What is a focus keyphrase?

The focus keyphrase is the phrase that you want your post or page to be found for in search engines. Sometimes, it is a single word, but it usually consists of a few words. That’s why we call it a keyphrase. For example, if you want your blog post to rank for ‘healthy snacks’, then optimize your post for that term. Your focus keyphrase can also be longer. For instance, you could write an article about healthy snacks specifically made for kids and optimize for ‘healthy snacks for kids’. Or a post about healthy snacks to eat after a workout, and optimize for ‘healthy snacks after workout’. 

Why is the keyphrase length important for SEO?

There are different approaches to choosing a keyphrase for your posts or pages. You can choose to optimize your article for a short, generic keyword. These are the more common keywords that get a lot of search traffic. But, they also have a great deal of competition. Like, ‘snacks’, for example. A lot of people will search for this term. However, there will be many companies optimizing for it. In the image below, the body of the mouse represents these less specific keyphrases.

You can also choose to optimize for a longer, more specific keyphrase, represented by the tail in the image above. These longer keyphrases are also called long-tail keyphrases. They get less search traffic, but they usually have a higher conversion value. That is because they focus more on a specific product or topic. For example, a lot of people would probably search for the generic term ‘snacks’. And, fewer people would search for the long tail keyphrase – ‘healthy snacks for children’. Still, there’s a higher chance that the people who use the long tail keyphrase will find what they are looking for because they used a more specific term. 

Longer keyphrases make it harder to optimize your post. Since you’ll need to repeatedly use a large number of words close to each other, it will be hard to keep your copy readable. Of course, Yoast SEO Premium can help you solve that puzzle. It recognizes word forms and lets you optimize for synonyms and related keyphrases as well. It’s also the other way around: using a single focus keyword might make it easier to optimize the post. But it will be harder for that post to rank. The competition will be fiercer.

What does the keyphrase length assessment in Yoast SEO do?

The keyphrase length assessment checks whether the focus keyphrase is present and whether it is not too long. But what’s too long? To answer this question we’ll have to explain a bit what Yoast SEO does with your keyphrase, and which words in the keyphrase we count when assessing your keyphrase length.

What are the boundaries?

Back to the length of your keyphrase. In Yoast SEO, we’ll check how long your keyphrase is. And we’ll provide you with feedback if it’s too long. If it’s too long this might jeopardize the readability of your copy. Imagine using [easy to use and short site structure guide] more often in your copy. Even if you don’t have to write those exact words in the same order, this will probably result in a strange and unnatural text.

The boundaries we use for this assessment depend on whether we can take out the function words for your language or not. If we can, the boundary is four words. In case we can’t take them out, the boundary is six words. If your keyphrase is longer than that, you’ll find an orange or red bullet in the SEO assessment of your post!