Many people’s understanding of SEO involves finding a few keywords to target and including those terms throughout your content. To some, it might seem like the best way to get your content to rank for certain keywords is to include it as much as you can to ensure that search engines pick up on it. However, SEO isn’t as easy as using the same keyword frequently in your content. In fact, using your keywords too much can actually end up hurting you and will make search engines think your content is spammy, rather than valuable.
Search engines have evolved significantly over the years, and if what you learned about SEO at one point is outdated now, you won’t get very far. One thing to know about SEO today is semantic keywords and how they can help improve your chances of your content ranking highly.
How Do Semantic Keywords Work?
An outdated SEO strategy would be to only focus on one specific keyword. However, today’s search engines want to see semantic keywords, terms that are conceptually related to one another. Thanks to search engines becoming more advanced over the years, they’re able to understand content better than simple scanning for keywords. Semantic keywords help provide search engines with more context on what a page is about, which can help improve how it ranks.
When you search for something on Google, you don’t only get back results that contain an exact match for your search term. Instead, you’ll see many results that show up with similar terms that still tell you what you wanted to know. Search engines understand the intent behind searches to provide you with the best results. Several people might benefit from the same piece of content, but use different search terms. Search engines today understand that people are likely to phrase things in different ways, but that doesn’t necessarily change the intent behind their searches. Semantic keywords can help search engines understand what searches your content fits so that you can show up in more search results.
Covering various related topics in a piece of content also helps provide users with more informative content. If you’re only concerned with covering one specific keyword and nothing else, your content likely isn’t going to be very valuable or tell users everything they’re looking for. Understanding semantic keywords and how to find them allows you to create more well-rounded content that gives users and search engines the information they want. Knowing what related topics to cover can also help you give more guidance when creating content and allows your content to sound more natural.
How To Find Semantic Keywords
Finding just one keyword to target can seem complicated to some, so figuring out semantically related keywords to include might seem like too much. However, finding semantic keywords can be easier than you might think if you know where to look.
Of course, one of the best places to find semantic keywords is through a keyword research tool like SEMRush. With this, it’s simple to look up your target keyword and immediately get related keywords recommended. Not only does this provide you with related keywords, but it also tells you the search intent behind them. This way, you can ensure that your content matches what users are looking for.
While keyword research tools can make it easy to find semantically related keywords, they aren’t the only way of finding them. Searching for your keyword on Google can show you many potential semantic keywords to include. These can show up as “things to know”, “people also search”, and “related searches.” While these won’t show you the search volume or keyword difficulty, it does give you an easy way of learning more about what topics fit your keyword well.
For example, a few semantic keywords you can find for “content marketing” through a Google search are “types of content marketing”, “what are the basics of content marketing”, and “content marketing strategy”.
Help Your Content Rank Highly with ENX2 Marketing
Knowing what search engines want and how to create high-quality content for your audience isn’t easy, and the best practices can change as search engines continue to evolve. Instead of trying to keep up with everything and do multiple tasks at once, have an experienced team handle it. At ENX2 Marketing, we can help with everything you need to optimize your content and stay up-to-date with all the latest SEO trends.
Contact us today to learn more about our digital marketing services!