Keyword optimisation: how much is too much?

There was a period when the answer to this question was a number. Two per cent keyword density, or three, depending on whose blog you read.

That period ended a long time ago, and the number was never real anyway. But the underlying question is still worth answering, because over-optimised copy remains one of the most common things we find on sites that are underperforming.

The short answer

Write for the person reading it. Use the keyword where it belongs naturally. If you have to force it, either the sentence is wrong or the keyword is.

That’s genuinely the whole rule. Everything below is why.

Why density rules died

Early search engines counted words. If a page said “Adelaide plumber” more often than the next page, it was presumed more relevant. Predictably, people gamed it, and pages appeared with the phrase repeated three hundred times in white text at the bottom.

Modern search engines don’t work this way at all. They interpret meaning rather than count strings. A page about plumbing is recognised as such through related concepts, entities and context, whether or not it repeats an exact phrase.

Which means the exact-match repetition that once helped now mostly signals that someone was trying too hard.

Hidden text

The oldest trick in the catalogue: text visible to search engines but not to visitors. White on white, positioned off-screen, hidden behind CSS, sized at zero.

This has been detectable and penalised for two decades. There’s no version of it that works.

It still appears occasionally, usually inherited rather than deliberate. If you took over a site from a previous provider and rankings behave inexplicably, it’s worth checking. View the page source and read what’s actually in the HTML, or select all the text on the page and look for anything that highlights but isn’t visible.

Keyword stuffing, deliberate and accidental

The deliberate version is obvious and rare now.

The accidental version is far more common, and it looks like this:

Our Adelaide SEO services provide expert Adelaide SEO for Adelaide businesses. As a leading Adelaide SEO company, our Adelaide SEO specialists deliver Adelaide SEO results.

Nobody set out to write that. It happens when someone is told a page needs to target a phrase, and conscientiously works it into every sentence.

Read anything you have written aloud. If it sounds strange spoken, it reads strangely too, and both your visitors and the search engine will notice.

What over-optimisation looks like now

The failure mode has shifted. Modern over-optimisation is subtler:

Exact-match phrases wedged into every heading. Every H2 containing the target phrase in an identical form.

Unnatural anchor text. Internal links all using the same keyword-rich phrase rather than describing what’s on the other side.

Padded content. A four hundred word answer stretched to two thousand because someone read that longer pages rank. Length is a symptom of thorough coverage, not a cause of ranking.

Near-identical pages. Separate pages for every suburb, differing only in the place name. Search engines recognise this pattern easily and it’s a good way to have most of them ignored.

Content written to a checklist. Every heading present, every entity mentioned, and no actual point being made. Increasingly common, increasingly obvious.

The consequences

Mild cases simply underperform. The page reads badly, visitors leave quickly, and it never ranks well.

Serious cases attract an algorithmic demotion, which appears as a sudden ranking drop with no obvious cause. Deliberate manipulation can attract a manual action, which is a human at Google reviewing your site and applying a penalty, visible in Search Console.

The good news is that none of it’s permanent. Fix the underlying problem and rankings recover, though rarely as fast as they fell.

How to fix it

Read it aloud. Nothing finds awkward optimisation faster.

Rewrite for the reader. Take the keyword out entirely, write the best version of the page you can, then put the phrase back only where it genuinely fits. Usually the title, one heading, and once or twice in the body is plenty.

Use natural variation. Search engines understand synonyms and related concepts. “Search engine optimisation”, “SEO”, “improving your rankings” and “getting found on Google” are all understood as the same territory. Varying them reads better and costs nothing.

Vary your anchor text. Describe the destination rather than repeating a keyword.

Merge near-duplicate pages. One strong page beats five thin variations, almost always.

Reconsider the keyword. If a phrase genuinely can’t be worked into a sentence naturally, that’s information. It may be industry jargon rather than something people say, in which case the keyword research needs revisiting rather than the copy.

The test

Would a knowledgeable person, writing for another person, with no interest in search rankings at all, have written this?

If yes, the optimisation is fine. If no, no amount of keyword placement will rescue it.