Are you thinking SEO beyond the current period? If you’ve been following SEO trends in the recent time, you must have heard of the arrival of the new kid on the block; it is called Semantic SEO.
Confused? Don’t worry; I will get back to it in a jiffy. Every year, SEO becomes even harder than the previous year. For most new people trying out SEO, it can be confusing. However, for the veterans in the game of SEO, they understand that SEO is not constant, new rules and algorithms come out on daily basis. This means you must not just be aware of new SEO techniques but you must be changing with them as well.
Alright, let’s get back to Semantic SEO. You will learn what this Semantic SEO is all about and how you can use it to achieve higher ranking in 2017, 2018, and beyond.
What is Semantic SEO Anyway?
Semantic SEO simply means optimizing your content to give a more meaningful result. You can see it as the process of building more meaning into the words you are using in your content.
Just like Google and other search engines have always recommended, it is a content written to give the user the best answer to his query. This involves going more in-depth to provide an answer to the user’s query so you will have an opportunity to rank higher for a really long time.
Semantic SEO works by establishing the meaning and relationships between the words used in the search question. You don’t have to use the exact “keyword or phrases” used in the query. The introduction of semantic SEO shows that Google and other search engine bots are getting more intelligent every day.
Why Google Introduce Semantic Search?
Google, as a search engine, has always maintained that their goal is to give the best “answer to user’s queries”. The service can only remain relevant if they can always satisfy the searcher. In fact, this has always been the basis of SEO right from the inception.
Rankwatch explained what is semantic search in this article.
With semantic search, it means that search bot just got more intelligent and will only rank contents that give the most meaningful answer to the question asked by the user.
The use of semantic search in the recent time shows that to some extent, Google is trying to move away from keywords and place more emphasis on what the user wants. Of course, the result of this is better and exponentially more meaningful search results.
What Does Semantic SEO Do Exactly?
Well, the ultimate aim of semantic SEO is to give users more meaningful result. In doing this, the semantic search was designed to:
- Predict search queries
- Extract entities as results
- Personalize the search results for each searcher
- Refine the search query by establishing context
What Are the Major Advantages of Semantic SEO?
Well, if you are willing to give it a try (which you should do by the way) semantic SEO will help you enjoy two major benefits which include:
- More opportunities to obtain a variety of keywords for ranking purposes.
- A chance to rank for a really long time
What You Should Do to Rank Higher With Semantic SEO
There is no need to get scared! You can easily implement semantic SEO and fight for your place at the top of Google ranking. What you need to do is to figure out the underlying reasons why someone is searching for content and then place those elements strategically within your content.
You can do semantic SEO by doing the following below:
1. Do Your Traditional Keyword Research
Before writing your content, make sure you research for relevant keywords using your traditional keyword tools. Personally, I love using KWFinder tool, because it works best for me. If you want to use WordStream or other keywords tools, that’s fine; as far as they are giving you the result you want.
2. Use Related Keyword Suggestions
Remember that I told you above that you need to figure out the deeper meaning of each query. You can do this by extracting semantic information from Google itself.
Here is how to do this:
Let’s say your main keyword is “residential property manager”. All you will have to do now is plug the same keyword into Google search bar and you will get a host of searches related to your keyword [residential property manager].
Based on the information displayed by Google, you can now understand what your customers want and use the semantic information on your content strategically.
3. Make Use of Full, Natural Language Sentences
With Siri, Google Now, and other virtual assistants becoming popular in recent days, more people are embracing voice searches. Experience shows that voice-based queries tend to be longer phrases, they are also usually questions.
If you want your content to adapt to this trend, you will need to optimize your content using sentences that provide full meaning, both questions answers. This simply means you should write a sentence that provides full meaning and can stand on its own.
For instance:
What is SEO?
SEO is a way search engine ranks websites.
You see, each of these sentences can stand on their own. You need to write like you are writing a dictionary. This makes your content to be aligned with longer, keyboard-less queries.
4. Pay More Attention to Topic And Not Just Phrases
Remember that semantic SEO is targeted at providing the most useful answer to the searcher and not just the letters and words they typed into the little search box.
Stop targeting specific phrases only and adapt your writing to targeting a broader topic. You need to use related phrases and ensure you cover things that related semantically.
5. Plan to Keep Visitors Longer
A great way to use semantic SEO is using formatting that keeps visitors longer on your page. You need to reduce your bounce rate by:
- Adding a relevant feature image
- Making use of infographics
- Adding multiple visually-appealing images
- Breaking up long paragraphs
- Adding video
- All these will contribute to low bounce rate and higher position in SERP.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that semantic SEO is the future of SEO. The introduction shows that the artificial intelligence is no more a joke; it is getting smarter by day. Making use of semantic SEO can seem like a hard task, but it worth your time. By applying semantic SEO, not only will you rank faster, but higher and longer too.
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