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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

Personally, I include the main keyword within the Title Tag and the H1 tag. I've also noticed ranking increases or decreases whenever I remove my target keyword from the title tag too so as a rule of thumb I include my core keyword in the title and H1 tag. I also work it into the main body content of the page I'm working on. If the page is relevant and on topic then it shouldn't be difficult to work your target keyword into your body content in a natural way. But the important thing to remember is to write in a way that is natural for the end user. I hope that helps some!

That's a big help thank you!

Ok, I think I see what you're saying, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Google. If I go directly to a page like this one (even incognito): https://www.shelfstuff.com/book-shelf/books/where-the-watermelons-grow/?id=9780062665867 ...and then go to the home page, I still see the book title in the browser tab. The title tag itself looks ok, but the sight is highly dynamic. I'm guessing this is some kind of strange JavaScript rewrite or something else happening in your code. Unfortunately, it would take an in-depth knowledge of your site code to sort out why. Is the site using AJAX or something similar? Definitely seems like pages are being created dynamically and not loading in a typical way.

Hi Rajesh, Yes, you are correct. If an image links to your site with no alt text, it will be reported as blank anchor test. It's always best to use alt text and make sure it's descriptive of the image. Cheers, David

Thanks for your advice. Yes, we will definitely be careful deleting pages. Thanks a lot!

Thanks, good to hear!

Hey Brett! Are you referring to refreshing a keyword list?  You first need to select the keyword checkbox and then hit refresh.  If they are not selected, they will not refresh.  If you are encountering problems, even with these instructions, please send us an email at help@moz.com so we can assist you! Thanks

Hello If you are a single product or single service website, you can definitely use the homepage to present that single product or service. However, if you sell even just two products or services, you're better off using inner pages for that. It's not that you'd get a penalty for using the homepage, it's just that it's much better site architecture to break the many products/services you may have into separate pages.

Hi Taylor, While I don't have the necessary time to do a complete audit, let's take a quick look at a few things here: Your client is at least not suspended. Their listing still exists at: https://www.google.com/search?q=orthopedic associates boise idaho&oq=orthopedic+associates+boise+id&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0l3.6373j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&npsic=0&rflfq=1&rlha=0&rllag=43612266,-116292485,1&tbm=lcl&rldimm=14815419333811269136&ved=2ahUKEwiIvfWg3P7cAhUmwcQHHWPdB0sQvS4wAHoECAEQEw&rldoc=1&tbs=lrf:!2m1!1e2!3sIAE,lf:1,lf_ui:2#rlfi=hd:;si:14815419333811269136;mv:!1m3!1d15.045442483230412!2d-116.29248519999999!3d43.612266299999995!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1!2i1!4f13.1;tbs:lrf:!2m1!1e2!3sIAE,lf:1,lf_ui:2 On the Contact Page of the Website, you are listing no street extension and a suite number. On the listing, you have no suite number. While Google doesn't pay attention to suite numbers, I am wondering why there is this discrepancy, which at the very least, is confusing for patients. So, that's something to clean up. The website is listing your client at W. Emerald. The GMB listing at Emerald St. Which is it? Choose one and clean the rest up. Your phone number is not the same on your Contact Page as on your GMB listing. Why is this? It should be cleaned up. On the GMB listing, you have listed no hours, have no photos, have only 1 review from a first-time reviewer, are not using Google Posts, or G Q&A. Your listing for this client is pretty empty and can definitely be improved. You have what I'm guessing is a practitioner listing for a Jeffery G. Hessing. It also features some NAP discrepancies you should check out. The fact that you have no Knowledge Panel appearing in the organic SERPs when I search for the brand "Orthopedic Associates Boise Idaho" leads me to believe that Google just doesn't feel it knows much about the business. So, I'd fully utilize all of the GMB features and put a review acquisition campaign in place to help this business start having more information for Google to dive into. When I do non-branded search for just "orthopedist boise idaho" you are not being filtered out by Possum, which is good news. You are ranking in the 11th spot and likely need to invest in both local and organic SEO to start moving up the rankings. On August 1st, there was a Google algorithm update released. Some have called it the "medic update", though Gary Illyes of Google says it didn't specifically target health-related sites. Have you read up on this? If the date your client's rankings dropped is around August 1st, it would be important to read everything you can about this update to see if your client appears to have been impacted by it. Dr. Pete wrote a good post here on Moz: https://moz.com/blog/googles-august-1st-core-update-week-1 Firing up Moz Check listing, it looks like there is a lot of work to be done with your citation completeness, and, of more concern, look at the duplicates tab. https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMk9ydGhvcGFlZGljJTI1MjBBc3NvY2lhdGVzJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyODM3MDQlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjJPcnRob3BhZWRpYyUyNTIwQXNzb2NpYXRlcyUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjg4NTQlMjUyMEVtZXJhbGQlMjUyMFN0JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyODM3MDQlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjIyMDgzNzgyODY4JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIydXMlMjUyMiUyNTVE You have a serious issue going on with duplicate Google listings both for the practice and for Dr. Hessing. Each of these must be appropriately addressed. This article may help you: https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing The presence of claimed duplicate listings is a violation of Google's guidelines, and even if they are unclaimed, they could certainly be impacting your ability to rank as this client as you'd like to. So, those are some issues I'm seeing at a glance. I recommend that you investigate all this, do a complete competitive audit for this client, and perhaps, hire a Local SEO to consult with your agency to help get basic local search marketing going for them. There are quite a few issues going on here that could directly or indirectly explain your client not ranking very well. Hope this helps and good luck!

It could be, it likely depends on if the important keywords are still part of the title. If they're not, then you might have a hard time ranking for it.

Hi there! In my personal and professional opinion, either have a blog or you dont. If you have, you must destine the resources needed and be part of the strategy. Having a content site just for the sake of having it is useless and can tell users that you dont care and/or that you are lazy with other parts of your products/services. There is no experiment (to my knowledge) that proves the need of a blog to rank well in the principal keywords. Usually, blogs or content sites are a part in a big content strategy, where you can target other more semantic and/or answer questions about your products. I'd like to think it as you are creating a conversion funnel, where blog posts, content in other sites or any content is somewhat convincing users about your products/services. Having a correctly structured content site (or blog) could help somehow through internal linking to express more clearly the anchor/keyword intent for some specific pages. Also, always consider that if you can attract users a little interested in some of your products, you are getting a share of visibility that you didnt have without the content site. Hope it helps. Best luck. GR

Hey!  Dave from the Help Team here, Most discrepancies in keyword rankings are caused by the way Moz is querying Google and other search engines. Our process completely strips personalization from the query. This means that it's more representative of a national average for all searchers in the country, but it also means that you may not be able to reproduce these exact SERPs within your browser because your location is factored into your search results. One of the SEO experts in our community offered a really great explanation of this difference here. If you are seeing some big discrepancies that don't seem to make sense to you, please shoot us an email at help@moz.com with some examples, we would be happy to take a look for you! thanks

Hi There, I hope your problem was solved, I have seen many such instances where Moz support has acted diligently and helped get the refund. If you have got the refund, you should mark this as solved to help others. Best Regards, VJ

Thanks for the question. It isn't uncommon for there to be strange 404 errors in Search Console with little information/bad information. They are working hard to improve this, but I wouldn't take everything you see there as set-in-stone. This doesn't sound like a negative SEO tactic. I would just mark them all as fixed, and see if they appear again in about a week. If they do, I'd make sure they are actually served as 4xx status and not worry too much about it. If you want to do more digging... Some ideas of where you could look further Logs logs logs. This will be the ultimate truth - you will be able to see whether or not GoogleBot is actually hitting those URLs. It could be something weird happening with a plugin of yours that generates those URLs (particularly on Wordpress). Perhaps you have a filtering system setup that generates these URLs? If you have a search function on the site, sometimes weird URLs can be generated through that. Do the URLs come-up when you crawl the site at all? Just a few ideas!

Thanks, Buddy!