How Keyword Stuffing Can Harm SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as it is commonly termed, is a crucial digital marketing activity aimed at improving a website’s search ranking, thereby attracting traffic.

At the heart of SEO are ‘keywords’ the search terms (words or phrases) that users enter into search engines to find information, products or services. Web pages can be optimised for certain keywords, for example by including them in the copy or title tags.

While optimisation for keywords is key to good SEO, overusing keywords can do more than good. This is known as ‘keyword stuffing’.

In this blog post, we examine what keyword stuffing entails, review how it can negatively impact a website’s SEO, and offer best practices for keyword targeting.

What Are Keywords?

Keywords are specific words or phrases that a web page targets in order to rank highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for that word or phrase. Keywords can be local or global, i.e. targeting a specific geographic area or not.

For example, a bakery might target local keywords such as ‘freshly baked bread in Guildford’ or ‘personalised cakes in Basingstoke’.

A travel agent may target global keywords such as ‘best ski resorts 2024’ or ‘budget holiday packages’.

When used effectively, keywords help search engines understand the relevance of the content on a page. This plays a large part in determining the ranking of search results for a given search term.

What Is Keyword Stuffing?

While targeting keywords is an essential part of SEO, ‘keyword stuffing’ refers to the excessive or unnatural use of keywords in order to manipulate search rankings.

In the early days of search engines, such tactics had traction. Since then, it has been determinedly diminished by search engine providers, all in the cause of improving user experience by rooting out unhelpful, untrustworthy, or spammy results.

Keyword stuffing can take several forms, including:

• Excessive, repeated use. For example: ‘Are you looking for personalised cakes in Guildford? Our bakery offers the best personalised cakes in Guildford. If personalised cakes in Guildford are what you’re after, then look no further!’
• Unnatural use or placement. For example: ‘Are you looking for personalised cakes near me?’, or a meta description that reads: ‘Bakery, personalised cakes, personalised cakes made to order’
• Hidden text: By colouring text the same as the background, websites aim to increase keyword frequency without diminishing user experience.

All of these tactics, and more, are more likely to harm your SEO than help it.

5 Ways Keyword Stuffing Harms Your SEO, Website and Business

There are five main ways that keyword stuffing can harm your SEO and marketing efforts in general.

1. Search Engine Penalties

Search engines reward sites that offer useful content and aim to avoid sites that partake in manipulative SEO practices, such as keyword stuffing.

This can come in the form of a penalty, whereby search engines de-rank sites or remove them from their indexes, making the sites impossible to find. Penalties are sudden and severe and can be extremely difficult to recover from.

2. Poor User Experience

Content overloaded by keywords often feels forced and is difficult to engage with. After all, who wants to read a blog titled ‘The 10 best Spanish resorts in Spain’? Such practices alienate readers and make for a poor user experience. Missed leads and a tarnished brand are the typical outcomes.

3. High Bounce Rates

A bounce rate measures the proportion of users who navigate back to the search results from a page. Search engines use bounce rate to understand the relevance and usefulness of a page.

If users spend on average a long time on a page, or click through to other parts of the website (low bounce rate), then the page will be deemed useful to their search term and rank more highly in the future. The opposite is true for users who quickly move away (high bounce rate).

When it comes to keyword stuffing, users aren’t going to stick around to read text overburdened by clunky keyword usage. The bounce rate will be high and the SEO will suffer.

4. Erodes Trust

These days internet users have a sixth sense for improper or spammy conduct online, and keyword stuffing is one of them. Such practices harm a website’s reputation and erode trust. Would you buy from a small business that blatantly engages in manipulative marketing practices?

5. Missed Opportunity for Engagement

Keyword stuffing takes up space. It also makes the text monotonous and tiring to read. By failing to use synonyms and natural language, a web page misses the opportunity to effectively engage with the audience it’s trying so hard to reach.

How to Optimise for Keywords Effectively?

Instead of stuffing your content with keywords, incorporate these best practices in your SEO:

• Use Keywords Naturally: Write content that uses the keywords in a natural manner, like you would in a conversation or email.
• Focus on Quality Content: More and more, search engines aim to reward high-quality content. Focus on this and the rest will follow.
• Include Synonyms and Related Terms: Use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to identify related keywords. A thesaurus might help too, just don’t swallow it
• Use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): LSI keywords are semantically related to your main target keyword, for example, ‘bakery’ and ‘bread’.
• If it feels off, it probably is: Trust your gut. If you feel your content is cooking the books, then there’s a good chance search engines will conclude the same.

Final Thoughts

Keyword stuffing is an outdated SEO tactic that is quickly and rightly becoming extinct. Not only does it harm user experience and your reputation, but it can lead to catastrophic Google penalties.

Create content that uses keywords authentically and naturally to help the user. It’s the only way to effectively target keywords and rise up the search engine rankings.