Semantic SEO is the practice of writing content search engine optimized around topics, not just individual keywords.
Why Is Semantic SEO Important?
Back in the day Google evaluated a page’s topic based 100% on keywords.
For example, if you wrote a page that used a keyword “Paleo Diet” over and over again, that told Google: “That keyword appears all over the page. This page must be about the Paleo Diet!”
Then, in 2013, Google launched their Hummingbird Algorithm.
This algorithm changed how Google worked in a major way.
Instead of only looking at keywords, they now read and understand a page’s overall topic.
For example, if you searched for “Paleo diet health benefits” pre-Hummingbird, Google would show you pages that had that exact phrase on the page:
But Hummingbird is smarter than that.
Yes, Google still looks for keywords. But they don’t rely on them.
So instead of only scanning pages for keywords, they look for pages that cover the topic “Paleo diet and health” best.
And present those results to users:
Best Practices
Publish “Topically Relevant” Content
I recently ran the largest Google ranking factors correlation study ever conducted (over a million search results analyzed).
And one of our most surprising findings was how powerful “Topically Relevant” content turned out to be.
So:
What is “Topically Relevant” content? And how can you optimize for it.
Topically Relevant content is a fancy way is describing content that covers and entire topic in-depth.
Write Topic Outlines
If you want to almost guarantee that your content is Topically Relevant, I HIGHLY recommend “Topic Outlines”.
Topic Outlines are outlines that list out all of the subtopics that you’re going to cover in your post.
And they make it easy to write the type of in-depth content that Google loves.
This Topic Outline listed all of the subtopics that fall under the greater topic of “backlinks”
Answer “People Also Ask” Questions
This is a cool tip that I recently picked up.
You might have noticed that Google now has these “People Also Ask” boxes in the search results.
People Also Ask Boxes are basically Google telling you: “These are burning questions that people have about this topic”.
And when you answer these questions in your content, you’ll not only rank better for your target keyword… but you can also show up inside of these “People Also Ask” boxes.
You can either answer these questions directly, like I did here in my post about nofollow links:
Or you can just cover the answer to that topic in your post.
For example, if you search for “backlinks” one of the questions is: “What is an example of a backlink”:
So I included an example in my content.
Simple.
Target Keyword Variations With The Same Page
When I first got into SEO, people used to create a different page for every variation of a keyword.
For example, you’d create one page optimized around “best cookie recipes”. And another optimized for “best cookies recipe”.
The idea was to create a page that was SUPER optimized around that specific keyword. And repeat the process for every different variation of that term.
This worked well… for a while.
But thanks to updates like Panda and Hummingbird, this approach doesn’t make sense anymore.
That’s because Google now shows nearly identical results for variations of the same keywords.
For example, when you do a search for “oatmeal cookie recipe” and “oatmeal cookies recipe”, the results are pretty much exactly the same:
That’s why you want to target multiple similar keywords with the same page.
Avoid Long Tail Keywords
You already learned it doesn’t make sense to optimize different pages around keyword variations..
Well, it turns out that the same rule also applies to most long tail keywords.
I’ll explain:
Long tail keywords are popular because they’re not super competitive.
The problem is this:
Thanks to Semantic SEO, Google now lumps similar long tail keywords under the same topic.
For example, take two long tail keywords like “link building tips” and “link building techniques”.
Google now understands that both of these long tail terms fall under the topic of “link building”.
Which is why the results for both are super similar.
Instead of long tail keywords, I recommend creating content around semi-competitive “Medium Tail” keywords.
And if your content is amazing enough, Google will automatically rank it for lots of long tail keywords.
This isn’t’ an insanely competitive keyword like “SEO”. But it’s also not a long tail keyword like: “best keyword research strategies”. It’s right in the middle.
Don’t Ignore Keywords Altogether
There’s been a lot of talk lately about “optimizing for topics, not keywords”.
And it’s 1000% WRONG.
As you just saw, Google can now understand a page’s topic. Which means you don’t need to spoon feed them different keyword variations and long tail keywords.
But that doesn’t mean that keywords are dead. Far from it.
In fact, Google s
