What is Semantic SEO and How Can It Improve Rankings?
The SEO landscape is constantly evolving, undergoing some major changes in the past ten years, as semantic web technology emerges. User now expect search engines to understand language better than in the past and Google has achieved some amazing accomplishments when it comes to language processing.
Semantic SEO involves optimising your content for a topic rather than a keyword. It focuses on user intent, experience, and relationships. It helps search engines deliver accurate and relevant results, boosting user experience.
In order to create relevant high quality content, you need to understand how Google ranks websites and displays your information on search engine results pages (SERPs). Google is moving quickly towards a semantic SEO approach.
Since 2012, Google has been using a very sophisticated knowledge base to store and organise information, improving its understanding of relationships between concepts and entities. The biggest change is Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE), which is an AI overview, taking snippets from top SERPs.
The snippets provide a fast and accurate response to user questions, along with links to the relevant sources.
AI overviews are now offered in more than one hundred countries. This new strategy helps users learn about a topic quickly, gaining insights, and accomplishing tasks without having to click on a link to a website to find out more.
When you use semantic SEO you are future-proofing your SEO efforts, helping you stay ahead of algorithm updates. When you focus on optimising yoru content for keywords and topics, taking user intent into consideration, you will enjoy the following benefits:
Rather than focusing on keywords, rather focus on topics and keywords, building on this. You need content to be relevant, valuable, and unique. You should be answering yoru audiences most burning questions or helping with pain points.
The first step to any successful digital marketing strategy is keyword research. Keyword research helps you understand the words and phrases your audience uses when searching for products and services you provide, along with understanding user preferences, behaviour, and interests.
With your keywords and topics gathered, you can write your content with semantic SEO in mind.
Structured data, also referred to as schema markup, helps Google and other search engines understand our content. It is a language that provides context behind your content, which Google then uses to make your content attractive on search pages.
Creating content with semantic SEO in mind improves relevance and value. Even the most high quality content that uses relevant keywords won't rank well, if it doesn't address the topic. Semantic SEO is optimising your content to ensure Google understands it. For help with your SEO strategy, get in touch with the experts at Genie Crawl today.
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