Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of making sure Google knows that you are the absolute authority on your topic in order to rank above others. Google is learning how to best understand human language and the relationship between words, adapting to take into consideration searchers’ use of slang, differences in phrasing, and variations in language. It is simply not enough to optimise for one seed keyword. When considering ranking, Google looks at a page of content and will analyse how much of your vocabulary surrounding that topic appears to show an in-depth display of topically relevant” content. Semantic SEO is about using related, LSI keywords to enrich your on-page copy.
For example, a page can no longer optimise simply for the term “frozen coffee”, as Google will also scan the page for LSI keywords like “filter”, “temperature”, “grind”, “cold water”, and “ice coffee”. These are cluster keywords, not necessarily synonyms. For example “jogging” and “running” are synonyms, but LSI keywords for “jogging” would be “trainers, exercise, gym”. This helps Google agree that your page is the authority and worth serving above other pages on the same topic.
Keyword stuffing, or simply repeating a seed keyword over and over, is grossly outdated and severely black hat practice. The quickest way to determine LSI keywords for your topic is to utilise Google Autocomplete
This helps us understand what Google is predicting that searchers will want to know around your seed keyword. These LSI keywords need to appear throughout all of the content as well as in various areas of the website such as title tag and alt text etc. Many digital marketing agencies will get their SEO experts to optimise simply for one keyword, but as we have described here, Latent Semantic Indexing is a technique that must be incorporated into the overall SEO strategy in order to see real SEO results. (Go back through this blog to see how many semantic phrases I used in this paragraph so that Google knows this is an SEO blog about Digital Marketing!)
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