Keyword research – remember “stop words”

For those that may perhaps be unclear on the use of “stop words”, search engines (especially Google) do not take stop words into consideration when delivering results based on the users search query. There are exceptions to the rule, of course.

So how does this play a role in keyword research? Previously, Google’s External Keyword Tool delivered a fairly accurate set of results for your queries. Over the last couple of months, there have been minor updates to the engine, such as the Google Suggest feature that many of you will have seen when typing a query into Google (launched August 2008). Since then we have been noticing additional “incomplete” phrases that appear amongst the keyword results when performing keyword research using the Google External Tool. And when choosing the final keywords for SEO, people occasionally include these “incomplete” phrases in their final list owing to the high search volumes attached to them.

Let me explain why this is not the best approach to keyword research. As I’ve just mentioned, stop words are not always used when delivering results for a specific query, as seen below:

For the query “accommodation in london”, “in” has been left out of the query, which focuses on the words “house” and then “home” to deliver what Google thinks may be the best set of results for your search. The results for the above query also go on to highlight that the stop word “in” has not been used to deliver the results for the query.

So where do the incomplete keyword phrases come into play? Let’s use “accommodation” as an example again. When researching “accommodation” phrases within the Google External Tool you’ll find a set of results similar to what you see below.

“accommodation in” is perfect example of an “incomplete” phrase; the final word within the phrase is missing, yet we have over 500 000+ searches a month for this “incomplete” phrase. There are a number of other examples for this, such as “hotels in” for location based searches or even “spare parts for” when searching for brands. It’s easy to see the desire to choose the “incomplete” phrase and try to optimise for it where the search volumes indicated are so high.

So, how come there is such a high search volume for an “incomplete” phrase? Google Suggest may very well to be main reason for these results. Let’s look at another example. When searching for “accommodation in” within Google we are given a list of suggested search queries that may be what we are looking for.

For some users it may be easier for them to select the relevant option from the list above without having to continue typing out the full query. This creates a slightly different Google search URL generated for the search.

search?hl=en&q=accommodation+in+london&meta=&aq=3&oq=accommodation+in

Notice in the above example that the original search query has been appended to the URL, while the query that delivers results is the full query selected from Google Suggest. Both queries have been used, which contributes to the results seen using Google’s External Keyword Tool. While the search volumes may be high on the “incomplete” keyword phrases, the final full query will be the query that drives visitors to sites listed in the results.

Remember that when search engines evaluate onsite content for keyword relevance, stop words are not taken into account (among a vast amount of other on page factors). In the same way many people look to work out keyword densities for optimised content, stop words are ignored when calculating keyword density for a page. Keep in mind volumes are guidelines to what people are searching for, high volume phrases are gold when optimising, and along with relevance and a small understanding of the how users search you have a winning combination for your next keyword research project.

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Tags: keyword research, stop words