Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI is the main part of the Google Algorithm with which its search bots rate and rank a website and web pages. The result Google’s Search Engine returns on a search of a keyword or a query are called Semantic Search. In this post, we will discuss the semantic search. Why it’s good for SEO, and how you can use this strategy to better appeal to search engines and improve your search visibility.
What is Semantic Search?
Semantic search enables the search engines to identify the intent and contextual meaning of search phrases while serving content to users on the web.
Earlier the search engines could only analyze the exact phrase of search term when matching results with a search query.
Now, search algorithms are more sophisticated and have incorporated semantic search principles for ranking content.
Principles of Semantic Search
Semantic search principle is based on the two most important factors:
The Search Intent
Search intent is the reason why people make a query on a search engine.
Simply putting Search intent means what is the intention of the person making that search on the search engine.
The search engine algorithm relates the query with what the user is trying to accomplish.
A search intent could be to learn, find, or buy something. By identifying the search intent of users, search engines can provide more relevant results.
For instance, if you search “How to Become Digital Marketing Expert,” then the search engine understands that you are trying to find information on learning digital marketing and it will show you the most relevant results.
Let’s take another example. Suppose your search “latest smartphone to buy,” then search engine understand that you intend to buy a smartphone and accordingly it will show you results of the websites which sell smartphones.
Typically, in return to a search according to the intent search engines can show results from an answer to a question, a product page, a brand’s website, a video, images, etc.
The Semantics of Search Terms
Semantics is the study of meaning and relationships between words.
In search, semantics indicates the relationships between a search query, the words, phrases related to it, and accordingly, it will show content on the search results.
By considering the search semantics, search engines can display results that are more closely related to the context of the search query.
How Semantic Search Began?
Let’s first understand the history of search, this will help you understand the semantic search much better. This will help to understand why search engines used the advanced methods of semantic search instead of their old lexical search.
In lexical search, the search engine looks for literal matches of the query words or variants of them, without understanding the overall meaning of the query.
Hence, in those days when the lexical search was in use, the keywords were the main ranking factor.
Usually, a page that repeated the target search term the most times would get top placement on search engine results pages (SERPs).
This system wasn’t great for users or search engines.
Because the objective of the search engines was to show the users the most relevant results, not the ones stuffed with keywords unnecessarily.
Hence, as you can imagine that this system was easy to manipulate.
And actually, people manipulated it by using all the techniques of black hat SEO, link juices, and keyword stuffing.
So, it resulted in the creation of low-quality content that was written for search crawlers instead of users.
The lexical search system also made it difficult for users to find relevant information.
Because search engines couldn’t properly decipher the context and meaning of search queries.
They could only analyze and produce exact match results.
So, as a result of this search engines changed their algorithm and adopted semantic search methodology. Semantic search benefits both users and search engines, as it resolved the problems of lexical search method.
Also, it made it more difficult to use black hat SEO techniques to manipulate search results. It started to cut down on spam and low-quality content.
Resultantly, the search was made more intuitive, which helps users find results that more closely match their search intent.
Other Factors Related to Semantic Search
Since then, search engines continue to refine their algorithms, improve their results, and provide better experiences for users.
But, there are few other important things which search engines did to further improve the search results. For instance:
Featured Snippets and Rich Results
In 2012, Google introduced Knowledge Graph to help users “discover new information quickly and easily.”
Knowledge Graph leverages semantic search to decipher search intent, which helps users find the information they want as fast as possible.
It was also the beginning of Google’s shift towards providing more answers directly on SERPs.
Google now displays content from webpages as Knowledge Graph results, rich results, and featured snippets to show the relevant answers faster and more prominently.
Example of Knowledge Graph Search Result
Example of Rich Search Result
You can test your website or web page for rich search results with Google’s Free Rich Results Tool. If your website is optimized to show rich results you will see a screen like below:
Example of Featured Snippet Search Result
Google Algorithm Updates – Hummingbird and RankBrain
Google is constantly changing its search algorithms to provide a better experience for users. Releasing regular updates and adding more parameters to its ranking factors and algorithms help make search results even more accurate.
Google released the Hummingbird update in 2013 which placed greater emphasis on natural language queries and the principles of semantic search.
They launched RankBrain, in 2015 which started using artificial intelligence to analyze the best-performing search results.
Hummingbird and RankBrain together focussed on prioritizing user intent and semantics as ranking factors.
Voice Search
On May 20, 2012, Google introduced Voice Search. It was another factor impacting semantic search. It helped people directly speak their queries into Google Voice and get the results.
Nowadays more people speak their search queries to virtual assistants like Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri. And needless to say that search engines are evolving to recognize the semantic, conversational nature of their searches.
Because, voice searches tend to use more natural language, longer phrases, and more questions, hence, search engines are relying more on semantic search principles to provide relevant results for the voice searches.
How to Do SEO for Semantic Search?
Semantic search is a significant ranking factor for the search engines and it is only going to get more influential.
As you plan your SEO strategy, use the following best practices to optimize your content for semantic search:
Think about the Relevance of Your Topics, Not Just Keywords
As you would have understood now that semantic search is more focussed on providing the most relevant results for the searched.
Hence, keywords are not the only factor for ranking, rather, the topics and the entire content around that topic is important.
So, to make your content rank on top of the search engine result pages your content must be more comprehensive and informative.
In that way, the semantic search shows more relevant results on the top where people click and consume content.
The objective of all the algorithm changes and updates in ranking factors is to provide users with highly targeted and meaningful content.
So, in order to make your content rank better, you need to create comprehensive evergreen content that covers the entire topic instead of creating short pieces of content with every variation of a broad search term.
For instance, if you are writing on “Local SEO” then your content should cover all the relevant topics of it. Have a look at this topic here for more information.
Then use content writing and SEO best practices to ensure your content is fully optimized for both search engines and users.
Match Your Content to Search Intent
As you develop content ideas also think about the keywords you want to target. Think about why a user would search for that keyword or phrase.
You should keep in mind what type of keyword it is and what type of search intent it represents.
And, what the search engines would show as per their semantic search algorithm. Once, you have this plan you can write your content.
But, don’t forget that along with the relevant and well-written content it should have relevant LSI Keywords to make your content rank better.
There are broadly three types of keywords:
- Informational Keywords: When the user is trying to learn something, he will use words like “how”, “learn”, “know”, “why”, etc., to look for information and get answers to their questions.
- Navigational Keywords: When a user is trying to navigate to a specific site or find a specific item, so he will use words like “go”, “brand name”, “product name”, etc., to find the website for a familiar brand or thing.
- Transactional Keywords: When a user is trying to make a purchase, he will words like “purchase”, “buy”, “find”, “best”, etc., to find a product to purchase or a page to make a transaction.
While writing your content you need to keep that in mind and try to include the keywords in headings, content body, etc. And not to mention that the content should actually talk about the same topic in great detail.
Write Content for People Not for Machines
Content is for people because they are the ones who consume it, not the machines. Make sure you write your content for the people so that they can get some value out of it, not the machine which only tries to analyze your content for ranking factors.
Also, you should keep in mind that Google loves you when people love you. Make people love your content then Google will automatically start to give your content more value.
Include Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords in Your Content
Now that you know what semantics is so you should not forget to include the related or LSI keywords to your content to better serve the user’s search intent.
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. The LSI keywords are the words or phrases which are closely related to your main target keyword.
The LSI keywords give context to your content and also help search engines better understand what your content is about and how it serves audiences.
To create content that is optimized for semantic search, you need to find LSI keywords and use them properly in your content.
Optimize Your Content for Featured Snippets
Search engines display rich results that give users information they want directly on SERPs at a glance without even opening the link.
Since the rich results are always shown on the top of the SERPs, hence chances of people clicking and reading that page goes very higher. This is a great way to increase your visibility on the search engines. To get your page shown in the Featured Snippets you need to optimize your content for that.
Featured snippets are of four types:
- Answer boxes
- Paragraph
- List
- Table
Well, you need to clearly answer questions in your content, target long-tail keywords, and use proper formatting of headings, body text, bullet points, etc., to make your information an attractive option for being shown in featured snippets.
Include Structured Data in Your Content for Semantic Search
Another great way to help search engines understand the meaning and relevance of your content is through structuring it properly in accordance with the structured data.
Structured data is also known as schema markup.
It is a form of microdata that adds additional context to copy on a webpage. It uses a set of standard data structures that categorize content for search engines.
For instance, the structured data for a book might tell search engines that “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” is the book title, and Yuval Noah Harari is the author.
Similarly, the structured data for a movie might tell search engines that “The Intern” is a movie name, and Nancy Meyers is the Director.
This extra information helps search engines rank content, and identify information that can be displayed in rich search results.
You can test your structured data for its accuracy on Google’s Free Structured Data Testing Tool.
How to Find LSI Keywords for Your Semantic Search
So far we discussed how to make your content better using the semantic search principles and LSI Keywords. But, how would you find the LSI Keywords?
Now we will discuss how to find LSI Keywords for your content. Don’t worry finding LSI keywords is not difficult. Yes, but it is a little different.
Find Related Searches on Google
Google search itself is a good place to start for finding LSI keywords. Just key in any keyword and scroll down to the bottom of a search results page.
There you will see a group of keywords related to your search term. You can use them in your content because they are all related keywords and people do search for them.
The results shown at the bottom of the SERP are similar to a semantic keyword tool. It shows you related queries and shows you what other keywords are being searched related to your keyword.
You can also look at the phrases that show up when you type a target keyword into the Google search bar.
This is one of the best and reliable tools that people use to write content-rich with LSI keywords.
Get Keyword Suggestions from Google’s Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner Tool is another best free tool to find LSI keywords. This tool helps advertisers to choose keywords for their ads. But you can make use of it for your LSI keyword-rich content. It suggests hundreds of keywords for common search terms and phrases.
Make Use of LSI Graph
LSI Graph is a free LSI keyword tool designed to help you identify dozens of related terms to your keyword.
All of these tools are great. But, you need to be careful not to stuff all the related keywords in one piece of content.
Use common sense and use only keywords that are most relevant and are required in your content to satisfy the search intent of the user. You can make a note of other keywords and use them in another piece of content.
Conclusion
I hope that by now you would have understood what is semantic search and how to Build a Strong Semantic Search Strategy and create your content using LSI keywords. This will help your content appear in top searches of Google and other search engines.
