Are Meta Keywords Still A Thing?
-
Hey all! First post on here, forgive me for being an SEO newb.
Are meta keywords still a thing? Here's why I ask, I read this article from back in 2009 that said they are absolutely not a ranking factor anymore: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
However, in doing some research on our competition, I found that the top result for "Financial Advisor in Colorado Springs" was this company: http://www.strasbaughfinancial.com/
Honestly, the site seems to be doing everything opposite of what I read to do. It isn't even mobile responsive! With the Moz Bar, I found that no links pointing toward it. Not one video on the site (there is a link to a welcome video but the link is broken!!), no blog or regular content updates, no keywords in the H1 or H2 tags, page titles, etc. The website looks old and, frankly, terrible. Really I’m stumped how this can be ranking so high for so many competitive keywords.
Then I realized that they stuffed tons of keywords in the meta description and meta keywords. From what I can tell, this is the ONLY intentional SEO strategy they used. Am I missing something? Are meta keywords still a ranking factor and THAT important?
-
This is not important, you can read this:
http://www.wordstream.com/meta-keyword
The domain age is one of the best factors
-
Thanks so much!! This is very helpful.
-
If you want to know the real reason of why that page is the position 1 look at the backlinks of that page ( anchor text/quality of the links/quantity of the links )
Check the audit
4700 backlinks / 26 Referring IP / Domain Score 3
-
Meta keywords are not still a thing, at least in Google search!
So looking at Strasbaugh, and answering some comments you made:
- You're right, it's not mobile responsive - this can be a detriment, but it's not going to knock them off the first page in most cases just because of that. It's a small percentage of the overall factors
- Site design - I feel that I have pretty high standards, but I wouldn't call this "old and frankly, terrible" - I'd say it's decent for this industry. Keep in mind they're not trying to be a creative design agency website
- Domain age can be a helpful factor if it truly is old
- Unfortunately, the Moz bar isn't the best source to find a high volume of links (yet) - using Ahrefs I see 70 linking root domains, which is pretty decent for a local firm
- Video, H1, H2, blog/content updates - those can be signals but are not deal breakers if other factors exist
- Titles are important, but they're not totally bungling them. They at least have their core phrase "financial advisors" in there, although yes all the pages should have rewritten titles
- One thing that's likely helping is that its links have generally good anchor text. Mostly "Strasbaugh Financial Advisory" in the link anchor. This is something that I thought Google would have discounted more by now, but that's not the case, it's still a strong signal
- Lucky for you, if they're a competitor, is that in looking at their traffic on Ahrefs, they actually don't get a ton of it, it's only about 53 visits a month. The important thing to note is that your example keyword exactly as you phrase it "Financial Advisor in Colorado Springs" - gets 0 searches a month. The keyword "financial advisors colorado springs" gets 20 searches a month and they are ranked #4
- Looking a page like http://www.strasbaughfinancial.com/who-we-serve - they have decent helpful informaiton on there. It's not 10x or even 2x content by any means, but it's better than what I see on a lot of these local financial firm websites
Hopefully that helps! The good news is that if you think what they're doing is minimal, then you should be able to replicate and improve and then rank!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Page Title (Meta descriptions) length... how strict are you?
I have just had a conversation with a client... the gist was this... Is it more important to stay under the 55-60 characters OR go over a bit and have the page title make sense and include the clients company name. The same argument for meta description. I have a client insisting on 55-60 length but the keywords are long and if we use the primary keyword phrase the length is 44 if we use the keyword phrase and add the company name it becomes 64. This is with us trimming it a bit. Anyone else discussed this before?
On-Page Optimization | | JohnW-UK1 -
Selling Products with a similar meta description
Wondering if anyone can help when selling similar products with very similar meta description and product descriptions in general. Have around 500 products - a lot of products have around 10-20 products which are very similar only different is sizes and a maybe a few lines of text if that. Is this a problem in search engines? How does other ecommerce stores selling similar products solve this problem...
On-Page Optimization | | royRR0 -
Meta Title for Category Pages
I am trying to improve the SEO for a few key category pages on my blog. I have two ranking really well so I want to boost them and bring up some others. Can I put two keywords in the meta title? Example: Maternity Deals | Pregnancy Deals Or should I just stick with one? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
Number of occurances of a keyword
At the moment my site is down due to issue at the datat centre so please don't ask for teh url as it will be some time before it is back up and running. On one of my pages I am targeting two related keyword phrases e.g. "How to use Widgets" and "Using Widgets" Each of these phrases appears once each in the Tile tag, H1 tag and meta description and two or three times in the body text. Which I beileve is current best practice. However the word Widgets appears more 60 times in total could this be hurting the rankings of the other two phrases? Many Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | spes1230 -
Keywords Qty per page.
I have a website http://www.versaillesdentalclinic.com with 20 pages in Total, but i need it to be on the top page of Google by 65 keywords and may be more. How many keywords per page shall I use? Currently I am promoting around 12 keywords high competitive for main page? Is it ok? I will appreciate a good answer 😉 Thanks, Russel
On-Page Optimization | | smokin_ace0 -
Meta descriptions
Hi, I have placed meta descriptions in a CMS for a client and afterwards checked with the SeoMoz tool "Page elements" that these are embedded correctly. However when checking the SERP for certain pages Google has "composed" the listing from other content than the meta description. What may be the reason, and how to avoid this?
On-Page Optimization | | vibelingo0 -
Meta Keywords
Hello Everyone- Quick question about meta keywords. Most SEO's agree that meta keywords are no longer used as a ranking factor in Google. My question is, if a client comes to me and they already have a bunch of meta keywords on their site what would the smart strategy be? 1. Remove all the meta keyword data from the clients site 2. Scale the meta keywords back by only leaving the top keywords in the code? 3. Do nothing Thanks for all your time! Regards, Bill Parlaman
On-Page Optimization | | wparlaman0