You may have come across the term ‘keyword frequency’ while working in search engine optimization or as an AdWords advertiser, trying to grow your business. What does the term mean exactly, and how does it work? You’ll get all your answers in this article.
What Is Keyword Frequency?
Keyword frequency is how many times or how frequently a specific keyword appears on any given webpage or within a piece of content. The more frequently a keyword appears, the higher the keyword frequency is.
The relation between Keyword Frequency and SEO:
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the practice of affecting the visibility of any website or web page in a web search engines unpaid results, which is referred to as natural or organic results. The higher a website appears on the search results, the more visitors it will receive, who will later be converted into customers. And this is where the work of keyword frequency begins.
In order for a website to rank organically in the web search results for a specific keyword, it needs to contain that specific keyword. This is where you need to be aware of your keyword frequency. If it is too low, your website or webpage will have trouble ranking if the keyword frequency is too low. Search engines such as Google scans your content to decide whether your content is truly relevant to the keywords used in the query.
However, there is a certain black hat technique known as ‘keyword stuffing’ which is basically stuffing a content with keywords, turning the keyword frequency unnaturally high, sending a negative signal to the various search engines. Such techniques should be avoided.
Keyword Frequency and PPC:
Keyword frequency is not only important when it comes to organic search results. It plays an important role in paid search ads as well. If your keyword does not appear in your ads, then it will be read as less relevant to both search engines and searchers. It will lower your click-through rate and quality score, significantly increasing your costs.
But here too, like in SEO, too high keyword frequency can be harmful. Strong AdWords ads typically repeat the keywords only twice. It is important to keep the balance when it comes to keyword frequency because users are more prone to ignore ads that are stuffed with keywords.
Keyword Frequency &Keyword Density: The Difference & Similarities
The terms Keyword frequency and Keyword density are technically different terms for the same principle. Both these terms essentially refer to the frequency of the keywords appearing on any given webpage. Both terms mean same and can be interchanged while using.
Proper Keyword Frequency:
There are no set rules when it comes to Keyword frequency. Newcomers to the world of SEO and PPC look for guidelines and rules about it, but there are none. Instead, there are few general guidelines that you may follow.
There are many SEO professionals, according to whom, a keyword should only appear once every 200 words of copy. Meaning, you should only use a given keyword once every 200 words in your content. This rule also applies to the different variants of the same keywords.
Keyword Frequency: the user experience
It is important to consider the user experience while thinking about keyword frequency. Whatever the product may be, the content must be easy to read and understand. Including awkward and forced keywords will only ruin that easy experience for the user.
The keyword frequency can be calculated numerically as well. For example, a 1000 word blog post that has 10 unique instances of a keyword will have a keyword density of 1%.
Keyword Frequency: the importance
Even though Keyword frequency is important when it comes to the visibility of your website or webpage, it is only one among many factors. Before the search algorithms became more sophisticated, it was easy for the websites to get away with keyword stuffing; the black hat way of manipulating a page’s rankings. But in the present, these techniques have become useless, and harmful even, for those who use it.