Semantic SEO

We’ve all seen it.

Google has been slowly evolving into a semantic search engine.

That means Google attempts to understand the meaning of language and concepts.

What’s more, Google is doubling down on semantics with its algorithms.

For instance:

• Hummingbird
• RankBrain
• BERT
• Mum

And that means…

A semantic search engine requires a semantic SEO strategy.

In this post, I’ll answer:

• What is semantic SEO?
• How do I implement a semantic SEO strategy?

People Also Ask boxes have been around forever.

What’s more, they are everywhere.

I mean, they appear on around 70% of desktop search results.

So the question is…

How can you use People Also Ask boxes to boost your SEO? Can you use them to bring targeted traffic to your site?

In this blog post, I’ll get into how to rank in Google’s People Also Ask boxes. I’ll first cover how the feature works and then get into the strategy and tactics for ranking in PAA boxes. 

Your brand SERP is your new business card.

And since brand SERPs became a thing, I often hear the question, how do I get a Google Knowledge Panel for my brand SERP?

Yes, a Knowledge Panel demonstrates your authority to your users.

This question is how do you get one for your business?

To help you out, I’ve done some research into what they are and how they work.

In this post, you’ll learn what they are, what triggers them, and how you can get your own Knowledge Panel.

But before we get into it, let’s start with basic definitions. If you just want to get to the practical steps of how you can generate your own Knowledge Panel, feel free to skip this section.

Yes, we all know that Google is a semantic search engine. 

What this means is…

Using Natural Language Processing, Google attempts to understand the meaning of your content rather than just looking for literal keyword matches.

The reason is, that Google is attempting to improve the user experience by attempting to bring results that more accurately satisfy the searcher’s intent.

In this post, I’ll attempt to answer:

• What is natural language processing?
• How does natural language processing work?
• How do you use natural language processing in SEO?

To do this, I’ll be focusing on theoretical knowledge as well as putting on my scientist hat and doing a little experimentation. (Yes, I love tinkering.)

My goal for this experiment is to have a deeper understanding of how to create on-page SEO for NLP.

There is no question that semantic SEO is the future of SEO.

The reason?

As search engines evolve towards semantic search your SEO strategy should evolve with them.

The problem is the barrier to entry is high. In other words, to do semantic SEO you must have a basic understanding of how semantic search works.

Unfortunately, as things stand at the moment, if you do a Google search for simple easy-to-understand resources for the layman you’ll find yourself scratching your head.

To deal with that, I’ve attempted to create some semantic SEO resources that anyone can understand.

In this post, I’ll be dealing with the question: What is Google’s Knowledge Graph?

Google's goal in a nutshell is…

To provide accurate and relevant content that satisfies user queries.

In order to do this, as a semantic search engine, Google segments all of the content in its index into topics.

Those topics are broken down into subtopics.

Each topic is called a Knowledge Domain.

For each Knowledge Domain, Google understands:

• What queries users generally ask
• What entities are associated with that topic
• Which sites are experts in the topic

This means to answer a user query, Google no longer has to search billions of pages in its index to find an answer to a user query.

Instead, when a user queries the search engine, Google identifies which topic or Knowledge Domain the query belongs to.

It then simply searches that Knowledge Domain for an answer to the query.

And, it already has a list of sites that have established themselves as experts in the topic.

How do you establish your site as a topical expert?

By creating a thorough network of content that covers the topic thoroughly.

This is a semantic SEO strategy called topical authority and topical authority is achieved through content clustering.

In this post, I’ll cover: What content clusters are and I'll show you two opposite approaches to creating cluster content.

What is site architecture? How does it affect SEO?

Site architecture is one of those best practices that makes sense on so many levels. It not only helps search engines crawl and categorize your content, but it also helps your users find exactly what they're looking for.

And...

At the end of the day, your content exists for your users.

In this post, I’ll get into:

• What site architecture is
• What the two main benefits are
• The relationship between site architecture and semantic SEO

Nowadays SEO is seeing the rise of concepts such as semantic SEO, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and programming languages. Speaking of which, Python is a huge help for optimization and most of the boring tasks you may want to carry out while working. Don’t worry, coding can seem daunting at first but it’s way more straightforward than you think thanks to some specialized libraries.

We have already discussed semantic search, as well as topical authority, and Python is a good solution to explore new insights and for faster calculations, compared to the usual Excel workflow.

It’s no secret that Google relies a lot on NLP to retrieve results and that is the main reason why we are interested in exploring natural language to get more clues about how we can improve our content.

In this post I clarify:

• The main semantic SEO tasks you can carry out in Python
• Code snippets on how to implement them
• Short practical examples to get you started
• Use cases and motivations behind
• Pitfalls and traps of blindly copy-pasting code for decision making

When looking at Google Search Console search queries, you might see something interesting.

When you scroll through the queries, you’ll sometimes notice that your content is ranking for queries that don’t actually appear in your content or your metadata.

Ever wonder why?

The answer is semantic search.

In this article, I’ll be sharing a simple Google Search Console SEO strategy that can easily be implemented to improve your topical relevance and scale your ranking potential. 

When starting your journey into semantic SEO, there are many concepts that you need to understand before getting started.

But, many of the resources online are painfully difficult to understand. 

So, to help you out, I decided to create content that spells everything out in simple English.

Also…

I generally try to give practical tips and strategies in my blog posts. But, since I was confused, I assume others are too. This is my attempt at giving you a clear understanding of some important concepts.

And, that brings us to the subject of this post.

If you were wondering what a Google entity really is, this post is for you.

In it, I hope to clarify:

• What an entity is
• What the various component parts are
• What the Topic Layer is

Once you understand these points, you’ll have both the knowledge and vocabulary to research the topic on your own. And since semantic SEO is not just a few tactics and best practices, having a real understanding can really help you get more traffic.

As Google and other search engines progress, SEO is constantly evolving.

One of the biggest evolutions is semantic SEO.

Semantic SEO is a branch of SEO that seems to have flown under the radar for many. What’s interesting is that semantic search is here to stay as Google is doubling down on semantic search with many of its algorithms.

For instance:

• Hummingbird
• Rank Brain
• Bert
• Mum

This means understanding how Google structures entities in its Knowledge Graph and incorporating that knowledge into your site structure is becoming more important every day.

In this post, I’ll cover what a topical map is and how you can use it to structure your content so that your site content can be easily understood by both users and search engines.

Topical authority is a semantic SEO strategy that could bring massive traffic to your site.

To achieve topical authority, you must create authoritative content that covers an entire topic. However, to be successful it really pays to first understand what entities exist in Google’s Knowledge Graph and how they are structured.

In my previous post, I covered how to research entities in Google's Knowledge Graph. 

The point of this analysis is to give you the information to figure out not only what content assets to make but also how to create a structure that not only makes sense to your readers but also to Google.

I explained that you are looking for:

• Related Entities
• Related Topics
• Related Queries

In this post, I want to clarify the difference between related entities and related queries and why the difference makes a difference to how you do SEO.