As search engines evolve to understand language in a more sophisticated way, relationships are becoming ever more important in SEO. Semantic search is here to stay so it’s time to pay attention to connections and associations to take your SEO content to a new level.
Using entities in your content can help you produce higher-quality pieces.
Linking these pages, guides and sections of your website together can help to maximize relationships even further to achieve some outstanding results.
So how can you get started?
Terminologies you’ll need to know
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): The process of understanding text and speech words like a human being does. It’s a branch of AI computer science that helps machines to interpret and understand the true meaning behind words. Google uses NLP to better understand our search queries and to serve the best results to those queries.
- Entities: Google defines an entity as a thing or concept that is “singular, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable.” These entities are identified and labeled, helping search engines to understand their meaning based on their relationship with other entities.
- Semantic search: The process of providing a user with the best possible results to their query based on the true meaning of that query. The search engine uses language and entity relationships to understand search intent, and the context of that query and serve up results grounded in actual meaning rather than keyword matching.
How are all these connected?
NLP and the understanding of entities are the keys to making semantic search work successfully.
If Google didn’t have a good grasp of how we really use and understand language, it could easily misinterpret certain search queries.
Equally, incorrect labeling of what an entity is could produce some confusing search results.
As humans, we make these connections naturally due to the context in which we experience them. AI has to learn these connections based on contextual cues.
Over recent years, Google’s Hummingbird, BERT and now MUM updates have all been building toward a more sophisticated semantic search.
1. Content
Writing great content for semantic search goes way beyond simple keywords. It must contain the relevant entities and consider the relationships between them.
Why do entities matter in SEO content?
Entities are important for SEO content because they are connected by relationships. These entities and the relationships that associate them are what Google is using to determine meaning and context within any piece of written content.
All these things and concepts are related to other things and concepts.
Some of these relationships are very strong, others are weaker.
Some entities are widely used in text across the web in lots of different contexts, and others are used sparingly in specific circumstances.
These entities are understood by Google’s knowledge graph.
So, why should this matter for SEO?
If you want Google to serve your content as one of the top results for a certain set of queries, it’s crucial to include the entities with the strongest relationships to those queries.
This requires a thorough understanding of a topic and the entity relationships involved.
How can I use relationships to write better SEO content?
When we appreciate how important entities are in search, it’s easy to see why considering which entities relate to the topics we’re writing about is vital for serving users’ queries.
If you want to write better content, you need to thoroughly explore the entities and relationships involved.
If you were writing about the theory of evolution, for example, your content would be lacking if it didn’t mention Charles Darwin, natural selection, humans, history, and ancestors.
How do I find related entities and NLP keywords for my content?
There are a variety of tools that can help with this such as:
- InLinks
- SurferSEO
- Frase
- Semrush
- Scalenut
- Ryte
These tools are really simple to use. All you have to do is set up an editor or project using your keyword of choice (or a selection of closely related keywords).
The tools do lots of the heavy lifting, providing you with a list of terms, phrases or entities to include in your copy. Some even guide you on how frequently you should use them.
You can use these guidelines to write your content, using any of the related terms that you can naturally weave in. Often, the NLP terms are arranged by impact too, so you can give more prominence to those at the top of the list.
3 insights to consider for content freshness:
1. Writing a new piece of content requires time, instead check your old content. You probably already have something that once performed well. By updating the older content with relevant information, you have a higher chance for a well-performing piece again.
2. If you have content that ranks at the start of a 2nd search engine results page, a slight update to your meta title and a few additional paragraphs with relevant information might give you a boost to jump from 2nd to 1st page. That can mean a huge increase in traffic!
3. Some content by nature must remain fresh to rank. Let’s take our example of taking care of a dog. Feeding, grooming and caring for your dog are things that remain relatively the same over time. But things like “best dog collars” or “top Christmas gifts for your dog” will change over time because of trends, innovation, fashion and other factors. Also, notice that the intention of the queries is different as well.
2. Pillar pages and topic clusters
Getting each individual piece of content right is only one part of the puzzle.
The next challenge for a content strategist or SEO is to consider and maximize relationships between different topics and content.
Just like each term and entity, each piece of content covers a topic that is related to other topics. These relationships can be powerful or insubstantial.
What is a topic cluster strategy?
A topic cluster strategy maximizes contextual relationships between pages and pieces of content by clustering them together to add to their strength. It involves a series of supporting pages that look at areas in-depth, linking to a piece of pillar content that broadly covers the central topic.
Topic clusters improve the user journey because they make it easier for people to find related information. They provide rich and relevant resources and package them based on their relationships with one another.
3. Website
Ideally, your pillar pages will cover all the broad topics that are important to your website as a whole. Getting this right can feel really daunting.
So where do you start?
What content should I post on my website?
If you’re starting from scratch and wondering what content to post on your website, try starting from the top down. Ask yourself what the broadest level of what your website represents is.
Next, consider all the high-level topics you intend to cover. You might already have this structure in place via your website navigation, depending on what type of site you work on, and what stage of development you’re in.
- For ecommerce sites, research all the things people want to know about your main product categories.
- For service-based or corporate websites, consider thoroughly answering questions about your core service areas and industry.
- For publishing sites, consider the main topics you’ll be covering and create a detailed hub and spoke plan to cover these in-depth.
If you want to harness relationships to improve SEO, it’s really important to keep things relevant. Don’t stray too far from your core topics and make sure every page relates to other pages on your site. Also watch out for duplicate contents.
Dealing with duplicate content
Duplicate content is content that appears on more than 1 website. While quoting someone on your website is perfectly fine, if 80-90% of your content is copied from somewhere else on the web, you will likely have a problem.
Duplicate content can have a negative impact on your search engine rankings. All of the pages you want to rank should have unique content (including meta titles and meta descriptions).
Common reasons duplicate content appears on your website:
- Copying descriptions or other related content from other sites for products that you plan to resell
- Using the same descriptions for variations of the same product. E.g. for different sizes, colors etc…
- Copying content from one section of your site to another
- Having multiple languages on your website but forgetting to translate certain pages
You won’t get a penalty for duplicate content, but you will compete with yourself if you have duplicate content within your website. Since the content is already indexed and ranking on search engines, you will not have a chance to rank against another website that already has the content.
An easy and quick way to find out if you have duplicate content (or someone copied content from you) is to use Google search. Use some unique text within your page, copy it and insert it “between quotation marks” in the search box.
Website on-page SEO content checklist
- Writing meta titles and descriptions
- Organizing content with headers
- Writing the main content of the page
- Optimizing images with alt text
- Inserting descriptive URL structure
- Keeping content fresh
- Removing duplicate content
Measuring the success of your SEO efforts
Measuring SEO success is important to ensure you are moving in the right direction. Effective search engine optimization requires testing different things, seeing what works and what doesn’t. If you don’t track your metrics, you won’t know if your tactics are working.
Here are a few metrics you should be keeping tabs on.
Organic traffic
This can be tracked by 2 free tools.
1. Google Search Console
You can check the following data:
- Clicks (actual traffic to your website)
- Impressions (how many times you appeared in the search results)
- Average CTR (percentage of impressions that resulted in a click)
- Average position (position of your website, based on highest position whenever it appeared in the search)
Filter the data by:
- Search type (web, image, video)
- Date
- Search query
- Specific landing page
- Country
- Device
- Search appearance (types of different rich snippets)
2. Google Analytics
Navigate to Acquisition → All Traffic → Channels → Organic Search → Landing Page.
Google Analytics reporting is advanced. You can use a lot of different types of data and filter different variables.
To keep it simple, you can start by monitoring the following:
- Users
- New Users
- Sessions
If you want to filter out and check a group of pages (for example all pages that fall under /blog category) or a specific page (for example an article), you can click on Advanced, select Containing next to Landing Page and insert part of the URL you want to filter out.
Keyword rankings
Based on your keyword analysis, you will select the most important keywords you want to rank for. Track the progress of these KWs and how the position changes over time.
The Google Search Console report based on average position is a free report you can check, but it’s not very accurate.
If you are starting small, you can check the Google results manually and write down the results.
If you want a more convenient and precise solution where you set up keywords once, you’ll need to use a paid solution like Ahrefs or SEMrush. They’ll update your KWs automatically based on your selected frequency and you only need to come back to check the report.
Conversions
You can use Google Analytics to track conversions and sales, and filter them by organic traffic. More details for setting up goals can be found here and details for setting up ecommerce tracking can be found here.
In short, you can choose to track many different conversions based on your website’s and specific page’s purpose.
Ideas for conversions to track:
- Sign-ups for your newsletter
- Sign-ups for a course
- Sign-ups for webinar or podcast
- Sign-ups for the trial version of your product
- Sign-ups for a demo
- Downloads of your ebook
- Purchases of your product or service
Reporting for SEO
In order to make sense of all the data you have gathered, it’s recommended you make a quick and simple report to see the global view of how your SEO efforts are paying off.
Takeaway
Whether you are an SEO beginner, launching a new website, or optimizing an existing one, these SEO basics are meant to help you or increase your organic search traffic.
Now you have an idea of how search engines work and how these SEO techniques can help you craft your SEO strategy and improve your overall digital marketing efforts.
By implementing the fundamental tactics of SEO, you’ll ensure that your website will be crawled and indexed correctly by Google. What’s more, you’ll more effectively make use of keywords to attract visitors, increasing the chances of them clicking on the search result and boosting your click-through-rate (CTR).
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