How to Avoid Keyword Stuffing – Keyword Best Practices

Keywords are a great way to optimise your content for higher rankings in SERPs, however, this can sometimes be overdone to the point where it is seen as an unethical SEO technique which often receives Google penalties that can worsen your rankings. When a content creator inserts as many keywords as possible into content, whether they fit or not, to try and optimise their page, this process is called ‘keyword stuffing’. In this article we discuss the process of keyword stuffing, explain why it’s bad for SEO, and how you can avoid it in your content. 

So, how do you avoid keyword stuffing? To avoid keyword stuffing, you want to make sure you’re still including your keywords to improve SERPs rankings but only where relevant. Don’t insert words in such a way that is unnatural to the flow of content, don’t include keywords that aren’t relevant to the content, and don’t write a group of keywords together.

Read on to learn from digital marketing experts Wildcat Digital the best keyword practices to avoid keyword stuffing and how you can implement this into your website and content. 

Jump To:

• What is Keyword Stuffing in SEO?
• How to Avoid Avoid Keyword Stuffing – SEO Best Practices

What is Keyword Stuffing in SEO?

To understand how to avoid doing something first we must understand what it is. ‘Keyword Stuffing’ is defined by Google as the “practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking”. These keywords are often grouped and forced into the content in an unnatural way creating an overall negative user experience and harming your site’s rankings. 

Keyword stuffing is seen by digital marketing professionals as a ‘black hat’ SEO technique as it goes against search engine guidelines and protocols to manipulate the system, but Google is not often deceived by this trick. An example of keyword stuffing is:

This sentence has a series of problems but the main one being that it is written to appease robots rather than written for audiences. 

How to Avoid Avoid Keyword Stuffing – SEO Best Practices

The misconception about keyword stuffing is that it works. Whilst we do actively encourage the use of SEO keywords, it’s best to only use them when relevant and useful to your content, otherwise it can sound unnatural and be harmful to the user’s experience. Below, we discuss our top tips to help avoid keyword stuffing and give you the best practice for using keywords. 

Quality Keyword Research 

When initially looking into keywords, before beginning to write content, you want to look into undertaking in-depth keyword research to find out who your target market is, what’s ranking well within that market and the difficulty to rank for these keywords. You want to make sure you’re trying to rank for SEO keywords that are relevant to your business and content but are also providing answers to queries that your target audience is searching for on search engines. 

When considering what keywords to use you want to look at domain authority, keyword relevancy and search volume in particular. At Wildcat Digital we offer keyword research as part of our SEO services, why not check out how we can help?

Avoid Inserting Unnecessary Keywords 

When writing content you want to make sure you are only including keywords that are relevant to the content you are writing about and that naturally fit into the flow of writing. You want to include keywords to help improve your SEO rating but not to the point where it is detrimental to the user experience. The point of content is to inspire and educate audiences; content that doesn’t make sense or is not relevant isn’t going to do that. 

To help you stay on track and try to find relevant keywords why not try Semrush this is a great SEO tool which helps you conduct keyword research and helps you track competitors strategy. 

Keyword Mapping

By using your keywords on your on-page SEO you’re showing Google what you are intending the page to rank for and that your content is relevant for this. Being rigorous and specific about where you are using your keywords can help avoid keyword stuffing in unnecessary locations. Try focusing on one main keyword in your content to help demonstrate relevance, to do this you could include your main keywords in sections such as:

• Title Page 
• Meta-Title 
• Subheadings
• Meta-Descriptions 
• Image Alt Text 
• First 150 words of your content 

Avoid Grouping Keywords Together 

Many people when trying to insert keyword practice into their content, may decide to group keywords together in a long list. This form of writing is illegible for users and adds nothing to their user experience as content should. When content looks unreadable in both the user’s and bots’ eyes this devalues the authority of the website and usually means users will click off straight away meaning, lower ranking, fewer conversions and higher bounce rates. 

If you’re worried that you’re keyword stuffing, why not check your keyword density online on a free checking such as this one? This shows you the percentage of times that your keyword appears within your content, a good keyword density tends to be 2-3%. But, take this with a pinch of salt – it is a robot after all and doesn’t have the same knowledge, information or context as the writer. 

Wildcat Digital SEO Services 

Wildcat Digital are a team of digital marketers who specialise in SEO here to fight in your corner, implementing a range of SEO services across your website to help increase conversions and leads by growing your online presence, gaining more traffic and ranking higher on search engines. 

Get in touch with us to receive a free consultation about how we can help your business with SEO, PPC, Paid Socials, and Website design.

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Grace Dugher