Variations and Rankings
-
How do search engines view wording variances?
I am trying to target Scottish Wedding Photographer but will google/bing etc be intelligent enough to see plurals, see the word Scotland instead of Scottish, photography instead of photographer?
Also with rankings, I had a secondary phrase there to which I'm ranking sort of page 2-3 at the moment (the site is circa 3 months old) but finding that I'm nowhere with the Scottish phrase, I checked 30 pages of results and show nowhere, is this due to the competition for my phrase?
My site is www.martinwardphotography.com
-
I think Andy is on the right track, with the caveat that Google needs a little help in the general meaning department. So, one easy way to do that is use Moz's on-page grader for whatever term you've selected... that best describes the page and is hopefully not too difficult and has a little traffic.Just to make sure Google has enough clues as to what this page is about.
Over time, you will find that the page hopefully gives you traffic for all kinds of related terms... not just the one you graded against. Like everyone else, I have pages with top terms that supposedly are good for no estimated traffic, yet dozens of terms contribute hundreds or thousands of visits because they're all in the same general neighborhood.
Plurals and what not don't change the general meaning which you have helped Google fully perceive without getting spammy.
-
Hi Martin,
I wouldn't get too 'hung up' about plurals etc, they will be taken care of!
Here is what I would do;
Focus on writing and building content about your business, write articles and blog posts in almost story format describing your experiences with being a wedding photographer in Scotland - what will happen is that the keywords will take care of themselves, you will include singular and plural terms by default and you will find that you will rank for terms that you had never even though about!
Sorry if I didn't answer your question directly but what I'm trying to say is focus more on creating excellent and informative content and less about the keywords!
Good luck!
Andy
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
-
Ranking Expectations and Search Intent Alignment
I've recently implemented the page optimization recommendations provided by Moz Pro to help our site rank for specific keywords on certain pages. It’s been about two weeks since we've added these URLs/keyword parings. The optimization scores for the targeted keywords and URLs are looking strong. Also, we've crafted these pages with keyword optimisation in mind. However, we have a couple of questions as we move forward: Ranking Expectations: Since our optimization scores are good, when might we start seeing improvements in our keyword rankings? We know that SEO results can take time, but we would appreciate any insights on a typical timeline based on your experiences. Optimization and Search Intent: While the tool’s optimization suggestions have been helpful in regards to giving us a score for a specific keyword, we’re curious about how this factors into search intent. How does this tool take into account variations in search intent, especially if users search using slight variations of the keywords we’re targeting? Thank you so much for your insight!
On-Page Optimization | | Cricket930 -
Google ranking content for phrases that don't exist on-page
I am experiencing an issue with negative keywords, but the “negative” keyword in question isn’t truly negative and is required within the content – the problem is that Google is ranking pages for inaccurate phrases that don’t exist on the page. To explain, this product page (as one of many examples) - https://www.scamblermusic.com/albums/royalty-free-rock-music/ - is optimised for “Royalty free rock music” and it gets a Moz grade of 100. “Royalty free” is the most accurate description of the music (I optimised for “royalty free” instead of “royalty-free” (including a hyphen) because of improved search volume), and there is just one reference to the term “copyrighted” towards the foot of the page – this term is relevant because I need to make the point that the music is licensed, not sold, and the licensee pays for the right to use the music but does not own it (as it remains copyrighted). It turns out however that I appear to need to treat “copyrighted” almost as a negative term because Google isn’t accurately ranking the content. Despite excellent optimisation for “Royalty free rock music” and only one single reference of “copyrighted” within the copy, I am seeing this page (and other album genres) wrongly rank for the following search terms: “free rock music”
On-Page Optimization | | JCN-SBWD
“Copyright free rock music"
“Uncopyrighted rock music”
“Non copyrighted rock music” I understand that pages might rank for “free rock music” because it is part of the “Royalty free rock music” optimisation, what I can’t get my head around is why the page (and similar product pages) are ranking for “Copyright free”, “Uncopyrighted music” and “Non copyrighted music”. “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted” don’t exist anywhere within the copy or source code – why would Google consider it helpful to rank a page for a search term that doesn’t exist as a complete phrase within the content? By the same logic the page should also wrongly rank for “Skylark rock music” or “Pretzel rock music” as the words “Skylark” and “Pretzel” also feature just once within the content and therefore should generate completely inaccurate results too. To me this demonstrates just how poor Google is when it comes to understanding relevant content and optimization - it's taking part of an optimized term and combining it with just one other single-use word and then inappropriately ranking the page for that completely made up phrase. It’s one thing to misinterpret one reference of the term “copyrighted” and something else entirely to rank a page for completely made up terms such as “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted”. It almost makes me think that I’ve got a better chance of accurately ranking content if I buy a goat, shove a cigar up its backside, and sacrifice it in the name of the great god Google! Any advice (about wrongly attributed negative keywords, not goat sacrifice ) would be most welcome.0 -
Will including "Contact Me" form degrade Google page ranking?
I have a content-rich page about one of my offerings. Will Google knock down the ranking if I include a contact me reply form on the page vs including a link to a standalone reply page? My concern is that including the form will cause Google to downgrade the page as being "too commercial".
On-Page Optimization | | Lysarden0 -
Combine poorly ranking pages into a single page?
I'm doing on-page optimizations for an apartment management company, and they have about seven apartments listed on their site. Rather than include everything on the same page - /apartments/apartment-name/ - they have the following setup: /apartments/apartment-name/contact /apartments/apartment-name/features /apartments/apartment-name/availability /apartments/apartment-name/gallery /apartments/apartment-name/neighborhood With very few exceptions, none of these pages appear to rank for anything, and those that do either rank very poorly for seemingly random keywords or for keywords like the apartment complex name (alongside the main landing page for the complex). I'm of the mind to recommend combining the pages into a single one that contains all the info, eliminates the chances for duplicate content (all of the neighborhood pages contain the same content verbatim), and prevents keyword cannibalization. Thoughts? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | Alces1 -
Rankings have dropped but why?
Recently our keywords have plummeted with regards to anything hen related on our stag and hen website. We were on the first page ranking 6<sup>th</sup> for terms such as Newcastle hen and hen weekend Newcastle. Now were around 15th this has also began to happen with other keywords. Content wise our pages score 90+ on page optimisation, we do have various keywords on the pages alike our competitors and use the highest searched for term as our page title. Our page speed is good on mobile and desktop. I’m struggling to see why we can’t seem to crawl back up to the first page when people who are outranking us have minimal content on slow sites. I know we lack back links but this can't be the only reason? Our website is hangoverweekends.co.uk
On-Page Optimization | | andy_simpson0 -
Page Rank Lost After Website Transfer
Hello, I recently transferred a website from Ruby on Rails to Wordpress in order to help with the site's responsiveness. I kept all of the URLs the exact same, but when I transferred it only the homepage and one other page kept their page ranks, all of the others have lost theirs completely. Almost every page on the site was at least a PR 2, and now their not ranked, and not ranking in the top of search engines like they were before. I am not quite sure what might have caused this, like I said, I kept the URLs all the exact same and its strange that 2 pages were not effected. I crawled the site with Screaming From and all of the pages that lost their page rank have a status as "Moved Permanently". They are the exact same URL, but they are listed without www. in front, could this have something to do with it? The website is www.goenergylink.com, and you will see that the homepage and "Residential" page still have their page rank, but none of the others do. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated! Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | mcmckenna10 -
Images being ranked
I have a client who is concerned about the performance of his images ranking on Google Images. I have taken a look at the obvious things like - alt tags, title tags , file names. I am not sure why he is struggling quite so much to get his images ranked well as the sites he is competing against and who are already ranking are a very poor quality. This is his site - http://www.ukweddingfavours.co.uk Would really appreciate your feedback and I can dish out some good answers.
On-Page Optimization | | onlinemediadirect0 -
When the keyword rankings trend south…?
So for the past 3 or 4 weeks or so I’ve been making some on page tweaks for keywords that we should rank for, implementing all the keyword recommendations, and getting “A’s” in the report card for page optimization in the Pro tool, and also doing things like fixing a bunch of 404’s that I found ….so I thought I was doing a bang up job… My rankings for some keywords were generally trending (slowly) in the right direction, but this morning I see that 2 important keywords that I had been working hard on, and which had trended from around 40 to in the high 20’s in rankings, has now dropped out of top 50 altogether…. I’m a little dispirited, and now wondering if I did something wrong? Any thoughts or recommendations? Is it normal just to drop out of top 50 when you were in the 20's or 30's? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0