You’re probably familiar with the term “semantics” as it relates to logic and linguistics. Ultimately, semantics are concerned with meaning, with the meat and potatoes behind words.
SEO semantics is also concerned with meaning. Its approaches move away from traditional ideas about keywords and lean into information and search intent.
If this sounds like Greek to you, we’ve compiled this guide of 8 SEO semantic techniques that help you optimize your content to its greatest potential.
Semantic SEO vs. Traditional SEO
See if this sounds familiar.
You need to write some content. You navigate to your keyword research tools.
You start poking around the Keywords Explorer, hoping to stumble on some high-volume, low-difficulty keywords for your brand you haven’t already written about.
Maybe you’ll analyze some competitor articles and get some ideas. If you feel really ambitious, you may do a keyword gap analysis and fill a Google Sheet with long-tail keywords.
Then, you’ll start creating briefs for your writers on the best-performing keywords, reminding them to write using SEO best practices outlined in a writer’s guide.
Once written, you publish the content and sit back and wait for the organic traffic and conversions to start rolling in.
This is the old way of doing SEO. And frankly, it’s not a very effective one.
Obviously, keywords are still at play. After all, Google itself states that the most basic way of assessing whether a result is relevant to a search query is if content contains the same keywords as the query in the search box.
But this is only the beginning of establishing relevance.
Google also considers other quantifiable indicators, such as quality, usability, and context, to establish topical relevance. This is where an SEO semantic approach comes in.
It’s no longer enough to pepper a piece of content with “B2B content strategies” 25 times and hope to rank. You have to offer value, establish context, and match search intent.
Let’s look at 8 SEO semantic strategies to help you get there.
8 SEO semantic strategies for content optimization
SEO semantics is an approach that is more concerned with topics than keyword matching. It focuses on user intent overall, which requires a broader strategy for organizing content.
Here are some strategies to help you accomplish this.
1. Structure content topically
The Pillar/Cluster model is a topic-centric approach to structuring content.
With this strategy, you create topic clusters with a pillar page as the nucleus.
Let’s look at an example.
Say you’re a landscape company writing content on decks.
You create a pillar page called “How to Build a Deck” that covers the topic broadly. Then, you write several cluster posts that delve into more detail and internally link them back to the pillar page.
Your cluster (or topical) blog posts can cover topics like “Best Wood for Deck Building,” “Mistakes to Avoid When Building Your First Deck,” “DIY Decks for Beginners,” and so on.
What you’re doing here is building topical authority. You’re laying the groundwork to catch semantic search queries that do not match keywords 1:1.
2. Use internal data as a content roadmap
Believe it or not, the most useful semantic SEO data you can use already exists in your organization.
The issue is most departments form their own little islands, completely adrift from one another and failing to communicate.
If you make the effort to compile your internal data, you will find exactly what your current and potential customers care about and a content roadmap to deliver it to them.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed about where to look for internal data, start here:
- Refunds and returns data
- Social media comments
- Customer testimonials
- Customer surveys
- Google Analytics
- Sales team data
- Blog comments
- Email software
- Chatbot logs
- CRM systems
- Heat maps
You’re guaranteed to find recurring topics your target audience cares about. Now, your task is to create comprehensive content that answers their questions and resolves their concerns.
3. Establish yourself as a thought leader
While concerns over AI content are rife across the internet, you have something that cannot be replicated by a bot — expertise.
The same quality rules apply. Your thought leadership content needs to inspire, educate, and inform but speak from the vantage point of the one who has lived it.
Your stories are valuable because they are lived experiences that hundreds (or more) people in your industry have also struggled with.
2022 research published by Harvard Business School by Thomas Graeber, assistant professor of business administration, shows that the impact of stories on belief faded by 33% over the course of a day, while statistics alone faded by 73%.
People feel inspired by the triumphs of others. They remember them and apply them to their own lives.
Your hard-won career lessons, coupled with verifiable statistics, make your content richer and your semantic relevance greater.
4. Interview subject matter experts
Using subject matter experts in your content has similar advantages to thought leadership.
AI cannot replicate personal narratives and years of expertise.
While thought leadership can come straight from your brand’s founder and other department heads, branching out wider to capture the thoughts and ideas of other thinkers in your industry amplifies your relevance and credibility.
Your content benefits from the knowledge of subject matter experts and creates the context for SEO semantics. The names and titles of the experts themselves may also have SEO benefits if they are titans in their fields.
5. Optimize for search intent
Every marketer in the game knows how to optimize content with keywords. But what about optimizing for search intent semantically?
Answer questions
Ultimately, people use search engines because they’re seeking information. This almost always comes in the form of a question. Your content, then, should be structured to answer questions.
Question keywords often start with “how,” “what,” “when,” “why,” and “where.” This is good to keep in mind when writing titles and outlines.
Many keyword research tools also have a “Questions” tab that shows you common queries for the keywords you are researching.
And if all that fails, there’s the good old-fashioned way: looking at Google’s “People also ask” section under the first few search results, as shown below.
Image provided by the author
And the “People also search for” section at the bottom of the search results page.
Image provided by the author
This is Google hand-feeding you the exact questions people ask about your long-tail keywords. Use them as a roadmap for your content.
Use schema markup
Schema markup is code added to web pages that structure data so Google can understand what your content is about.
The benefit for users is increased visibility of details that are important to them. Google supports 35 different types of schema markup, ranging from event info to review snippets. This allows details to be displayed that would otherwise appear only as links.
Below is an example of search results with schema markup.
Screenshot from the author
By comparison, here is an example of a results page without schema markup.
Screenshot from author
When Google understands the semantic context, it categorizes content more effectively for relevant searches.
It can do this through a data model called the Google Knowledge Graph, an informational database that maps relationships between related entities.
It’s helpful to visualize it like this.
Because of the mapped relationships between entities in Google’s database, if you search something like, “When is the author of Little Women’s Birthday?” it will know you’re asking about Louisa May Alcott.
Image provided by author
This is what SEO semantic approaches are all about: capitalizing on all the search traffic you can by covering context and targeting topics in your content strategy.
Pro tip: Less than 1% of all websites use schema markup, so it really puts you ahead to go the extra mile and include it in your content.
6. Consolidate keywords
Before Google released its Hummingbird Algorithm in 2013, individual keywords held more importance.
Those were the days when a search query landed a 1:1 match with single keywords. So, if you wanted to rank #1 for “best lasagna recipe,” you had to rank for those keywords specifically.
The Hummingbird Algorithm was the advent of semantic search. It allowed for a broader topic understanding of search terms and more conversational language.
This means that prior to 2013, you needed separate pieces of content for each keyword you were trying to rank for. Unfortunately, this caused a lot of keyword stuffing of very similar terms.
Think, “hotels in New York” vs. “hotel in New York.”
After the Hummingbird update, this is no longer necessary. Google can identify the similarity and find your article with more semantic keywords like “places to stay in the Big Apple.”
The downside of the swing to semantic search is many marketers continued to plow ahead without cleaning the house first.
This means they still have scores of content optimized for search the old way.
The problem here is keyword cannibalization.
All those old articles need to be consolidated into one valuable piece of content without all the unnecessary keyword variations.
Make it a priority to tighten the ship. Do an audit for any articles stealing traffic from one another because of similar target keywords. Clean them up and optimize them for semantic search.
7. Optimize for voice search
Voice search is important for semantic SEO strategies for two reasons.
1. The data shows it’s rising as a search method. In June 2022, NPR reported that 62% of U.S. adults use voice search across devices. Furthermore, voice requests increased from 7.5 a week in 2017 to 12.4 a week in 2022, showing the likelihood of the trend increasing over time.
2. People naturally speak in context vs. keywords, which is what semantic SEO is all about. It’s far more likely that someone will say, “Show me a list of top landscape architect firms in Richmond,” than it is for them to say, “Landscape architect, Richmond.”
Which brings us to our final SEO semantic technique.
8. Write for real people
This is as important in traditional SEO as it is in SEO semantics. Natural, conversational language proves that you are a real person there to offer value and not a bot answering a keyword prompt.
A 2023 study published by MIT found that readers show favoritism towards human-created content. People want to hear from other people. Everyone understands that we’re in the growing pains of an AI transformation, and it’s uncertain where the pendulum will land.
Though feelings about artificial intelligence may be conflicted, for now, at least, favor swings to the side of the human, and with it, trust.
So, writing semantically for real people doesn’t just help boost your organic traffic and optimize you for conversational search results. It also builds trust in your brand as you continue to prove that you’re out to offer value, not cut corners by trimming content creation costs at the expense of truth.
Re-thinking your approach to SEO
An SEO semantic approach to content is more straightforward in many ways. It focuses more on conversation and topics, the way humans actually communicate. It cuts out a lot of artificial keyword stuffing and grammatical structures that no one uses in life.
Approaching SEO semantically, however, does mean being intentional with your content strategy. Focus on creating context and answering questions, including as many relevant keywords as possible to make your content valuable. Establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, with an intent on speaking to people as people, not as potential conversions.
We would love to chat if you need help restructuring your content and building authority.
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