Semantic SEO is the process of giving web content more meaning and more thematic depth. Doing that helps Google’s crawlers understand your content better. It also helps them rate your content as high quality and therefore rank it more often in the SERPs. It also goes by the name meaning based SEO.
In 2011 Google and the other search engines started moving to artificial intelligence and natural language processing in order to understand a searcher’s intent and the meaning of a query. Instead of analyzing questions and web pages on the basis of keywords, they began working with entities and concepts.
Semantic SEO takes up a great deal of room in search engine optimization, SEO work. It is a method used by professional SEO consultants.
“The most successful content is the product of work that sits somewhere between a concept map (which is objective) and a mind map (which is subjective), built to fit semantic SEO.” Tahir Dinç
As search engines got smarter, they started discovering what words actually mean. Content owners, for their part, no longer only built web pages, they started describing them using linked open data and semantic web technologies. That is what made schema.org possible, an initiative launched in 2011 by the world’s largest search engines (Bing, Google and Yahoo!) to apply a shared data schema structure for describing web pages.
Today SEO specialists can learn about Schema in the context of semantic SEO and study the ways Schema keeps developing. Stars showing up in the search results for products can lift clicks, for example, which is to say the subject is worth learning more about.
Why Meaning Based SEO?
Search engines need context to understand a query correctly and to give relevant results. Contexts are built out of words, phrases and other combinations of words and links found in knowledge stores such as encyclopedias and large text corpora.
Semantic SEO is a marketing technique that raises website traffic by providing meaningful metadata and semantically relevant content that can answer a specific search intent clearly. It is also a way of building content clusters grouped semantically by topic rather than by keyword.
On context vectors, take the word “Aksaray” as an example. Same word, different meanings in different contexts: “Aksaray” is a city in Turkey, a district in Istanbul and a presidential palace. In semantic search engine optimization content is cataloged and organized around each context, much like Wikipedia does, so that machines can understand and evaluate what is unique about the content.
What Are the Benefits of Semantic SEO?
Anyone who puts semantic technologies to work in building a semantic SEO strategy can get surprisingly good results out of their site. A/B testing by our team at Türk SEM showed that structured data is worth having in digital marketing terms.
Analyzing our own SEO focused website Turksem.com, for example, we saw these improvements in the metrics after three months of using structured data on the site:
- +14.33% new users
- +19.51% organic traffic
- +2.1x page views
- +12.85% session duration
In this piece we will try to help you understand what has changed across semantic SEO and what opportunities this new approach to search engine optimization opens up. Understanding it properly can help your business grow exponentially. Not only will search engines understand your content better, you will also be handing users relevant information that turns them into customers more easily. That gives you a strategic advantage and puts you one step ahead of your competitors.
How Do You Optimize Content for Semantic SEO?
As we said earlier, semantic SEO makes your content smarter, makes it easier for search engines to understand, and gets more information relevant to your audience into it.
Which raises the question: how do you optimize your web pages for semantic SEO as well as you can?
This part matters, and I would advise you to read it carefully.
Step one: understand the intent behind the search. You have to find out what users are looking for and how machines understand that query.
Once you start with a topic, you can see the intents by entity, search volume and competition.
Step two: discover the related opportunities that can be added to the entities and topics this query focuses on.
Step three: optimize your content to cover those topics and mention those entities on the page. You also need to include internal links.
Step four: add the markup to the page. This is where you put in the structured information about your entities and any other structured data you have.
And finally, make sure you have good title tags, image alt text and everything else that plays a large part in traditional SEO.
Is the Web Ready for Semantic SEO?
A more semantic web does not fill pages with synonyms or semantically related words.
The semantic web is following a line of development much like the one artificial intelligence is on. In the future search engines will genuinely know what a person is going to search for that day, and we will see real results tailored to the individual.
Tahir Dinç
Only a few months after schema.org launched, Amit Singhal, then Google’s Senior Vice President of Engineering, published an update that changed the game: Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings.
There is a sentence in it that goes:
“Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that: two words.”
“But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ.”
“ The Knowledge Graph lets you search for things, people or places that Google knows about […] This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do. ”
Using Google Sheets, you can build a Knowledge Graph out of a SERP.
You cannot manage what you cannot measure.
PETER F. DRUCKER
Topic Maps in Semantic SEO
The web is changing and getting steadily more semantic. SEO is changing too and getting more semantic. That is because search engines keep developing and turning more and more toward reading the content on the web. If we want better rankings in particular, we have to improve the way we create content as well. Which is to say that thinking in terms of relationships rather than web pages and keywords will produce healthier results.
A search engine favors a piece of content in its positioning by calculating the distance between meaning vectors, based on the relationships between search intents. What we can do is design an architecture that lets the search engine understand the relationship between different ideas and concepts. So the real business here is building topic maps.
Topic maps help you know what to write about and how to structure your content. Learning how to build an excellent topic map will do a great deal for your chances of being found on Google and other search engines.
Semantic SEO and on-page SEO are closely tied to one another.
What Is a Topic Map?
A topic map is basically a visualization of concepts related to one another. Starting from one topic, it lets you see every entity connected to it. That way you can see clearly which entities, concepts and ideas your site already covers, and discover new opportunities by working out what content you could add and how to build it.
In this scenario your content model becomes an important part of your SEO. It can make your content understandable for search engines on one side and for your audience on the other.
Structuring your content model brings out your content and the relationships underneath it, so search engines can recognize you among hundreds of pieces of information and make you more visible to the users whose search intent matches your business.
The richer the content model in your structured data, the better your chances of targeting exactly the users interested in your business.
Other Frequently Asked Questions
What is semantic SEO copywriting?
Semantic SEO copywriting is a content marketing technique aimed at ranking in semantic search engines. In traditional SEO copywriting an editor targets a particular keyword. In semantic SEO copywriting an editor starts from a wider range of topics and shapes the content so that it carries the semantically relevant terms and sentences that help readers understand a subject, much like reading a wiki.
From a writing point of view, the practical way to do this is to build a vocabulary of the terms and questions surrounding your target topic. That gets you thinking strategically about the content you are going to write.
How Do You Test Structured Data?
You can test your code or your sites using Google’s structured data testing tool.
The most successful articles start one level above the topic and work all the way down to the most relevant layer beneath it.
Tahir Dinç
Before semantic SEO entered our lives in 2011, at Türk SEM we were running the “latent SEO strategy”. Have a look at our latent SEO strategy if you like.
