Targeting synonyms

[Etido]

This question was prompted by a tweet from Cyrus Shepherd:

EDIT: Can't post link yet. Here is the tweet:
"7 most obvious places to vary keywords with variants+synoyms:
1) URL
2) <title>
3) H1
4) Subheads
5) Anchor Text
6) Body
7) Alt Image"

My specific question is this:
If I have a page targeting "blue widget" but many people are also searching for "blue gizmo" or "blue thingy". To be concrete, lets say blue widget gets 10k searches/mo, blue gizmo gets 8k searches/mo and blue thingy gets 2k searches/mo.

Do you optimize the page to capture traffic from all 3 keywords? If so, how?

 

[chanilla]

 

[turbin3]

You have to determine whether it makes sense for a group of keywords to be aggregated to one page and one encompassing topic for them. One method of determining might be looking at content that is ranking for several of those keywords, and determine whether this aggregation seems to be favored already.

The other obvious, common-sense method is simply looking at the keywords and making an educated guess whether the keywords appear to be different enough that they should stand on their own, or whether they are similar enough that you can pick up "bonus points" by aggregating them into one larger piece of content.

The how is also common sense, so I hate for this too sound vague. Just think about when you've read a particularly good article, and how that article may have been structured and varied to keep things interesting. Varied being the key word. You have the core, structural components that should probably be oriented towards your primary keyword (URL, page title, meta description, H1), however they don't necessarily have to be solely oriented towards that one keyword. There may be opportunity to combine a few, while still remaining oriented towards the primary. Example:

• URL: /2017-trending-blue-widgets
• Title: Popular Blue Widgets & Gizmos Trending in 2017 | MyBrand
• Desc: Buying a blue widget, but can only choose one? Make your decision the easy way with MyBrand's list of the most popular blue widgets & other gizmos in 2017.
  
• H1: Blue Widgets Trending in 2017
• H2-4 (or whatever): Popular & Noteworthy Blue Gizmos
• ALT: graph of blue widget trends Title: Blue widget & gizmo trend graph for 2017

Not my greatest work, but my time is limited right now. What we're talking about here is really just subtle variety. If you think about it, as a reader, this variety just sounds better and more natural anyways. The best place to be is developing the habit of simply taking note of some synonyms, understanding a few different ways people talk about a particular subject, and working those variations into the content in a manner that keeps things interesting. Once you've done that a few times, it's pretty easy to develop the subconscious habit of doing this.

 

[Ryuzaki]

You have to determine whether it makes sense for a group of keywords to be aggregated to one page and one encompassing topic for them.

This entire thread and the quote above are something I intend to cover in depth soon here on BuSo.

There's no sense in leaving money on the table, optimizing for one phrase at a time, especially when nobody has taken the topic down to the granular level yet. One piece of content can rank for 5 - 10 huge keyword variants and 1000's of long-tails and one-time searches when done right.

Once you see people coming in and going granular, you can then write up an additional article on the specific terms they're trying to snipe, and interlink the new one with the big one and continue to own all of the rankings.

The trick is to not go for variants that include the exact match only. You have to dig into the LSI terms, the topically related terms, not just hyper-relevant exact+phrase style keywords. This is the fun part and strengthens your rankings and volume of long-tails and one-offs, but I can't go into it here. There's some good methods that require a little cash to be spent that I'll go into in the big write-up later.

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