To know whether your page needs targeting multiple keywords or have a singular keyword focus, you first need to ascertain how competitive your targeted terms/phrases are and how many of them carry the same visitor intent.

If a keyword is highly competitive, single page optimization is recommended so that the internal and external links that point to the page can focus more directly on the target phrase and give you a competitive advantage.

On the other hand, if your multiple keywords have different visitor intents, you will end up too much information on a single page, leading to a drop in conversion rates.

Single keyword focus can have its disadvantages too.

When you have a large number of target keywords, optimizing each page around a single keyword can be an expensive and tedious task. If you still wish to go down this route, it might lead to a couple of issues.

If content writers feels restricted to just one keyword per page, they might develop very thin content that doesn’t discuss the concept in a broad, useful manner. This in turn will require valuable information to be spread across multiple pages, potentially reducing the authority of each page.

The site will become larger than necessary, making it difficult for search engines to distinguish the unique values. It may even attract a Google Panda Penalty, which aims to lower the rankings of low-quality think sites or ‘content farms’. It is therefore recommended by professional web development companies to have 2 to 3% keyword density per content.

Let’s have a look at when optimization for multiple keywords is a good strategy:

Keyword Phrases

A keyword phrase is a set of separate words that build up a phrase, often deriving more targeted and specific traffic to the website. The order of the word within these key phrases and the use of stop words are important as Google tries to find the exact match of the query. It is advised to optimize your age with different variations of your focus keyword phrase.

Long-tail Keyword

Long-tail keyword is a combination of 3-4 keyword phrases, used to seek out a target purchase. Being very specific, they have less competition and are relatively easy to rank for than generic single or double keyword phrases. It also leads to higher sale conversion.

LSI Keywords

Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI Keywords are essentially keywords that are related to the keywords your consumers are searching for. These can be synonyms, substitutions or related keywords. Their use can help in retaining visitors to your site and reducing bounce rates by preventing your site for ranking for the wrong keywords.

Multiple Topics

Sometimes, a post can be about more than one topic, or have a few sub topics, which can easily fit into one article. In such cases, it is important to optimize for all relevant keywords to make sure your post ranks for more search terms.

While one strategy may seem more fruitful than the other, it should be chosen after thorough analytics research with regard to your business, customers and competitors. The main focus should be to create a content rich web page with optimal keyword density.