4 min read

Put your keyword in four places, then stop

Google reads a few fixed places on a page to work out what it's about. Get those right and the rest of the page can be written for people, not for a crawler. That's the whole trick, and it takes ten minutes per page.

Say you want a page to rank for "handmade dog collars". Here are the steps:

  1. Put the words in the page title
  2. Put them in the URL, like /handmade-dog-collars
  3. Put them in the main heading on the page
  4. Put them in the first sentence

That's it. Don't repeat the keyword all over the page. Write the rest like you'd explain it to a customer.

A web page with the four keyword steps marked: the page title in the browser tab, the URL, the main heading, and the first sentence

The URL counts the most

Google reads the URL before it even opens your page, so it's the strongest of the four. Folder names do nothing, and that catches people out: a page at /shop/red-collar gets no help from /shop/. The keyword has to be in the page's own part of the URL.

More mentions make things worse

The instinct is to work the keyword into every paragraph. People who run SEO tests keep seeing the opposite: take keywords out of a stuffed page and it often ranks higher. To Google, a page that repeats its keyword twenty times looks like spam.

Two versions of the same page: one repeats the keyword in nearly every line and is marked stuffed, one uses it once near the top and is marked clean

Pages in that 8 to 20 range are the ones to start with. Google already sees them as candidates, and a placement fix is often all they're waiting for. If your Search Console data is wired into Claude over MCP, finding them is one prompt. And once the four places are right, the same page is usually your best candidate for ranking for more keywords.