Keywords & Keyword Stuffing

Keywords & keyword stuffing

Stop cramming keywords everywhere thinking it'll help you rank - it won't. This video explains how Google understands keywords these days (spoiler: they're clever enough to know a pizza recipe page is about making pizza without you saying it 50 times).

Prefer to read about this instead? Click here to read my guide (10-minute read).

I'll show you examples straight from Google's spam policies of what not to do - raw lists of phone numbers, blocks of text listing every city and region a page wants to rank for (which I see on real sites all the time as part of my job), and words repeated so often they sound unnatural. The example Google give on that page is honestly milder than plenty of real websites I've looked at. The video also gets into why writing naturally works better than forcing keywords where they don't belong, and the difference between someone searching "pizza" (could want anything) versus "pizza in Prestwich" (wants to order now). Really useful if you've been told to "use more keywords" but your content sounds like a robot wrote it.

The live search demo

To show how Google thinks, the video walks through a couple of live searches: "how to make pizza" turns up recipes from the cold internet - the top result doesn't contain the phrase anywhere - while "pizza in Prestwich" turns up pizza places, because Google knows where I am and knows what someone typing that actually wants. The person searching "how to make pizza" isn't going to buy anything; the person searching "pizza in Prestwich" is. Getting that distinction into your content is most of the job. It's the same approach I use when writing content for the sites in my examples, which run on my open source Eleventy template with JSON-LD structured data telling Google what each page sells.

Who actually ranks

The nationwide chain Rudy's tops the local results with an H1 that just says "Prestwich Manchester" (I inspect it in the video, for the nerds) and maybe six lines of unique content on the whole page, because the domain gets mentioned all over the UK and it collected a remarkable number of Google reviews in under a year. Two independent places round here, Cuckoo and Chroma, have more reviews but far less domain clout, which I think is a bit unfair and say so in the video - Google prioritises the "safest" results. The practical bit either way: reviews from real customers bump you up regardless of what's written on your site, and there's a Google Business walkthrough if you're starting from scratch with that.

On headings, meta titles, and meta descriptions, the advice is the same: write them for visitors first, because Google is good enough at figuring out what a page is about without phrase-for-phrase matches - but there are two sides to that coin, and if a keyword fits into a heading in a way that reads naturally, fitting it in is still worth doing. None of this is a magic bullet, by the way, and I'm not saying you should copy a chain's local page - it's about looking at the actual examples that show up on Google and deciding whether the hard-and-fast rules you've been told really exist.

If you'd like help writing natural content that ranks well without keyword stuffing, just fill in the form below and I'll reply within 48 hours.