SEO Blog

Quite often you’ll find that you have a ranking for a term you aren’t even targeting. While it is related to your page’s content, it perhaps isn’t what you’re going after. But, as long as you are getting good rankings for your main keywords, this provides an invaluable bonus.

This usually comes about because you have a strong site, certainly in terms of links and overall authority. Somewhere in your content you may have used the phrase or word that you have earned a ranking for, Google then picks this up, recognises it within the context of your content and assigns you a ranking on that basis.

This is an important lesson for any copywriter. Whilst you want to make sure your keywords are used and prominent, you have to anchor them in some kind of context. This means using phrases that are related to the core message of the page.

Over time these will be picked up and search engines can use them to get to the bottom of what your page should rank for. This provides benefits for your primary terms as well as the ‘less important’ synonyms.

Don’t get carried away though, you don’t want to confuse the search engines entirely. Getting top rankings on a page for one term is difficult enough, you don’t then want to start suggesting that you actually want to rank for another. You could achieve both, but it’s best not to get too far ahead of yourself as it could backfire.

You might also find that you are ranking for misspellings of your terms too. This isn’t uncommon and can prove equally beneficial.

Don’t panic though, if you do have these kinds of rankings they are usually as a result of Google interpreting what the searcher was intending, not errors on your actual pages. Again, these should be treated as a happy coincidence and a bi-product of a successful, well-optimised site. You don’t actually want to go around misspelling terms left, right and centre just to improve these rankings. After all, it might get you traffic but it certainly won’t do much to improve your credibility.

So the lesson to be learnt here is that you want to always be mindful of how to add value to content by throwing in some related synonyms. This should come naturally anyway; just as with writing about any subject in depth, you tend to find ways to refer to the subject without using the same term repeatedly. It’s a very organic style of writing and is one that Google acknowledges and understands.

Getting some added rankings as a result is a fantastic bonus and should drive you on to develop content that really engages search engines and visitors alike.