually looking for very different things when they search for plural versus singular. Bing and Google have both gotten much better at identifying those intents and separating those out.

If you search for something like "best Thai restaurant," it is perfectly natural that potentially a very well-regarded individual Thai restaurant might be able to rank for that query. If you search for "best Thai restaurants" plural, it's very unlikely that you're going to see one single result. It sometimes happens, but much more likely is that you'll see lists of those, because that's what serves the intent. So be aware of what your searcher is looking for, whether they want that list intent or multiple intent when they're performing this