Can Bold Text Boost Your SEO?

“Someone was arguing that bolding important parts in a paragraph can boost your SEO.

Does it?

I think this is something that comes up every now and then. I double-checked before the session actually and Matt Cutts did a video in 2012 or something around that, about bolding and strong on pages.

So usually, we do try to understand what the content is about on the webpage and we look at different things to try and figure out what is actually being emphasised here. And that includes things like headings on a page, but it also includes things like what is actually bolded or emphasised within the text on the page.

So to some extent, that does have a little bit of extra value there in that it’s a clear sign that actually you think this page or this paragraph is about this topic here. And usually that aligns with what we think about the page anyway so it doesn’t change that much.

The other thing is that this is, to a large extent, relative within the web page. So if you go off and say I will just make my whole page bold and then Google will think my page is the most important one, then by making everything bold, essentially, nothing is bold because it’s all the same.

Whereas if you take a handful of sentences or words within your full page where you say this is really important for me and you bold those, then it’s a lot easier for us to say here’s a lot of text and this is potentially one of the most important points on the page.

And we can give that a little bit more value and essentially, what that kind of goes into is everything around semantic HTML where you’re giving a little bit more meaning to a page by using the proper mark-up for the page and from our point of view that’s good, it helps us to understand the page a little bit better.

So, if you want to simplify it to a one word answer, does bolding important points on a paragraph help SEO?

Yes, it does. It helps us better understand that paragraph or that page.”

SEO Best Practice: bold text.

Making some of the text bold in a webpage does add emphasis. By emphasising text visually you are making it stand out to readers and therefore assisting them.

Some readers of webpages like to skim the text, so when you’re adding emphasis to the right words you’re helping them to quickly identify key information.

However, using bold text sparingly is the best advice because, as John said, overuse dilutes the impact – if everything is bold, nothing is bold, right?

Probably the most critical piece of advice is that you should have a clear structure to your web content, so a professional content writer who builds pages with H1-H3 tags, paragraphs, and relevant blockquotes etc. is helping to ensure readability and structured SEO.

So, while bold text can play a small role in SEO, it’s not a primary or even particularly important best practice. Search engines primarily focus on other factors like content quality, keywords, page structure, and backlinks.

Search engines do consider the text within <strong> tags (which is the semantic equivalent of <b> tags), but they give it very little weight in ranking algorithms. The context of the word in bold is more important than the bolding itself. Again, emphasising words in bold is good for the user, good for readability.

Semantic HTML

What’s also critical to point out here is that rather than just using “bold markup” in a WYSIWYG editor it’s important to use the correct HTML tags. While the <b> (bold) tag still works, the semantically correct tag is actually <strong>. By using the <strong> tag you are indicating strong importance, whereas <b> is purely presentational. So, for emphasis that doesn’t necessarily imply importance, <em> (emphasis) is preferred over <i> (italics).

Focus on Your Content

The most important thing in SEO is high-quality, relevant, helpful content. Just “bolding” the keywords won’t help if the content itself is of insufficient quality.

Keyword research is absolutely essential when conducting  SEO. Understanding the keyword terms that people are searching for is far more important than just bolding random words.

Also, the context in which a word appears is crucial. Search engines analyse the surrounding words and sentences to understand the meaning. Bolding a word out of context is useless for SEO.

Other Important SEO Factors

As always, if you’re writing content for your audience and then creating an HTML page to convey that content, there are some really top level important

• Title tags and meta descriptions: These are critical for how your page appears in search results. Remember that titles and descriptions actually appear in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
• Header tags (H1-H6): These structure your content and help search engines understand the hierarchy of information. Personally, I try not to go beyond the H3 tag, but in legal, medical, and technical content, sometimes this is not possible.
• Image alt text: This describes the content of images to search engines and screen readers. It’s not an ALT tag, ALT is an attribute of the IMAGE tag.
• Internal and external links: These help search engines crawl and understand your site’s structure and the relevance of your content. As with all things in SEO use links when necessary and don’t overdo it.
• Mobile-friendliness: Ensuring that your website shows correctly on mobile devices is essential for ranking in today’s mobile-first world. Mobile-first crawling and indexing was officially rolled out somewhere between about 2018 and 2020, but this was flagged as far back as 2014 with the infamous Mobilegeddon in 2015.
• Page speed: A fast-loading website is crucial for user experience and SEO, so make sure that you have a decent webhost, that the server is optimised, your website is as lightweight as possible, and that you’re not overdoing it with images, video, or pop-ups.

Conclusion

While bolding text can improve readability, it really is a very minor factor in SEO. You should focus on creating excellent content, using proper HTML structure, and addressing the other SEO elements mentioned above. Don’t rely on bolding alone to boost your search engine rankings.