To begin today’s SEO analysis I pointed my Chrome to Google Insights for Search. I was curious to know the 90-day volume for the term “SEO” in the Los Angeles metro to see what the marketplace is doing. Most importantly, I wanted to see how keyword combinations were trending for that term. My search revealed that “google seo” is the most popular phrase with regard to SEO in my target geography.

Next I conducted a simple Google search for “google seo los angeles” which returned 28 million results. The top organic result belonged to SocialMediaforSEO.com, a media services company on Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles. For the remainder of this post I lift the hood on this website to learn what they’re doing to pop number one on Google for LA SEO.

Here’s the top organic search result snippet for “google seo los angeles:”

Google places SEO - local SEO Los Angeles

www.socialmediaforseo.com/google-places-seo/

Google places SEO, internet marketing for local Los Angeles business entries and enterprise needs to address Google places SEO as a viable commodity of cost… 

The number of times each keyword repeats in this search snippet:

“SEO” - 6

“Google” - 4

“Los Angeles” - 2

A list of how many times each keyword and keyword phrase appears in the HTML coding for the “google-places-seo” page:

“SEO” - 156 including title (twice), every link and menu

“Google” - 43 including CSS file name

“Los Angeles” - 19 including title, menu, and links

“Google Places SEO” - 17 including h1, h2, h3, h4, CSS classes, menu

“Local SEO Los Angeles” - 6 including menu

Discussion

Social Media has done their work to include numerous occurrences of the above keywords in their “google-places-seo” page. While that is admirable, are they guilty of keyword stuffing? Google considers a site having crossed the line into keyword stuffing when the number of keywords interfere with the usability of a particular site, or create a “negative user experience” as they put it. Here’s the first sentence of main content from the Social Media website:

“Google places SEO, internet  marketing for local Los Angeles business entries and enterprise needs  to address Google places SEO as a viable commodity of cost effective search engine marketing  internet marketing and advertising.”

At first examination, the word block above appears to be a sentence fragment crammed with keywords. Perhaps it’s just written poorly, but I had a difficult time reading through all the paragraphs on their page. That raises an issue for website designers as well as their clients: website content must be well written to be taken professionally – and seriously – by website visitors, the people clients hope patronize their establishments. If a site is keyword crammed just to pop on Google, it will be obvious to the user and they will most likely move on to the next search result.