Should I exclude prepositions in tracked keywords of moz analytics?

[osaka73]

I'm new to Moz.  Just set up my trial campaign, and it had suggested many keywords.  Many of the phrases that were suggested do not contain prepositions.

For example, instead of something like "sporting good stores in Chicago" it suggested "sporting good stores Chicago"

Today, I looked at the on-page optimization suggestions, which are (of course) suggesting that I remove prepositions from my page to rank well.

Well, as you know, that is unnatural to the reader.  But I suspect people are searching in higher volume, leaving the prepositions out.  I know that if I were to search for a sporting goods store in Chicago, I would probably leave out "in."

What should I do?  Should I remove all the suggested keywords, and make them readable (which people are less like using in their search?)  Do I go back to all my pages and try to optimize it for a keyword that is natural, but does not include a preposition (such as Chicago sporting goods stores) or should I be doing something else?

[gowebsol]

I would say let your keyword research do the talking. The tried and true method is to use your "seed" keywords, gather all the suggestions you can, measure which keywords hold the most value for you, and look for the opportunities. If one of your best opportunities has prepositions in it, there is your answer. I'm willing to bet you'll find valuable keywords that use them.

My observation is they don't carry much weight, but with voice searching on mobile, searches can be much more "conversational" when spoken into Siri or Google voice search. We tend to keep things short when we have to type it in, right? There is also Google's Hummingbird update, semantic search and natural language processing. WordStream did a great blog on this right after Google's Hummingbird update. I highly recommend you read the whole article. Here's an especially relevant quote:

"You only have to look at how accurate Google Now has become since its introduction to see that natural language processing is going to remain a major part of Google’s plans for search."

Overall, I'd use the prepositions. Natural language is important, sounds better, and the data is probably there suggesting you should keep it.

[LauraSultan]

I agree with Joey. Most prepositions are stop words, so they may carry less weight in the search algorithm. That's not to say they aren't important. I just searched "sporting goods stores in Atlanta" and "sporting goods stores Atlanta" and got very slightly different results for each.

The on page optimization suggestions are just suggestions to point you in the right direction based on keywords you entered into the tool. You should never sacrifice usability for your readers in order to satisfy an SEO tool. The tool is just a starting point.