The recent updates in the SEO
ranking factors have changed the way webmasters and marketers create content. Semantic
SEO enables us to create more engaging content and address the related queries
that your users might be struggling to find online. Semantic SEO impacts your
overall ranking as it helps search engines understand what your website is
about. This makes them produce the best results users expect from their search
queries. These are the 6 effective ways to do semantic SEO for your website.
1. Understand what Semantics is
Semantics is not a new word in the
world of language but it can be a bit confusing to interpret it in terms of
SEO. Simply stated, semantics is- understanding different words or phrases that
closely mean or denote the same thing. But you would ask how it is related to
SEO. The answer to this question lies in the way we try to find answers on
Google or other search engines. When you search anything in Google, it has to understand
what question of yours you actually want to get answered. In the recent years
search engines like Google have come up with algorithm that lets them
understand the relevancy of the search terms. This helps them pop up the best
matches that the user is supposedly searching for.
2. Get to know the recent SEO
changes related to search queries
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
has changed a lot in the recent years. Google wants to emphasize on the user
experience. It wants to give the very best to the users when they search with
particular queries. The days of spamming Google with different unethical SEO
tactics is long gone and now those techniques don’t work if you want to build a
long term successful online business. When a user looks for a particular query
Google wants to give him the very best of all options. The updated algorithm
understands which content is really relevant and the most useful and which
content is not the best match for the search query. This is the way webpages
are ranked. You can help Google understand your website better by doing
Semantic SEO.
3. Create content for the
users not search engine bots
So, what is the main thing that
business owners and webmasters need to act upon? It is creating content for
users and not for the search engines. The latest updates in the Google search
ranking factors emphasize on the content that is high quality and useful to the
readers and not the one that is low quality but perfectly optimized or search
engines. Therefore if you create authentic content targeted towards the users
or clients that will be the most helpful strategy that you can benefit from in
the long term.
4. Find the related search
terms that users might be searching for
If you are a marketer you may be
knowing the importance of keyword research for building online presence. At any
given point of time there are numerous websites trying to rank for a particular
keyword. Many of the seed keywords or primary keywords are difficult to rank
for because of high search volume and fierce completion. Instead of targeting
those competitive keywords you can find the LSI Keywords (Latent Semantic
Indexing keywords) that are present in the search queries. These are the search
keywords that are related to your main keywords in your business space. When
you include LSI keywords in your content, it helps Google to understand what
your content is about and the related topics that your content is built around.
This is the most important part of Semantic SEO. This is how you can rank with
Semantic SEO.
5. Find the deficiency in
content that you can fix
This is simple. If you already
have content on your website, find the deficiency in it. Ask yourself where is
the content lacking in providing value. Nothing is ever perfect so you can find
places where you can improve. The deal here is- making your content super
thorough and intended to solve the reader’s problems along with the LSI keywords in it. Increase the value and usability of your content so that it
gets more and more social signals and views. Google has emphasized on ranking
the content that the users love, even if does not target primary keywords. So,
find the deficiency in the content and make it super-efficient in providing
value to the user.
6. Improve engagement- It is
absolutely necessary for Semantic SEO
Along with adding LSI keywords and
improving content improving the engagement in the content is very important.
How can more and more users engage with your content? The answer to this is incorporate copy
writing techniques while writing your content. Keep the content to be skimmable
with short paragraphs and graphics and images in between. Studies have shown
that majority of readers do not read full content. They just skim through the
content and read the headlines of the paragraphs. So to increase the on-page
time that is engagement you need to grab reader’s attention with pieces of
visual content like images, graphics and videos so that the user stays longer
on the page. Make sure that this visual content is attributed with semantic
keywords so that it can be identified by Google as related content.