Traditional marketing began to be fade into the background with the advent of digital marketing. One of the most successful tools which are used today for marketing campaigns is content marketing. Content marketing promotes the product or service by creating digital content such as blogs, podcasts, videos, and many others to attract, inform, acquire, and engage with a target audience. It is designed not to highlight only the advantages of goods or services, convincing the audience to purchase them – with its help, they strive to bring maximum benefit.
Content is essential not only for humans but also for machines. Search engines would have to know what a certain page is about. Nowadays, search engines are permanently getting improved in order to understand the meaning of the words better. Although today’s searching tools are not yet ideal, it helps regular users to find the corresponding information they requested.
Briefly, the content is a bridge between people who need specific information and machines which are trying to understand what the users want. It’s up to you to build a strong bridge by using relevant content or not.
Let’s begin with the definition of Semantic SEO. As we remember, classic SEO is focusing on keywords for better query understanding. Semantic Search is the next level of SEO, focusing on the context and putting more meaning into the words in the content. Semantic SEO is related to real-world objects, ideas, and concepts.
Special technologies are used to carry out a semantic search on the Web. Semantic search takes into consideration the information context, the location, and purpose of the user’s search, word variations, synonyms, generalized and specialized queries, the query language, and other features that allow you to get the appropriate result.
Semantic search technology is considered as an addition or alternative to traditional types of information retrieval. The purpose of semantic search is to identify the characteristics of the user and provide him with the most relevant results.
How do the machines achieve better results by using semantic SEO? There are three main components: user intentions, context, and words relationships.
Semantic SEO is learning to understand user intentions by analyzing the meaning behind their search requests. It is not enough to spot what the user enters in the search bar, but what do they exactly mean.
Semantic SEO is intended to help the users in problem solutions and prioritize those results, which are more corresponsive to user intentions. That is why the content should provide the answer to the question and/or variant of solutions. To understand this component, we would have to ask several questions. What problem are users trying to solve? What kind of content are they expecting to find? What are their intentions? Knowing the answers to those questions, we can create content that can correspond to user queries.
One single word can be put in different contexts. Good content wouldn’t work in the wrong context. Every query is unique. Let’s imagine that the user types in the search bar the word “horse.” What do they mean? It could be either animal or sports equipment.
Semantic SEO is here to help because machines can determine the context. What we can do from our side is to provide the right content. In order to create suitable content, we would have to know our audience, their demographic and psychographic and habits. Who are they? What is their profession? What is their context while searching?
As we know that machines are not perfect, although they are getting improved. Today they can spot the difference between words in a different context.
Previously search engines were focusing on keywords, namely verbs and nouns. Today machines have learned how to recognize the word inside the context by considering other grammar structures, like prepositions and pronounces.
Before, people who would like to go from Brazil to the US searched for visas before their travels. However, there was mostly information about the travelers from the USA to Brazil in their search results. Nowadays, thank to semantic SEO, that wouldn’t happen since the search engines can understand the context and difference between the prepositions “from” and “to.”
Word connection is important. Make sure your connection between words is relatable and choose the right words to lead the users to the web page.
As mentioned in the beginning, content is created not only for users but also for machines. However, we should not forget to preauthorize humans, not SEO needs. We should create better content for real people and only optimize the machines later. If your content does not serve the people’s needs, SEO will not work correctly. Know your user, predict their intentions, and create user-oriented content so that the semantic SEO will work more efficiently.
