What Are Stop Words and How Can You Use Them for Deathcare Marketing?

Integrating keywords into your content can be cumbersome. How do you write high-quality content people want to read (and that performs well in the search engines) when you start with keywords like “funeral home planning service” or “preplan cremation funeral”?

It’s easier than you might think because you don’t have to use all those keywords verbatim. Think of keywords that come out of keyword research tools as raw veggies for a salad. You don’t grab the entire head of lettuce or stalk of celery and toss it in a bowl. You start by cleaning, peeling, and cutting.

For keywords, that process involves adding elements to make them grammatically correct and including stop words to ensure your sentences are sensical. Google doesn’t care about these things. Artificial language has come along over the years, and the search engines know that “funeral home planning service” and “funeral home planning a service” and “funeral home helping you plan a service” are all similar phrases.

Start by ensuring your keywords are grammatically correct. Change misspellings and add plurals or possessives as needed. You can also change the structure of verbs; Google treats “save money on funeral costs” and “saving money on funeral costs” the same.

Next, add in stop words. Stop words are common, typically short, words that don’t change the meaning of a phrase a great deal. Google mostly ignores these words as it determines what a page or phrase is about. Common stop words include a, an, the, it, if, or, but, and, for, to, so, on, in, with, and about.

Typically, you can add almost any word (or a few) into a keyword phrase without impacting SEO. Just make sure those words don’t change the meaning of the phrase substantially.