Semantic Keywords (or LSI) are words that follow the same conceptual ideas as a core keyword. Using them helps you to create content that maintains expected discourse and so improves SEO and UX.

This article looks at what semantic keywords are, how to find them, and how to place them in your content.

What Are Semantic Keywords?

Semantic keywords are unique words and phrases that have some kind of conceptual link to your main, core keyword. They’ve had a lot of names over the years, but the marketing (SEO) community has generally settled on LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing).

What does that mean?

It’s really just a case of semantics.

Semantics: the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning.

LSI is where you take the language (discourse) which surrounds a piece of content you’re creating, and you make sure that your piece of content fits.

Imagine you’re going to a party. It’s a fancy dress party, the theme being animals. You show up in a tux with a rose red bowtie. You’re not going to fit in. Depending on the party, you may get thrown out. At best, you’re going to be a seen as an oddball.

In an age where search engines are constantly improving their algorythms for judging relevancy, you don’t want to be an oddball (too much).

Let’s take a look at a linguistic example. Which of the words below does not fit.

Ice cream
Yogurt
Cheese
Orange juice

If you picked ice cream… you would be wrong.

You would be right if you picked “Orange Juice”. But why?

On a textual level, the words are all as different and similar as one another. Ice cream also has two words, so it can’t be that. Yogurt also has a “U”, so it can’t be that. The difference is the concept. Orange juice simply isn’t a dairy product.

Semantic keywords would be all of the words apart from orange juice… if we were talking about dairy products.

And that leads in to the second thing about semantic keywords, you need to have a frame of reference.

Framing Is Key to Semantics

In order for semantic keywords to make sense, you need a frame of reference.

For most digital articles, this frame of reference is going to be your core keyword.

Let’s say that you’re writing a piece of content about hamsters (I don’t know why, hamsters just come into my head a lot).

Well, stage one of your semantic hamster research is going to mean narrowing down your frame of reference to a particular article.

Take a look at finding content opportunities through comment analysis if you’re stuck for where to go here, or simply use a keyword tool. Either way, you’re going to need to find a specific article idea first.

Once you’ve frame your article, you’re ready to get started.

To keep things simple, for the rest of this article, we’re going to work on identifying the semantic keywords for the keyword (phrase) “are hamsters good pets”. This is the article we want to write and rank for.

Find Your First Semantic Keywords

What better way to get started with semantic keywords than by finding your own!

There are four primary avenues for finding semantic keywords:

Google Search
Wikipedia
Reddit
Social Media

Google Search

This section is going to talk about creating a corpus from a range of different texts related to your targeted keyword. The idea here is that we want to understand the language “network” that search engines like Google, and readers, expect.

To begin, we’re going to create a corpus from the page one Google search results. We want to keep our corpora separate during this stage as each offers a different type of data.

If you’re like me, maybe you have a program that will automatically scrape Google’s data (to be released). If not, then you’re going to have to do this manually. Simple search for your keyword, click through to each page and copy paste into a notepad document.

Note: Before you do this, launch into some keyword research for your main term. If it’s not a high volume, high difficulty term, you can probably just create a really great piece of relevant content, and this is an unneeded step.

Once you’ve done that, it’s time to boot up your favorite corpus tool and get to analyzing the discourse around it.

To start, we’re going to take a basic word list.

All of the words your find here have value. But it’s also useful to assign some kind of statistical significance to help filter out the data. In most cases, I will set a 5% frequency cutoff. In other words, the word needs to appear in more than 5% of the corpus. This may seem like a lot, but it really helps to sort the most important semantic keywords for SEO, from the less important.

You can continue to reduce this threshold if you find that it doesn’t provide enough semantic keywords.

Refining Discourse

Relevant content from sites like Wikipedia and Reddit, and social media, should be put into a seperate corpus.

These provide insight into how your audience speaks on the topic – it provides deeper insight into the discourse. As we discussed with Coca Cola, this is vital to creating change and inspiring action.

When selecting texts to take information from, don’t just lump in everything you can find. Take a look at the content and see if it aligns with your brand’s own values.

Once you’ve collected the corpus, create and perform the same semantic keyword research as before.

Taking Semantic Keywords Deeper

Once you’ve created a list of semantic keywords, it’s actually possible to take this even further and create a network of the language situated around high-performing content that focuses on your keyword.

A lot of SEO strategists do this without realizing (and in a somewhat haphazard way). We’re going to inform our strategy with data.

Using Collocates

Once you’ve collected your keywords and have decided you’re really going to take things to the next level, it’s time to start working with collocates.

Collocates tells you which words occur together most frequently, based on a span set by you, the user. A span is the number of words to either side of your primary word.

Collocates can get really complicated really quickly, so I highly recommend limiting your span and the number of words you analyze when doing this. If you do it too much, you’re also in danger of receiving the dreaded duplicate content penalty.

To begin working with collcates, take your previous corpus and stick it back in a tool that allows for an analysis of collocates.

Load up the collocate section and set the span to 3L and 3R. Type in a keyword you want to look at, I’m going to pick “hamster”, and hit go.

Here you’ll be presented with a bunch of collocates. These are going to have relatively low volume, but in some cases, they are going to be useful. You can then click on them to learn more.

“Slimming” is interesting. Why is that there? Let’s click on it and find out why:

What to do when your hamster is fat

Slimming down your hamster will be to his benefit…

So it’s more a question and answer about hamster care. Care is obviously an important quality to articles about why hamsters are good pets. This also gives us an idea for a further article, as well as for how we should talk about the current article.

There are a bunch of other collocates we can take a look at here. Collect the most frequent collocates and add them to your semantic keyword list.

Putting Your Network into Play

The final step is putting your semantic keywords into play.

Semantic keywords are very different from core keywords.

Firstly, there should be a lot more of them. Secondly, they are much more in tune with user experience. Thirdly, they are going to potentially need to be bunched together (collocates).

So when putting semantic keywords into your text, keep in mind the following rules:

Evenly distribute them throughout your text (with the exception of collocates).
Understand the deeper connections (collocates)
Provide them in association with genuine, useful content

Conclusion

So there you have it. This article has outlined how you can easily create content that matches search engine and reader expectations.

As an added bonus, because you took a look at the way the community talks about your products through Reddit and social media, you also have access to the discourse surrounding the product. This means it’s just as easy to create content that emotionally resonates.

…Just make sure to add your own rheotrical spin!

Google offers digital marketers a huge number of resources to get your marketing strategy off the ground. Not just in its marketing apps, but in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) themselves.

This is a quick guide on how to use SERPs to create better link-building content that has a higher chance of ranking – before even stepping foot in a keyword tool.

A Breakdown of a SERP

SERPs are no longer the simple, homogeneous body they used to be. Now, there are over 20 different sections which can pop-up depending on how Google defines an individual search query. A couple of examples of these different sections include:

The Search Bar Itself
A Short Informational Summary
More Detailed Information
Top Stories
Shopping Results
The Actual Search Results
Searches Related To…

The sections that appear are based largely on the semantic attributes Google associates with your query. At the time of writing, Google categorizes search results as either Informational, Navigational, or Transactional. It does this through a linguistic analysis of what you’ve written. For instance:

“What is Valentine’s Day” = Informational
“Where to Buy the Best Valentine’s Day Gifts?” = Navigational
“Valentine’s Day Gifts” = Transactional

Particular phrases indicate particular requirements on the part of the searcher. As Google search has become increasingly powerful, so too has its ability to deliver content that is progressively more relevant.

This not only provides an incentive for website owners to create better, more relevant content, it also provides searchers with an easier job of finding something.

This entire process relies on a linguistic analysis of search queries and on-page content.

Getting Started With Semantic Optimization

To get started with semantic optimization, you’re going to need to open a relevant search. Let’s say we’re looking to promote a valentine’s day product, we would type “Valentine’s day gifts”.

Ignore everything on the top and scroll straight to the “Searches Related To” section at the bottom of the page. Here, you can find frequently searched terms which are also related to your primary search query above.

The first four results that appear are:

valentine’s day gifts for her
sentimental valentine’s day gifts for girlfriend
non cheesy valentine’s day gifts for him
romantic valentines gifts for her

Immediately, several key words and phrases can be seen: “for her”, “for him”, “sentimental”, “non-cheesy”, and “romantic”.

Confirming with the Search Bar

Your next port of call is the search bar. Start typing in a relevant query and see what comes up as you type.

For instance, if I start with “best valentine”, I’m given a lot of entirely new
results , but I’m also given some reoccurring search phrases as well. “best valentines gifts for him” and “best valentines gifts for her” seem to be very popular, so I’m going to move forward with those.

Repeating this method with different search terms I’ve gathered from the original SERP can also net me some new ideas and language to play with.

I find that a good way to organize this data is by marking down each search term and then giving it a tick for each time it or a similar search term appears. Eventually, you should end up with several which are marked much higher. These will become your primary contenders for on-page optimization.

Supporting Keyword Strategies with Other Software

Once you’ve narrowed down a list of potential suspects, you’re going to want to use third-party software to confirm them. I tend to use KW finder as it provides data on the difficulty of becoming strong in a particular keyword or phrase. They also currently offer 5 searches per day for free. Here’s what a search result will look like:

What we mainly want to look at is the suggestions page and the DIFF (difficulty) score. The lower the score, the better the search term, the higher the score, the worse. 30 is an ok score, but something lower would be even better.

We also want to look at the search column. This provides us with data on the search volume. We want to find something which lands on a happy medium.

Rinse and repeat with the other search terms you have and rank according to the power behind them (search volume and ranking difficulty).

Once you start creating your content, take the most powerful keywords and place them as the most prominent (no keyword stuffing). Try to work in as many of them as you can organically (again, no keyword stuffing), and you’ll start to see your content rank quickly.

The Role of Schema

I’m going to talk about schema briefly as it highly relates to the pragmatics problem associated with SEO.

Written word, unlike verbal communication, lacks some of the contextual clues that come with an in-person conversation. Medium, sound, body language, etiquette: all of these things contribute to meaning but are unfortunately absent in written communication.

Schema takes a step towards bringing this gap by providing a revealing co-text, as opposed to context. This co-text is coded behind the content.

Marketers interested in understanding the purpose of schema should explore the history of linguistic tagging to see how it can benefit their organic results.