How to Use Keyword Variants for SEO

When you or your internet marketing company is plotting out your keyword targets for either pay-per-click advertizing campaigns or on-page keyword focus in your content, don’t forget to consider all the keyword options that are on the table. Alternative keywords can be great resources for hits, and what’s even better is that they are less expensive to achieve as there’s less competition. Don’t follow your keyword tools by the book. Think outside the box. Let’s look at how to use keyword variants for search engine optimization.

What are Keyword Variants?

Keyword variations go far beyond typical misspellings, which is what most people assume they are. While misspellings are important to completely targeting the market, you’ve got a lot of other options to look at when it comes to keyword variety. Keyword variants are any spellings related but slightly different from the main spellings that are targeted to increase a website’s rank for alternate keywords.

Misspellings

These are obvious, as who really spells restaurant correctly when they’re typing it into an iPhone looking for a good burger joint? Get creative with spellings, as bad spelling can be key to your business. Several tools are great for generating misspellings that get hits, like Microsoft’s Keyword Mutation Detection and Keyword Discovery.

Acronyms

Words that use letters from a multiword phrase, acronyms can be great targets for keyword variants. Remember to include acronyms with periods and without.

Synonyms

Try 2 completely different keywords that mean the same thing or are closely related, such as soda, pop, or soda pop. Everyone has their favorite phrase to search for, so hitting all synonyms keeps you from missing key portions of your audience.

Action Words

If you are targeting for an action word, don’t forget to use variations of the verb, including past tense and “ing.” Don’t lose your audience to keywords too limited in scope.

Don’t Keep Certain Variations on Separate Pages

Last but not least, don’t target close variations of a keyword on separate pages unless you’ve got good justification. When the keyword variation doesn’t vary that much in subject or scope, you’re better off targeting it on the same page. There’s no need to venture into spammy territory. Provide quality content that makes sense. When the keyword variants seem to fit together, they’ll work better on a single page.

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