Hello,
Thanks for reaching out about Yoast and gerunds.
As you mentioned, when you use ‘buy a used snowmobile’, what is the feedback that you get from the Yoast analysis?
Let’s you set the keyphrase to ‘buy a used snowmobile’ and then begin your post with the sentence ‘There are six things to know when buying a used snowmobile’. Yoast will say Problem: You didn’t use your keyphrase in the first sentence.
Maybe your meta description is “The complete guide to buying a used snowmobile”. Yoast will say Problem: You didn’t use your keyphrase in the meta description.
Maybe you used both “buy” and “buying” throughout your post and in your subheader sections. Yoast will say Problem: Keyphrase density, because it only counts ‘buy’.
And you might suggest, well just make the keyphrase ‘buying a used snowmobile’, but let’s say you do that, except it makes more sense for your post title to be ‘How to Buy a Used Snowmobile’, and in this case, Yoast will say Problem: You didn’t use your keyphrase in the title.
The issue is that it’s very natural to say both buy/buying depending on sentence structure. It would be great if Yoast recognized both as part of the same keyphrase.
Thank you for responding to my post!
Ah! That makes so much sense.
What you are referring to are word forms. Yoast SEO Premium recognizes singular and plurals. It recognizes the singular: “dog” and it also recognizes the plural: “dogs”. It also recognizes different tenses of verbs, like “call”, “calling”, “calls” and “called”. And, it adjusts your keyword optimization scores accordingly. The plugin only focuses on content words. These are the words that contain the core meaning of your keyphrase. Function words that act as the “glue” for your content words are filtered automatically. What’s more, the word order is flexible. However, this is a feature specific to the Yoast SEO Premium. You may want to learn more at https://yoast.com/features/word-forms/
Got it. Thank you for the explanation! It’s good to know the premium version has this feature. Maybe I’ll get it next time it goes on sale 🙂
