Updated 06/11/2024. Click here for our complete SEO glossary.

What is “keyword prominence” in SEO, and is it a proven ranking factor? And how do you make a keyword prominent?

What is keyword prominence in SEO?

Keyword prominence refers to how close to the beginning of a web page a given keyword appears. For your primary keywords, like money keywords, you’re going to want to make them prominent; for long-tail, there’s less need.

Search engine algorithms give more weight to keywords close to the top of the page. This makes sense – after all, if a keyword is appearing right at the start of a piece of content, it’s likely to be pretty relevant to the topic at hand.

Is keyword prominence a ranking factor?

You bet. And it makes sense: if you were to build a search engine from scratch, it would be a simple way of picking the best result between two otherwise-equal pages. It would be a good rule of thumb that the page which mentions the search term/a variant early on is more relevant to the user’s search intent.

People have said that keyword prominence is a ranking factor for decades, and although SEO changes fast, it still is. Here’s an excerpt from a 2021 John Mueller Q&A:

“I would recommend, if there’s something you want to tell us that your page is about, to make that as visible as possible. So don’t just put that as a one-word mention on the bottom.

Instead, use it in your titles, use it in your headings, use it in your subheadings, use it in your captions from images, all of these things to make it as straightforward as possible for users and Google when they go to your page that this page is about this topic.

So that’s kind of the direction I would take there. I would not worry whether Google can get to the word number 20,000. Because if you’re talking about the word 20,000 and saying this is the most important keyword for my page, then you’re already doing things wrong.

You need to ensure that the information that tells us what this page is about is as obvious as possible so that when users go there, they’re like, “Yes, I made it to the right page; I will read what this page has to tell me.”

How to make a keyword prominent

Easy: use the keyword in the page title, and/or a variant of it in the first paragraph of text. Use variants throughout the content without overstuffing it.

If you’re a beginner to SEO, follow these simple steps:

1. Pick a core keyword that you want the page to rank for: let’s say “buy garden gnomes online”
2. Use the keyword in the first 100 words of the page’s content
3. Use the keyword in the main page heading
4. Use the keyword in the page title (the text that appears in the tab when the page is open)

Alongside keyword prominence, you’ll also want to think about keyword density. Check to see how top-ranking pages for your keyword use that keyword: do they use it a dozen times, or more sparingly? And how does this compare to lower-ranking pages on page 2, 3, 4 or 5 of search? Don’t be ashamed to give Google what they want and follow their lead.

An example…

Here’s something of a meta-example. In this post, we’re targeting the keyword “keyword prominence”. So if you look in the page title–you can find it in the tab for the page in your browser–you’ll find the keyword there.

And there it is in the H1 heading.

Or, if you look in the first paragraph of text, you’ll find it there. And in the first H2 heading, too.

You get the picture!