The keyword density ratio, that is, the total times a targeted keyword appears in the overall text of a page, is still something we hear mentioned as an important consideration in SEO from many firms and agencies.
It’s not. The strategy has been firmly and consistently debunked by the leading thinkers in the industry. This is not to say, by the way, that adding your targeted keyphrases to a page’s content isn’t good for SEO. Of course it is. There just isn’t any secret formula for determining how often you should add them.
So why do people keep talking about keyword density? It is one of the most persistent myths in online marketing for four important reasons:
- It was true once. Before search engines really started to grow in sophistication, a lot of spammy strategies would get traction, the most famous of which was “keyword stuffing”, or the inclusion, in meta tags and on-page copy of huge blocks of repeated terms or repeated synonyms. In a bizarre nod to “usability” often these blocks were made invisible to the user through formatting tricks like making the text the same color as the background.
Algorithmic changes started to make this strategy increasingly ineffective as early as 2001, but the approach had been so successful, and so low-effort, that it persisted as a strategy for years. These days few people think “stuffing” is a good idea, but the attraction of a low-effort “magic bullet” remains so appealing that the sanitized “keyword density” approach has replaced it in the SEO mythology.
- It makes a lot of logical sense if you think about SEO as a way to fool web crawlers. If the use of a keyword once helps with ranking, wouldn’t adding it a second time double the effectiveness? The problem is that the web crawlers — and, more importantly, their underlying algorithms — are extremely sophisticated, and grow more so every year. Even if keyword density were a real input into search engines, it would be one of 200 or more signals considered by Google alone.
- It is easier than writing copy properly. Who wouldn’t want to get a nice list of keywords, drop them in appropriate ratios on a page, and watch the traffic roll in? Modern crawlers, however, are much more focused on the actual content of the page and the relationship between that content and other related pages. A good way to think about keywords now is as a guidepost to the crawlers who are trying to contextualize the content.
In that regard, one keyword is most likely enough, and in fact it is more appropriate to mention context-appropriate synonyms rather than repeating the same phrase.
- It is untestable. You’d think this would be a detriment. However, those who persist in talking about keyword density argue that it cannot be seen as a single input, so the variation is hard to lock down. This is less than useless, and creates ranges of appropriate “density” as low as 1% and as high as 8%.
We would argue that this attraction to untestable strategies is a huge red flag. What is the point of a theory if you can’t test it, especially when your marketing budget is on the line as the bet?
These four reasons are not just a problem with keyword density; we think they are indicative of the biggest problems in the SEO field today, in that they allow people to get away with doing SEO badly. In reality, these four reasons can apply as the motivations behind many shady SEO recommendations.
The cynical side of me believes that SEO often attracts people who are excited about the complexity of a system but don’t like the intensive work in the trenches necessary to make it work. In that way, the myth of keyword density captures the essence of how this problem can be part of many SEO worker’s attitudes about their efforts, the results, and, most importantly, your money.
As an aside, if you are interested in doing SEO right, just dive into the SEO section of our blog. There are many great articles there about how to improve and optimize your site’s organic visibility.