The usage of synonyms versus the use of focus keywords is no exact science. The most important criterion is the way readers will experience your text. So, read and re-read it. Is it engaging and easy How often should you use to read? Or are you getting annoyed by the constant use of a certain term? Be critical of your writing and ask others for feedback on your text.
As mentioned earlier
you can add your related keywords to the analysis in Yoast SEO Premium and Yoast SEO for Shopify. By adding these, the plugin can check whether you’re using them in your text. Your focus keyword remains the most important keyword, though, and that’s why the plugin is less strict in its analysis of your related keyphrases.
You’ll also be able to add synonyms of your focus and related keywords when you use our Premium SEO analysis or Yoast SEO for Shopify. These analyses include checks to ensure you’ve used these synonyms in your text and your meta description, introduction, subheadings, or image alt text. Moreover, our keyphrase distribution check will reward you for alternately using your keyphrase and its synonyms throughout your text.
Make those related keyphrases and synonyms work for you
As we said earlier, Google has come a long way since the early days of SEO. It can understand texts, consider related concepts and synonyms, and recognize related entities. All this allows it to serve its users the best results. And part of being the best result is ensuring your texts are easy to read. Google wants to serve readable texts.
So make sure you deliver! Think of synonyms for your keyword or key phrase and use importance what is link building and how can it help your site grow of cannot them to your advantage. Take a moment to come up with a few alternatives for your keyword. But also think of topics that are strongly related to your keyword. You’ll notice that writing a naturally flowing text becomes much easier when you don’t have to use your focus keyword in every other sentence. Using synonyms and related keyphrases helps Google understand the context of your text, which increases your chances of ranking!
Conclusion
Focus keywords remain essential. These are the words your audience is dating data searching for. People searching for ‘candy’ will probably not click on a result with ‘delicacy’ in the text. If you search for ‘candy’, you’ll expect to see the exact word in the search results. So, matching the keywords of your audience remains important.
Using synonyms and related concepts helps you write a text on topic and full of the proper entities. Repeating the same keyword over and over again hurts the readability of your text, especially if you’re optimizing for a long-tail keyword. Furthermore, using synonyms and related keywords may create ranking opportunities you’d otherwise have missed. If you need help with that, Yoast SEO Premium and Yoast SEO for Shopify offer extra features to ensure your content is readable and rankable.