Effective Text Optimization Strategies for Better SEO Rankings

The content written on a page is how a search engine determines whether a page matches a query, and therefore how to rank it in the search engine for users search engines google rely on, and how that content will support search engine optimization seo, traffic generation, and business growth.

This is where textual factors come in, acting as clear signals that help search engines evaluate content quality, keyword usage, and whether the content truly meets the search intent behind each query.

Textual factors refer to the information that we can gain from a piece of written content, including structure, keyword density, keyword frequency, and overall content relevance for the target audience. From its literal meaning to its subtext, and from headings to alt text and internal links, every element of content creation matters.

This is how search engines decide on the meaning of content, and therefore how to rank it and how that content ranks in organic search results compared with competing web pages.

Why is it important to consider textual factors?

Textual factors do not lose their significance in determining a site's ranking, but they become more complicated every year as algorithms, ranking factors, and content optimization requirements evolve across google search and other platforms.

By focusing on these factors, we can create high-quality texts that attract visitors and improve behavioral factors, increase engagement, boost click-through rates, and help search engines trust your domain as an authoritative website.

The main textual ranking factors on a site

There are several indicators used to determine the quality and relevance of a piece of text, to a user's query, and to ensure that the content types on a site match user intent and deliver measurable value.

Uniqueness

Your text should be unique to your page and site, and the content should not repeat existing web pages on your domain or other domains. Without it, Google will not be able to discern your page's information from another making it harder to compete in organic search and rank higher for competitive keyword terms.

For this reason, uniqueness is one of the most important ranking factors for any piece of online content that aims to drive traffic and conversions.

How to ensure your text is unique?

• Copywriting – This means getting a copywriter to write unique content for you. By doing this you can ensure your text is unique to your site and aligned with your brand awareness, products, and services.

• Rewriting – This means rewriting a text that has already been written. You may be taking the general meaning that the text is trying to convey, but it will be in your own words, with updated examples, case studies, and more detailed content.

Using software to reproduce a piece of content. This is a riskier means of creating new texts. Whilst it may be quicker and easier, there is a risk that these texts will contain errors and be less readable to a human, reducing content quality, trust, and engagement.

For this reason, we recommend that you refine any texts that are created using this method, review the content manually, and ensure that each article, blog section, and landing page offers unique, useful information.

Duplicate content within your site

Identical content on the same site, even slightly modified, can negatively affect the visibility of the site in the SERP and confuse indexing. This is because your pages will be competing with one another, giving you less chance of reaching the top 10 in the SERP or achieving strong rankings for a single keyword.

Semantic core

After checking how unique your site's text is search engines will then determine the semantic core of the text, evaluating keyword usage, related keywords, and overall content relevance.

These are the queries (or keywords) present in your text. A higher ranking will be given to sites whose semantic core is most relevant to the keywords that users are using in their searches and whose content matches the exact search intent.

To save time when forming your page's semantic core, you can use the search engine's services such as Google AdWords, etc. to find a selection of keywords, analyze keyword frequency, and identify which keyword appears early in competitor content.

LSI

Search engines use latent semantic indexing to analyze the degree of a site's relevance to a query, compared with competing pages that cover the same topic.

Simply put, LSI keywords are words that are semantically related to the main keywords. These can be synonyms or words that are contextually relevant to the main keywords and the overall topic of the article.

If you were writing an article on 'dog walking', you may also mention 'dog leads', 'dog parks', 'hiking', 'water bowls' etc. to create quality, useful content that actually answers different related questions.

By using LSI, you are showing to the search engines that your text covers your given subject in a broad and in-depth manner and that the content contains multiple relevant keywords instead of keyword stuffing.

Density, frequency, and weight of the keywords

The density of keywords is the percentage usage of the keywords in relation to the total text, word count, and overall length of the content.

This can be used by search engines to determine a web page's topic, measure keyword relevance, and identify whether the content is over-optimized or naturally written.

Previously, the criterion for matching a web page to a search query was the frequency of the keyword within the text. The more often it was used, the more relevant the content was considered to be. This led to low-quality, unreadable content, as keywords were stuffed into a page as much as possible.

As a result of this, the relevance of a text began to be determined by the weighting given to the word in the TF-IDF statistics document. This is an analysis technique used to determine how important a word or phrase is to a piece of content when compared to the other more typical words we would expect to find in any text such as 'the' or 'and'.

Overstuffing a page is now a way of getting penalized, but also not using your keywords enough means that your page will also unlikely be in the top 10, so you must calculate keyword density carefully and avoid extremes.

BM25 function

The BM25 function (BM stands for 'best match') and its more modern update 'BM25F' is a TF-IDF-like ranking factor. It shows the relevance of a page to a keyword depending on the number and location of keywords in the text (excluding links) and how that content compares to competitor documents.

When analyzing the relevance of a text, search engines use the BM25 ranking function to analyze the exact occurrences of a keyword in a text, and where they occur. For example, the relative location of other words from the keyword in the document, the combination of the title tag with the text of the document, etc.

Location of keywords

Although not as important as it used to be, the presence of a keyword in the title tag still holds important weight as an SEO signal for page ranking and organic visibility.

According to research, title tags starting with a keyword tend to work better than title tags with a keyword at the end, particularly when the title also clearly communicates the content purpose to readers.

Search engines do not use the description meta tag as a ranking signal, however, as this tag is likely what will be seen from the SERP it can still affect the CTR. The CTR is an important SEO factor, therefore time should be spent creating the most attractive meta descriptions and ensuring they accurately reflect page content to drive clicks.

The keyword must be present in the H1 header, which, together with the Title tag, is used by search engines to determine the relevance of the page to the keyword and assess how well the content aligns with the query.

The appearance of a keyword in the first 100 words has a strong correlation with the sites ranked on the first page in Google search results. For this reason, we recommend always including your keyword in the first 100 words in a natural, concise sentence.

The presence of a keyword in the H2 or H3 subheadings can be another, albeit not a very significant sign of relevance since it helps search engines determine the structure of the page and helps readers navigate content sections quickly.

Ranking with several keywords

If a page is ranked by several keywords, this can be a sign of quality to the search engines as it shows a broader coverage of a topic and that the content ranks for multiple related keywords and queries.

Compliance with user Intent

The intent behind a keyword represents the intention of the user. There are three typical types of intent: commercial, informational, and mixed, and the content must match that intent.

Commercial intent implies the intent to buy a product or service. Whilst informational implies the user simply wants to find out information on a given subject. Mixed is when both intentions are combined.

Ensuring your text aligns with the intent of the user, and what your page offers, is an important ranking factor and a core part of any seo strategy.

The search engines can see whether your text is aligning with what the user has searched for by analyzing user behavior. For example, the page's clickability in the SERP, how long the user spends on the page, and whether the user bounces back from the page quickly (an indication that it did not satisfy the user's needs).

Ensuring you optimize your text to meet the user's intent is key to ranking well in the SERP and improving long-term organic performance.

Covering a topic completely

There is some correlation between how 'complete' the coverage of a topic is and how it ranks on Google. Consequently, pages that cover all sides of an issue are likely to have an advantage over pages that only partially cover a topic.

Comprehensive content that answers common questions, provides examples, and offers clear, practical guidance tends to perform well, earn more backlinks, and support overall seo practices across the website.

Text volume

This indicator is important primarily because the number and weight of keywords depend on the text volume. This, in turn, affects the site's ranking and whether the content meets user expectations for depth.

According to expert opinion, texts from 1000 to 4000 characters are considered optimal. This volume is sufficient to ensure the desired keyword density, at the same time it is not too large and is suitable for quick reading by busy readers.

When creating commercial text, we advise focusing on the text length and density of keywords that your competitors in the top 10 are using for their pages, and to review how their content is written and structured.

Table of contents

Using a table of contents that includes links to relevant sections of the text can help search engines better understand the content of your page. It may also lead to additional clicks on links within your site.

Such navigation elements improve usability, reduce the chance that people will skip content, and provide clear signals to search engines about the hierarchy and structure of your article.

Structuring your text

Don't use large chunks of text, instead break them down into logical sections, using subheadings for each section. This makes the text flow, looks less daunting to the user, and helps them to better understand what they will be reading about in the text by seeing clear headings.

Bullet points and numbered lists also help to break up the text making it easier for the user to read, improve readability, and support accessibility guidelines.

Punctuation and spelling

Search engines require that the norms and rules of the language being used are followed. Only well-written texts tend to gain those higher positions in the SERP.

Incorrect grammar or spelling can be an indicator that the page has not been well thought out and may not be high quality. Not only can this affect a page's reputation in the eyes of the search engine, but also in the eyes of the users too. A user is unlikely to see a page as an authoritative source if it is badly written.

Easy-to-read fonts

For writing text, it is recommended to choose a font that will be easy and convenient to read, supports different devices, and maintains high readability on mobile and desktop.

Updating content

Search engines prefer recently published or updated content, also known as 'fresh content'. This is especially true for keywords with a time factor such as news articles, etc.

Google even shows the date of the last page update, indicating that this is likely an important factor to them and that regular updates to core content can enhance visibility.

The scale of content updates

The significance of edits made to the text is also considered by search engines and modern seo algorithms during content analysis and overall ranking analysis.

Adding or removing entire sections is more important than changing the order of a few words or correcting a typo, because such edits can change keyword density, keyword relevance, internal links, and the intent the content serves for the target audience.

Useful content

Today, search engines have learned to identify high-quality and useful content for users by using many of the factors we have discussed above to analyze the written text, its keyword usage, keyword density, behavioral signals, and how the content matches user intent and query terms.

How to evaluate a site's textual factors?

The placement of a unique, optimized, and well-written text is becoming an increasingly important ranking factor, closely connected with other ranking factors such as internal links, loading speed, and technical seo.

If you wish to analyze the quality of the text content of your site, you can use Labrika's content tool for in-depth seo analysis and strategic planning.

It will analyze your page's text according to the main ranking factors we discussed above, including keyword density analysis, TF-IDF analysis, BM25 analysis, and semantic core analysis for every important keyword and for groups of related keywords.

It will then offer recommendations on how to improve and compete with your competitors in the top 10 of the SERPs, taking all the guesswork out of it for you and supporting your long-term seo strategy and content strategy.

Using such data-driven seo practices and following each recommendation as a clear step-by-step practice helps optimize content, improve rankings, and build trust with users and search engines alike.

Labrika’s reports help calculate keyword density more accurately, show whether any keyword appears too often or too rarely, measure total word count, and highlight where you can enhance content quality without keyword stuffing.

In addition, you can review how your content ranks for specific keyword terms, compare your rankings with competitors, and discover which content types, headings, and sections deliver the best organic rankings and conversions.

For strategic content creation, Labrika supports content marketing teams, copywriting professionals, and business owners by showing which pages need fresh content updates, which keywords should be added, and which sections can be optimized to achieve better rankings.

By combining this analysis with clear seo strategy documents, you can plan future articles, case studies, and guides that align with user intent, support brand awareness, and deliver real value to your customers.

Updated on January 20, 2026.