Early this year Google engineer Steve Baker blogged about the positive results of incorporating synonyms for keywords into websites. According to Baker, 70% of Google searches are affected by the use of synonyms, and out of every 50 inquiries where synonyms were pulled as part of the results, only one unrelated synonym was part of those results. Since synonyms/acronyms have such an impact on queries, Google now displays them in bold type. Traditionally, only keywords and close variations of those keywords, such as plural forms, were displayed in bold.
Synonyms are words that can be swapped for the same meaning, such as “Las Vegas” and “Sin City” or “internet” and “cyberspace”. Acronyms are words created from initials of a term, such as “cpu” for “central processing unit”. As users have become more comfortable with manipulating their queries to better represent the information they are searching for, it is important that businesses stay on top of keyword synonyms and acronyms that users may potentially use. Also, synonyms and acronyms are useful in creating content that is interesting, and not unbearably repetitive. In the screenshot below, we did a search for “SF hotels” and returned results on the first page with the words “San Francisco”. It’s interesting to see that none of the organic results on the first page actually include the keyword phrase “SF hotels”.
A great tool to use for researching keyword variations is the free Google Keywords Tool. In regards to using synonyms/acronyms it is important to be aware of the context you use them in. Google decides on these variations based on the accompanying words in the phrase, so that unrelated words do not show up in bold, for example “AAA” could mean “American Automobile Association” or “American Accounting Association”.
