Keyword placement isn't about stuffing. It's about putting your primary keyword in the 5-6 high-signal locations where search engines weight it most, then letting the rest of the content read naturally.
Primary keyword, near the front. Non-negotiable. Single biggest on-page signal.
Primary keyword, ideally near the front. Can be slightly reworded from the title tag.
Primary keyword in the slug. Short, hyphenated. /best-crm-for-insurance.
Your primary keyword should appear naturally in the opening paragraph. Not forced. Just present.
Using the primary keyword (or a very close variation) in one H2 signals topical focus.
Alt text describes images for screen readers and search engines. Using the primary keyword (where relevant to the image) helps.
Modern Google understands synonyms, related phrases, and entities. You don't need to repeat the exact keyword 20 times. Use synonyms and semantically-related phrases. Google rewards topical depth.
You'll hear about "LSI keywords" (Latent Semantic Indexing). Technically LSI isn't how Google works, but the intuition is right: cover related concepts. Use entity tools (Clearscope, Surfer) to find what concepts the top-ranking pages cover, and include those.
Target 2-5 secondary keywords per page (variations of the primary). Weave them into subheadings and body content. They help you rank for long-tail variations.
If you hit the six locations above with your primary keyword, and write the rest of the page for humans with natural coverage of related terms, you've done 80% of on-page keyword work. The remaining 20% is rarely worth the tradeoff in readability.