How To Boost Content Strategy With a Great Semantic SEO Plan

Ever wondered why your content can rank for different keywords? That is thanks to the power of semantic search, which relies on contextual rather than literal matches. Semantic SEO is mainly why SEO agency services move away from keywords and towards topic cluster strategies.

Needless to say, your website needs a good semantic SEO plan.

This guide’s purpose is to teach you how to add semantic SEO to your web strategy, including:

• How semantic SEO helps your content strategy
• Five practices to follow for excellent SEO content

There’s a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes.

Let’s go!

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Semantic SEO and Your Content Strategy

Any SEO agency would say that the key to winning the semantic SEO game is to understand that context matters — a lot. If you use meta tags, you already know that search engines need help understanding your content. Machines do not possess the ability to read and understand human languages the way we do.

Instead, they look for patterns or helpful clues to identify which content is meaningful for search queries, such as whether certain words are present. Your target keyword works similarly. It marks your content as part of a specific topic; for example, ‘gaming pc builds.’

Therefore, moving from a keyword-centric to a topic-centric strategy is highly beneficial. The latter ties everything together in ways the former could not. That is, unifying your content under a topic (or pillar page) helps establish your expert status, which then helps you win users’ trust.

Here is a quick thought experiment to drive the point home. Imagine that you somehow found a website on page one of Google where every article published covered a totally different subject from the rest. Would you, in all honesty, trust information from this website and its writers?

Now flip that around. Say, while searching “gaming PC builds,” you found a website filled to the brim with content reviewing PC parts. It does not directly answer your query, but — and this is a big but — all of it is relevant to your concerns and even answers ones you did not know you had.

5  Semantic SEO Practices for Great Content

When you hear the term ‘semantic SEO,’ language and writing are probably the first things that come to mind. While not incorrect, it does not capture its true essence. As mentioned above, this branch of SEO deals with connecting the dots, specifically connecting ideas and meaning.

Semantic SEO is not purely content-based, but it does lean heavily in that direction, and for the most part, content is the most actionable aspect of it. Therefore, it only makes sense to start with it. Here are five best practices you can apply now to improve your content’s semantic SEO.

     1. Be Creative With Sources

Every piece of content starts with an idea, and you need to find the right one to get the most traffic. Keyword tools help immensely, but everyone already knows about them, which means that using them might not help you stand out. You need to think outside the box with these ideas.

• Use tools like ChatGPT and Hebbia to gather semantic SEO topic ideas for content.
• Look at what competitors write about, especially what they have not covered in depth.
• Research Google, particularly ‘People are also asking’ and related searches.

     2.  Write in the Active Voice

People rarely search using the passive voice (i.e., was the Grand Canyon made by people). Instead, they might write something like ‘did people make the Grand Canyon? or ‘who carved the Grand Canyon? The same goes for any content you publish on your website.

The active voice is also better overall for content because it lets the reader know who is in the role of actor – and when you use the second person (“you”), your material makes them the actor and immediately tells them whether this is relevant to their problem. This should tell you how important language, and in this case structure, is for SEO, hence semantic SEO.

     3. Tap Into Common Sense

This one might seem odd, but hold onto that thought for a while. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and think: if you were looking for products, content, or services like yours, how would you do it? You would most likely conclude that you want to find everything in one place if possible.

Semantic SEO comes in here: are you covering all possible topics your customers might look for? To frame it another way: if someone finds your website, will they leave it knowing what they need or want to know about problems, solutions, and everything in between?

     4. Link Your Content Pages

You cannot talk about semantic SEO without broaching the subject of topic clusters and internal links because semantics is essential to the former, which then affects the latter. In fact, topics are fundamental to semantic SEO strategies because they respond directly to semantic search.

Another way that internal links contribute to semantic SEO efforts is through improvements in user experience (UX) or customer experience (CX). Why? That would be because internal links make it much easier for users to find the correct page on your website.

     5. Improve on Topical Depth

Last but not least is the topical depth, which refers to how well your content can apply semantic SEO to address user problems and has nothing to do with word count or length. Let us break it down even further to help you understand how this concept works. Here are three tips to follow:

• Use a topic cluster strategy to give each topic its own contained and in-depth discussion.
• Revisit old content and optimize each one for better topical depth with fresh information.
• A well-written article covers a subject's or topic’s who, what, when, where, how, and why.

Summing Up

High-quality content still remains one of the most reliable methods for boosting your SEO score and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs), and semantic SEO furthers that. With a solid plan, you increase your content’s ability to draw traffic and keep customers happy.

Something as simple as switching to the active voice can do wonders for your content strategy. However, more advanced techniques, such as topic clusters and adjusting the topical depth, can take your articles to the next level of SEO effectiveness. Any of these is an excellent place to start.

Need help applying semantic SEO to your content strategy? Contact us to learn how we can help.