A major portion of SEO concerns pairing a relevant webpage with a popular search term.
One of our former, personal strategies was to limit the number of keywords or search terms I optimize a page for to only one, the broadest and most popular variation on the query. The reasoning was that having more pages tuned to specific terms would result in wider coverage of terms and would avoid essentially competing with our own pages for rankings.
Recent re-examination of this process has convinced us to alter my approach in future.
Whilst placing more focus on a broader search term or keyword is still a good idea in terms of encompassing a greater potential for appearing in more popular searches, Google has been continually prioritising pages with high authority in multiple RELATED keywords and search terms.
This makes sense from a UX perspective, since different people will often use different language, grammar and writing styles when searching for the same information, and if Google only followed the most common practice it would potentially make using Google’s search engine difficult for certain people.
This move benefits not only users however; being more flexible with search terms and keywords opens up your options as a copy-writer. When utilising my previous strategy, I often found myself restricted when it comes to vocabulary and sentence structure, and copy that doesn’t come naturally can often feel as stilted to read as it does to write.
I’ll be keenly watching how the shift to a more holistic page optimization approach affects both copy and page rankings!