Should You Use Acronyms In Your Content?
Here’s a good discussion on the use of jargon and acronyms in marketing content. The discussion is just as relevant for search engine optimization efforts, maybe more so. After all, with good quality content you are not just selling, your are selling and optimizing. And if you are using acronyms for your optimization efforts it means that you expect searchers to perform search queries for those acronyms at the search engines. Will they? If they do, will they search for the acronym more often than the term it represents?
I like Grok’s blog post because it shows a little bit of both sides of the argument. On the one hand, jargon (or acronyms) can be a turn-off. On the other hand, it can be a turn on for the right audience.
Here are my thoughts on the acronyms within content topic:
- No. 1, know your audience. If your audience is not highly technical then acronyms may not be the right way to go.
- Perform your keyword research thoroughly. Do people in your market search for the acronym? Do they search for the acronym more than the term it represents? If so then you might optimize your site for the acronym, but if you do then you are leaving out the people who will search for the term and not the acronym. It’s usually best to go after as wide berth of your target as possible.
- Given point No. 2 above, you might want to optimize your website for the term your acronym represents while throwing in moderate uses of your acronym to keep the technical terms in your reader’s minds, but also to keep them in the search bots’ eyes.
Acronyms can be tricky business. Many acronyms have different and unrelated meanings. For instance, RWW stands for ReadWriteWeb, but it also stands for Remote Web Workplace and Radio Wireless Week. For this reason, you will want to associate the acronym on your web pages with your specific industry as well as with your specific company. Using acronyms as search terms in and of themselves could prove to be disastrous, but you know your customer better than I do. If 90% of your market would search for the acronym, who am I to argue with 90%. Just know that’s what it is before you target it.
4 Responses to “Should You Use Acronyms In Your Content?”
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I also look at what the search engines are looking for on the page in addition to the keyword, or on other pages on the site related to what the site’s main theme is supposed to be. I think this is touching upon “LSI” or Latent Semantic Indexing (there I go – the acronym and the whole thing spelled out). As we spend a lot of time dealing with SEO issues, we know that Google’s algorithm deals with and understands synonyms and the closer the synonym is in meaning to the keyword or keyphrase, the more “relevancy” that synonym has – so why not acronyms too? I personally think it’s a good idea to start out with an acronym like SEO, followed by Search Engine Optimization spelled out just to give the newer, less tech savvy visitors what they need to follow the rest of the piece, and maybe a few paragraphs down include the whole phrase again spelled out completely in case the visitor has forgotten it (short term memory is only about, what, 30 seconds?). Then use the acronym after that exclusively.
When an acronym does have more than one meaning, I’m of the opinion that Google understands the meaning in the context of the remaining content on the page. Computer sites using the word “mouse” don’t rank well for rodent searches, just as rodent exterminator web sites don’t rank well for computer mice… but in either case, you make an excellent point. I would use and rely upon the acronym far less frequently if it has multiple meanings, and make sure I used negative keyword filters in PPC to remove any terms that might associate my ad with the “other” acronym meaning.
Hi Suthnautr – Thanks for reading, great point about the “mouse” example…
Intersting article. I would agree that to use both, the acronym and the actual words is best. Another reason for people to use acronyms when searching is lazyness, we all tend to go for the easiest option when typing.
Rifki
Hi Rifki Jones,
This is so true, we all have become very lazy with the time that we spend searching…thanks for the comment!