What is ‘Semantic?’ & why does it matter for SEO

Google has been adjusting its algorithm for years to focus on the users. Google wants to return the best results possible to users after they have completed a search on its search engine. RankBrain, a machine-learning aspect, was one of the latest and most complex updates.

Many business owners and marketers struggle to understand semantic search and how to optimize it. This post will explain what semantic search is and what tools you can use to create a semantically optimized content marketing campaign.

What does latent semantic analysis mean?

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). Uses a few different concepts to analyze the relationships that exist between documents (or web pages) and terms contained within them by understanding a number of ideas. LSA is based on a technique known as Natural Language Processing, which is a field in computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics. It compares how computers interact with human languages.

This is primarily to process a corpus of natural language or real-world text samples. Machine learning is required to understand the meanings of the terms and the context in which they are used.

If you are a UK resident researching cars in the US, and you type “auto,” an LSA will know that an automobile and a car (auto) are the same thing.

Does Google use latent semantic analysis in its algorithm?

Yes, the short answer is “yes.” Google uses machine learning to process queries and find the best results. Google calls this machine-learning feature “RankBrain.” Andrey Lipattsev is a search quality senior strategist at Google who said that content, links, and RankBrain are among the top three factors for ranking.

Google’s algorithm is kept very secret, and it is easy to understand why. It makes our jobs as SEOs harder, but we like challenges.

Understanding RankBrain and the importance of content is key in building web pages that add value for the user and that are indexed correctly.

How to Optimize for Semantic Search

Many tools try to optimize web content for semantic searches. MarketMuse is our favorite, but other tools can be used to text mine the most long-tail keywords possible. It’s important to tailor your content in order to include all of the “buzzwords,” or keywords, that are related to your topic.

How do these tools pull keywords? These tools scrape the top 10 results for the search query that you are optimizing. These tools remove the most popular content and attempt to replicate the LSA. These tools are used to sort and categorize the most popular phrases in that content. The text may say “sales representative” rather than “Salesman,” “Sales Rep,” or “Sales Rep” more frequently.

The Moz Keyword Explorer tool displays the most relevant results and allows you to drill into a particular topic using the criteria below:

• • Mix up your sources
  • Include keywords only with the entire query term
  • Broders will be generated if you exclude your search terms
  • Closely related topics
  • Synonyms and issues that are broadly related
  • Similar search results for keywords
  • What are your questions?

You can also sort keywords using the following criteria:

• Yes, with lexical similarities
• Yes, with medium linguistic similarities
• Yes, with high similarity

This is based on the Natural Language Processing concept through a corpus of natural language.

The linguistic similarities include sub-words, compound words, and phrases, which are all related. To optimize a page for semantic searches, you should drill down to the semantic networks in order to discover the linguistic semantic trends that are present within the top 10 SERPs. In essence, you are giving Google more information about a subject by saying that this page has been indexed for this keyword. I will add more text to the topic with high lexical similarities. Google bots are fed the information they need to compare their results with yours.

Topic modeling is another term often used in the SEO community. Topic modeling is defined as a “type statistical model” for discovering abstract “topics” which occur within a collection of documents. (Source). Word clouds are an older term for this concept.

Semantic tools for text mining include:

• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Market Muse
• TextRazor

Semantic Search: How to Leverage it

The majority of business owners know that they should have a blog. However, what to post on it is often a total question mark in outer space. Blog strategies are often not a priority, and as a result, publishing articles on the company blog doesn’t have a positive impact. Your content marketing campaign may fail if you do not have a content strategy with measurable goals. If this is happening on your blog, you should audit your content and make improvements.

The best way to leverage semantic search optimization is to create long-form articles using a topic ideation framework we call ” context content clusters.”

Articles in Long Form

Backlink.io found in an article that “Content length: Content with more word count can cover a broader breadth, and are likely to be preferred over shorter superficial articles.” SERPIQ discovered that the length of content was correlated to SERP positions. This means that you should make sure that any content you post on your blog has at least a certain word count. It can be detrimental to you to have thin, lower-quality content.

Contextual Clusters

Google bots are obsessed with relevance, and they love to combine data. Give them what they ask for. First, you need to find out what questions people have about the product or service in your industry. You’ll then want to look for similar themes, create full-length articles, and connect them using keyword-rich anchor texts. Internal links can be made using the keywords that you discovered when doing semantic text mining.

Optimize Your Blog Articles

MarketMuse is a great tool to optimize your blog posts and web pages. This tool scores the content according to the top SERP results. This tool allows you to compare your content to a specific keyword that you are trying to rank. The tool scans top results to determine the average word count of the content, the number of times the keyword is mentioned in the content, and the overall score. If your content is below the average score, you’ll want to compare it to the best-performing content. You can also add keywords to your content in order to increase the word count.

All these pieces can be combined to make the most of Google’s search algorithm.