5 Mythen, die deine SEO-Texte ruinieren
Together we destroy the
most common myths surrounding SEO texts. Have fun! My name is Alexander Rus
and SEO is my bread and butter. On this channel we chat
about SEO and content marketing. If you want to learn how you can sustainably acquire
customers through your website, then subscribe to this channel right now. In this 6-part series on SEO copy
or SEO content, you will learn everything from keyword selection to content design. This episode is about mythbusting.
We'll bust the most common myths surrounding SEO content, and in subsequent
episodes we'll cover keyword selection per page, SERP & competitor
analysis, from structure to writing, content design and last but not least,
content revision.
What is very important to me: I'm not telling you
any theories or anything that I've somehow spun out, but what exactly we do and what
works wonderfully for our customers in practice. But let's start with
the first myth. Namely: keyword density as a ranking factor. What is keyword density,
put simply? How often does a word appear compared
to the total number of words on a page. And the myth is simple
: there's a magic percentage that if the keyword
appears that often, you'll rank better. My current view on this: Why my current view?
Because SEO is always changing, which means that's where it is today, and I
suspect it won't change much, but it's still a snapshot.
From my point of view, it is currently less about
keyword density and much more about keywords being installed in prominent
places. That is, let's say we have a
focus keyword for a specific page. Let's say our focus keyword is "women's shoes". Then it is important that the
term "women's shoes" appears in the title tag, in the H1, maybe also in
a subheading, maybe in the first 100 words, and so on.
Those would be prominent places. So it's not about letting this term appear
as often as possible, but that it appears in the important
visible places. By the way, there is a separate video where I explain how to place keywords
correctly on a page.
So.
If you now say: "Ok, but keyword density
still has a certain importance." I would say the importance is low,
but you can still see certain things, results. But there is still
no blanket answer like "XY% is the right answer", but – as always in the field of SEO
– it's about the competition per search query. This means that if you want to determine the right keyword density
for a specific page, then you have to look at this search query: What is the keyword density of the
top-ranked pages for this keyword? Then you have to ask yourself: Do
they fulfill the same search intention, or do these
pages have the same purpose? That means it can be
– that's quite often the case – that the search intention in the top 10 is different.
Let's say the first results are commercial, then there are non-commercial and so
on.
If you now have a commercial site, then you cannot compare yourself to
non-commercial results. Accordingly, you have to think a lot
about it, and that's easy for us – and why we simply consider the topic of keyword density to be extremely
unimportant because we believe that user experience is more important than keyword density.
And often, high keyword density just hurts the user experience, and that's worse
than keyword density being "perfect." Just an example for everyone who
can't visualize it: Let's say we have the page with the URL "../wordpress-seo".
The focus keyword is obviously “wordpress seo”. If we now
look at a keyword density checker, or at the keyword density analyzer –
sorry – then it's quite exciting. We analyzed this page
and you can see… I hope that I can now
find it for you very quickly. The word or
phrase "WordPress SEO" only occurs 18 times on this page , in over 11,000 words.
That means: As you can see, we rank number 1 there, the
keyword density is simply not that important. Just so you can
see an example of that. Now what are tools
to determine keyword density? There are tons of tools. That would be one of them.
Then of course most people work with YOAST-SEO,
the keyword density also tells you that. If you want to approach it more professionally
and generally play around a lot in the area of semantics, the PageOptimizer Pro is of course awesome.
We use that too. Or what is also an awesome
tool is Surfer SEO. This also offers a lot more about
content than “just” the keyword density now.
Fits. Let's get to the next
point, number 2: WDF*IDF as a ranking factor. Put simply, what is WDF*IDF? And
that's really the simplified form now, because it's just not that
important to understand exactly what that is. The formula calculates how your text compares
to other texts for the same keyword. Not only the keyword, but also other terms are considered and how
often they should occur. The myth is: WDF*IDF will help you get better rankings. And that is particularly
widespread in the German-speaking market. What is my current view on this now? WDF*IDF, to understand a little where it
comes from, was a hype staged by a German online marketer who didn't even really
focus on SEO. And that's exactly the problem: If there's no practice and you don't
really have to lead projects to success, then you use a model that has zero
to do with SEO and that was invented, I think, 50 years ago to do that
on what to apply where it doesn't fit at all. Is WDF*IDF now nonsense? No, you can definitely use it:
for researching subtopics and entities , just
to be able to fully understand and cover a topic.
That said, this isn't [ __ ], but optimizing a page to WDF*IDF
is complete [ __ ]. So what is really the
problem with the WDF*IDF concept? Different pages rank in the SERPs (search results)
, that is logical, but these pages
fulfill different intentions. That is, some pages are commercial and
cover that product, and some pages about that same product are non-commercial—i.e
., a review, and so on. That means I already have fragmented
intent – I've already got a lot confused. This means that
the picture is extremely distorted.
Let's say as an example: Partly rank in
the top 10 guides and partly landing pages. Then letting WDF*IDF run over
it is of course nonsense, because the pages generally rank
for different reasons. Then:
SERPs are dynamic. Accordingly, the values are constantly changing. Then: Actually, only the
top 10 are interesting anyway, that means, if you do a WDF*IDF analysis, then you
only have to analyze the top 10 anyway and nothing more. Anything else isn't very smart anyway. And what the extreme fallacy of WDF*IDF is: The existing pages that
rank here for this search query rank for perfect WDF*IDF.
But that's not the case. Because the main thing is that
the page is relevant to the search query, to the search intention – that's why the page ranks. Then of course there are many other
factors, but WDF*IDF is a mini-factor, but I would judge the whole thing by WDF*IDF
– makes no sense.
So. That means for research, i.e.
that you really have a complete picture of your topic – super cool.
Maybe also to find out which entities should appear in your
text – very practical. But an tweak of "this
word should appear that often" is, I think that's
pretty logical too, totally pointless. What are tools that can do this? There are free WDF*IDF analyzes
such as this one. Then again the PageOptimizer
Pro, which just maps it more so that you understand what other
important semantic terms are. Something like Surfer SEO, which is very
focused on content, can do that too. As for our myth number 3, namely: Gender is an SEO problem. This means that if I gender, I rank
lower.
What exactly is the myth: gendering, no matter how you do it,
is fundamentally bad for SEO. Please don't let this become a
political discussion. We gender on our site, but
for example if it's a short copy where gendering doesn't work
then we don't gender either. That said, we don't gender
at all costs, and I think that 's important to understand: gendering
isn't an SEO issue in principle. What is my perspective now? As long as you include your focus keyword
in prominent places, I don't see a problem with gender at all.
This means that if you use the variants with separators, i.e. gender asterisk, colon
and so on, then nothing changes at all, because in our experience,
special characters are more likely to be viewed as spaces from Google's point of view,
and Google generally doesn't care about spelling.
That means if it says in principle…
Let's take the example of drivers, you just have "driver + * + inside", then
Google will read "driver inside" anyway and now we could of course say:
"Ok, but if Google the asterisk If you don't see it, it would be a
spelling mistake and so on." Yes, but Google doesn't care anyway.
So, Google doesn't really care about spelling. Spelling is insanely
important as it is important for user experience and user experience is important
for SEO, but directly Google doesn't care. But what is important to say, and
this is again not a political issue: gender-neutral language, i.e. that
you really exclude words, is of course difficult from an SEO point of view, if you
then put important terms for which you want to rank in context of the topic no longer use.
Then gender is actually bad for SEO. That means I always see it like this: If the target group
uses certain terms, but you don't use these terms because of your gender concept,
you are no longer user-centric, but centered differently and you will feel it in
organic search and in sales.
That means gender is not a problem per se.
It only becomes a problem when you stop using your target audience's words,
then it becomes difficult to rank. Example of nothing happening at all: We gender on Evergreen Media
and our rankings are only going up. Accordingly: all good. Then we come to number 4, which is: Exact Match is always better. The myth: by
hook or by crook, you should incorporate your keyword exactly as you researched it, even if it's wrong
. An example would be "hotel achensee".
Of course, “hotel am achensee” would be correct.
“hotel im achensee” would now tend to be
bad, but “hotel am achensee” would. And we need to use it in a way
that we can rank somehow. My current take on this: Yes, Exact Match will continue to work.
However, it has massively lost importance that you really use exactly the
keyword on the page. Accordingly, if I
want to rank a page for "hotel achensee", then I still
correctly write "hotel am achensee", because there is no noticeable difference –
but there is a difference in terms of seriousness and thus user experience,
and so I rank better again . This means that Google is no longer in the Stone Age, but can
understand semantic relationships very well.
That means if that's a clumsy word,
then you just use it correctly, and not as clumsy as people
naturally search for it quickly-quickly. And then we come to the last myth, which is
just incredibly important, namely: the myth of adding keywords afterwards. What is the concrete myth now? Let's say we have a text, and it was written without a focus on the
demand and the target group. So 99.9% of the content that is
produced by companies. But: "It's all about the keywords anyway." That means we threw this text there
, and now I, as SEO, simply add the keywords, and then
everything is wonderful and the page ranks anyway.
What is my current view on this? This is just a classic fallacy
of traditional companies and people that have nothing to do with SEO, and their knowledge is just from
2007 – and that was a very, very long time ago. Especially on the internet, this is
like 200 years in the “real” world. Because good content is about
relevance to existing demand. And I really mean that
we hit what the user wants. It's about completeness, it's about topicality,
about legibility, and if it's a medical topic, for example, or YMYL (Your Money
Your Life), then it's also about accuracy.
If you don't now know what I
mean by Your Money Your Life, then there is a video where I explain for critical
niches, for example finance, medicine and so on, what
special rules apply at Google. So. Keywords are definitely a signal to say,
"This text is relevant to the query," but what really matters is that you
really hit what the purpose of that query was. In other words, from our experience it's like this: If
you've written a text now, but you haven't thought about what the user wants to
achieve with this keyword, you ignored who the target group is, and so on.
From our experience, this content has to be completely rewritten, you
can't "fix" it now. Then the statement often comes:
"Yes, but you can add text to it." Yes, then you have "Frankenstein content" and
the rest is still not user-centered and everything should be good
and everything should fit together.
That means it just doesn't work that way. And where does this perspective come from? "Just insert keywords
and just add some text." Because people don't understand the value of content.
But content is the ultimate value. The content ensures visibility. The content inspires trust. Content drives sales. "Without content, everything is nothing." This means that content should be seen as an asset
and not something that you can have an intern
or a broker write quickly, who has neither the SEO knowledge nor
knowledge about your company. There's a relatively cool
episode from Olaf Kopp and me where we talk about this topic "What is content
worth?" and how people get it wrong. Content is what counts.
Everything else is secondary. For now, those were the top myths you need to let go of before you
can produce really good SEO content.
In the next episode, you will learn how
to determine which keywords you primarily optimize a page for.
That you really know: These keywords should primarily appear in the text.
These are also the keywords that you should then measure , where you then measure
success. And that's the end of it. Thank you so much for watching and see you
next time. Bye!.
