Have you heard that merely targeting a single keyword and optimizing your blog post around only that keyword has gone? That’s where semantic keyword research comes in !
Wondering?
I am not saying that keyword research is gone, but optimizing your entire blog post around single keyword is ineffective.
Gone are the days, in which you would churn your blog post with a single keyword scattered in it, and rank.
Search engines are less relying upon the keywords. They are indexing and returning results to the user queries from its latent semantic index.
Have you ever heard about the entity or semantic relationships?
Search engines have been developing intelligence.
Previously, Google returned the results based on user query.
It was searching for the user query in all its documents. And then returned the results. It didn’t take the risk of answering straight away.
But look at the current trend.
Simply searched – How to boil eggs?
Google has become self-aware to some extent.
It is partially capable of understanding the user queries like we humans do. How’s it possible?
It’s because of entity and semantic relationships.
Some another example:
According to Google analysis, the majority of users who search for “Places to See in Los Angeles” are tourists and are hunting some places to visit. They need to visit the places in Los Angeles.
Hence the result.
Google is now capable of determining the relationships between various keyword.
Including semantically related or synonyms of the main keyword, along with the main keyword in your articles or blog posts, give ranking boost.
It helps Google in determining the meaning of the written content to some extent by analyzing the relationships between the entities or keywords in the content.
If Google understands your content better, better is the rankings.
How about this? Google is confident of taking the risk of showing the semantic result of SEJ straightaway. Because SEJ is trusted site and the article is semantically rich in terms of Google.
So now you might be thinking, how to create content that is easily understandable by Google.
The answer is: Including related synonyms or semantic keywords along with the main keyword.
However, merely including semantic keywords in a site or blog that has no authority or backlinks doesn’t work. But it does boost rankings.
How to find semantic keywords that are related to the main keyword?
Before finding the semantic keywords for your main keyword, it’s important to find the main keyword you want to concentrate upon.
You need to prefer long tail keywords to other keywords. Here’s the detailed guide to find long tail keywords and rank for any keyword.
Must Read: Unique way to find long-tail keywords
Once you have found the effective long tail keyword, it’s important to find semantically related keywords to the main keyword.
That’s where this post comes in.
I will be taking example of how to do semantic keyword research for a blog post whose main keyword is “How Google Works”.
How Google Works – Book by Eric Schmidt OR article on how Google works
By merely including the keyword (How Google works) all through the blog post, Google cannot determine what the content is exactly about. Whether the article is on a book or Google search mechanism? Google is confused! Therefore, it does not take the risk of ranking high the blog post.
If you are writing about the book: How Google Works – Book by Eric Schmidt
Then here are some of the semantic or LSI keywords that you have to include.
- Book
- Book Review (if it is review)
- The New Digital Age (another book written by him)
- Chairman of Google
By this Google comes to know that we are talking about the book written by Eric.
If you are writing in detail about the working of Google then include keywords like,
- Data mining
- Indexing
- Crawling
- Algorithms
By including semantic keywords, you are helping Google to determine, what our blog post is particularly about.
So how to do semantic keyword research?
Ultimate keyword hunter
Whoa! Greatest LSI tool that I’ve ever used. It’s great.
Just head over to UltimateKeywordHunter, enter the email to help them send you a copy. Go to your inbox and click on the download link. The setup file is just around 2MB. Install it.
Enter the keyword for which you have to search for LSI keywords. Hit PARSE.
Wait for the analysis to complete, and hit analysis report.
The result will be opened. Basically, this report contains the most repeated terms in Google top 10 results for the keyword. In the result, the stop words are excluded. So you will get rock solid semantic keywords.
The semantic keywords in the result are grouped as 1 word, 2 words, 3 words, 4 words…
It’s one of the most powerful tools in my SEO arsenal.
You can export the LSI keywords in the result as CSV file, and upload it in the keyword planner for search volumes and effectiveness, if you are really paranoid.
Now, as you can see in the above result, if I sprinkle some semantic keywords like natural language, computer science, semantic elements and lexical in my blog post, I will get a ranking boost.
With this, you can easily adapt the semantic strategies of the top contenders for the keyword in SERPs.
Google suggest
As you can notice above in the screenshot, you can easily find the related keywords to your main keyword in Google Auto Suggest. You can insert asterisks (*) symbol to fill in the blanks the Google suggest.
You can also use UberSuggest or Soovle (quickest way to fetch all the suggests like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, etc.
You can also look at Google’s suggested related terms. At the bottom of the SERP.
Semantic link search tool
Semantic link search is one of the greatest semantic research tools. For example, if the main target keyword for a blog post is “Semantics”, then you may want to enter it in the search box as shown below.
Now, as you may have observed that the tool, suggested related words like syntax, theoretic, RDF, lexical, semantic, syntactic, propositional.
Look up for the meaning of the word for which you are not certain of.
Now just scatter up the semantic keywords here and there in your content. By this Google clearly concludes that the post is about semantics.
Similar-word
It’s the simplest and effective tool of all. You need to simply enter the main keyword in the search box. It will return the results in seconds.
This tool may sometimes, generate irrelevant keywords. So, make sure that the words are semantically related to the main keyword and topic, before using it on your blog.
Where to include semantic keywords in your blog post?
Once you find the semantically related keywords, the first question that pops in your mind is where to include the LSI keywords?
Here are some places where you can include them.
- First paragraph of the blog post (along or instead of main keyword)
- Scatter throughout the blog post.
- Last paragraph of the blog post (along or instead of main keyword)
- ALT tags. Prevent ALT keyword stuffing by including semantic keywords.
- Using semantic keywords craft a new title for your blog post, and use that title in social media.
- Anchor text, as they should be diversified.
- Text surrounding the internal links or backlinks to the post. (KILLER)
However, do remember the keyword density. In this example, I will take the post on “Semantics” as example.
Main keyword density should be around 0.75 – 2% .
Keyword density of both main and semantic keyword should be around 12-20%
Keyword density greatly vary DEPENDING UPON THE TOPIC AND NEED.
What next?
I bet many of you bloggers have not implemented semantic words in your older posts. Do head over to the older posts and optimize them for semantic search.
You can analyze the effectiveness of your semantic keywords implementation using SEOPressor plugin for WordPress.
BE NATURAL IN TERMS OF USING KEYWORDS. RESPECT USER EXPERIENCE.
So what are your strategies to find semantic keywords? Let me know in comments.
Do remember that sharing is caring.
MOST RECOMMENDED: How to Find LSI Keywords and Implement Them for SEO
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