What is ‘Keyword Density’ in Content Marketing

One of the biggest drivers for digital marketers is to get onto the first page of the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). To do this properly, and not to resort to any black hat SEO techniques, you need to put keywords in your copy which are relevant to your business and which you feel that people – who have a requirement that your company will fulfil – will search for.

The practice of content marketing assists with this as it helps you insert these relevant keywords into your site, in a natural manner, through blogs on your site. However, to maximise your content marketing and digital marketing efforts so that you can get prime place on the SERPs you need to have the right keyword density in your articles.

What is keyword density?

The term ‘keyword density’ refers to how dense – or full – an article or piece of web copy is with a particular keyword. There is no specific figure when it comes to what is right or wrong when it comes to what the optimal keyword density is. It all depends on how many words an article has.

To illustrate what copy – that is overly dense with keywords – is here’s an example. The keyword being used is ‘content marketing’:

Content marketing is a great option for digital marketers to make use of in 2019. This is because content marketing allows you to expand on aspects of your business. Marketing departments across the globe have jumped on the content marketing band wagon.

A way that you can modify this paragraph to make the copy sound more natural – and thus friendlier for search engines – is the following:

Content marketing is a great option for digital marketers to make use of in 2019 because this type of marketing allows you to expand on aspects of your business. Marketing departments across the globe have started to use articles and blogs to market their services.

Why should you worry about keyword density?

According to Randall Stross, in his book entitled Plant Google: How one company is transforming our lives, when Google started its goal was to organise the world’s information. A significant part of this type of organisation is to deliver relevant information to people who search for a particular topic. A way that the search engine judges whether or not a piece of information is relevant to a particular person is by looking at other similar searches and ranking the information, that they see as relevant, highly.

If you content is stuffed with keywords – as per the first example above – readers will see your content as badly written and navigate away from your site quickly. Google will see this as a  black mark against your name. As such, they will move your site down the SERPs. This means that it will become very difficult for your site to regain popularity.

Think like a searcher

When coming up with the keywords for your articles, think like a potential customer. What will he or she be searching for when looking for the products and/or services that your business offers? What other synonyms could people search for in order to find your site? Make sure to add these in to your copy on a regular basis.

Digital marketers across the globe are prioritising content marketing in 2019. This means that as a digital marketer or a small business owner, you need to do this too. Make sure that you are aware of your keyword density when you put pieces out there so that you don’t get penalised by search engines.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

To learn more about keyword density, we recommend that you do an SEO course as this will give you the in-depth knowledge you need to make a success of your content marketing efforts. For more information, follow this link. For information about the Digital School of Marketing’s other online digital marketing courses, visit our website.