Can you rank for keywords not listed on-page for SEO?

[ToledoRoofing]

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[Xiano]

You might do if Google felt the page was relevant, and backlinks with anchor text along those lines would certainly help increase that relevance, but I'm not sure why, if you've identified that "Custom Software Development" is a keyword you would like to rank for, that you wouldn't include it on the page? If I were trying to rank for that kind of term I would be including terms like custom and bespoke in my copy. Is there a specific reason you don't want to do this?

[EGOL]

Google recognizes synonyms and will often give you ranking credit for them.  We have a site that shares lots of photographs.  We call them  "photographs" on the site, but Google ranks our pages in the SERPs for many other keywords that do not appear on our site:  These include:   images, pics, pictures, photos, and more.  Google often bolds those keywords from the query in the SERPs - as if they appear on our page.

[jasongmcmahon]

Hello,

Yes you can for a number of reasons, the content of your copy & your backlink profile being the 2 main ones.