Please... Help me convince my boss that Keyword Density is not-important / damaging.

[TaylorRHawkins]

If you can, please provide any and all talking points that I can use in this argument. It seems that no matter what I show him, including Matt Cutts' video debunking Keyword Density back in 2011, it doesn't seem to stick. He is fully, 100% convinced that keyword density is hugely important and we need to focus our time and energy on it.

Any sources you might have to help me show him that this is a myth would be hugely appreciated.

Thank you.

[LoganRay]

Taylor,

If you've already shown your boss data from a Google employee and that didn't work, nothing provided here will be convincing either.

I've been in similar situations where my boss has a different stance and the way we've always settled it is by running a test. This gives you your own data to prove your case.

Take a subset of pages on your site, split it in half and try your way and his way. Be careful in what you choose so it's not skewed one way or another; look at search volume for target keywords, current traffic volume, etc.

[effectdigital]

Well, you're partly right and partly wrong in what you are saying to your boss.

What you can assuredly say is that existing ranking positions are unlikely to increase based upon increasing your keyword density / saturation.

There are many forced at work within Google's ranking results. Of those, perhaps the largest two are authority (also sometimes referred to as popularity, but that's slightly broader) and relevance.

No matter how many times you mention a keyword on a web-page (in the content, in the Meta data, in file names, in contextual tags or Schema) that doesn't increase Google's perception of your website's authority or the individual web-page's popularity.

If a piece of content or a web-page is very relevant yet it's not found to be popular, useful or authoritative - you can bet your bottom dollar that in most query spaces the page won't rank.

If the query-space is innately low quality because hardly anyone has produced decent content, then you can rank just with relevance (sometimes even on the first page). Although that's true; most such query-spaces have diabolically low search volumes (and thus aren't really worth optimising for, unless you can figure out a way to do it en-masse and soak up lots of searches - but this usually involves expensive development and strategic content deployment work).

If web-pages are over-saturated with the same exact match keyword(s) over and over; the variant of the Panda algorithm now working inline from within Google's core algo-set is likely to 'kick off'. This can result in algorithmic devaluations or manual penalties from Google (be warned). An algorithmic devaluation is usually page or keyword level, whilst with many 'manual' Google penalties (where you get a notice in Google Search Console) - **you will fail to rank **for even your brand terms.

So what does keyword density affect? Well - it's true that using keywords (or keyphrases) and synonyms (or synonymical phrases) throughout the various different facets of on-page content, coding, Meta etc will impact the relevance of a page. That's _which _keywords the page will rank for. But will it increase or decrease existing or desired rankings by itself?

In a word - NO

Thank you for your time in reading