[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]
Back in February, we explored balancing keyword targeting with concept targeting. This time around we're looking at using your knowledge of related topics and semantic connections in your on-page SEO processes. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about applying those ideas in ways that will boost your ranking potential and inform your keyword research.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about using related topics and semantically connected keywords, not just for keyword research — although that is a potential use and application — but also for some of the on-page SEO processes that we run.
Now when I say "related topics and semantically connected keywords," I'm not actually talking about the things that you would find through a traditional keyword research process. The idea here is not to say, "What other things are people searching for that I could target?"
This is really trying to define two different, unique kinds of use cases or extractions for keywords.
Those are: What are keywords (well, words and phrases overall), unique words and phrases that are used on more pages and paragraphs and phrases that contain the query you're going after across the Web, and what are terms and phrases that are used by more pages that rank for that particular query?
This may sound a little technical, but it's not too hard. Once I show you these examples, I think you'll grasp it real quick.
Let's say for example that I'm trying to target the word "food processor." I've chosen that as a good keyword for me. It's something that I want to rank for. I know that if I can rank for it, I'm going to do well. My keyword research is done.
At this point, I'm doing on-page SEO. I'm trying to make my page more relevant and my site more relevant. I'm trying to rank better for this, and it could be the case that using certain words and phrases on the page where I'm targeting "food processor" is very important.
Google might look at a page that's ranking for "food processor" and say, "Gosh, it's weird that this page doesn't have this keyword, this keyword, this keyword on it. We would expect that a page that's targeting 'food processor' should have these things."
So I want to find two things. I want to find, in the top 10 or top 20 results that Google already has for "food processor," what are words and phrases that are on those pages more frequently? And across the entire Web, the corpus of the whole Internet that Google crawls or at least the important parts of the Internet that Google crawls and indexes, what are words and phrases that are used more on those pages when the phrase "food processor" is present?
That's what this chart is showing me. Essentially, these are things that are used more across the whole Web. These are things that are used more on pages that already rank for this term.
I've done this with two examples — food processor and rainforest. Rainforest keywords in orange, food processor keywords in purple.
For example, you might see that the word "recipe" is used across the Web on lots of pages that contain "food processor," which makes sense. Lots of recipes that call for a food processor have the word "recipe" on the page. But those aren't necessarily the ones that rank very well. So it's over here. It's high up on the "Yes, used across the Web" but low down on "Used by pages that rank well."
Is it important to use it on the page that I'm trying to target? Well, maybe. It depends on how comprehensive I'm trying to be. Maybe I should think about targeting that on a different page, these kinds of things.
Something like — let's go over to our example for rainforest — a word like "temperate rainforest," which are less popular and commonly used both on the Web and in the results that rank than the more commonly thought of "tropical rainforests." So Washington State, for example, near Seattle has some temperate rainforests, where you get lots of rain, but you don't think of them as traditional rainforests. They don't have like thousands of creatures in them. They're not all hot and wet like they are in Brazil or Costa Rica or those kinds of places. So "temperate," less commonly used across the Web and less common in the ones that rank well.
But something like "Amazon," very common in things that rank well and in the middle of pages that use it and don't. Many pages that use rainforests don't describe specifically the Amazon rainforest, but many do.
Got it. Now what?
So now you've got this concept. What do I do with these? Well, there are really two big things that you can do that are pretty awesome.
1. Use semantic connections AND related topics to boost ranking potential
So if I have a page that's targeting rainforests, I want to think about: What are the topics and concepts, words and phrases that Google probably wants me to cover, that users and searchers probably also want me to cover? Those could be things like rainfall, ecosystem and biome, tropical, Amazon like we talked about. Maybe even a competing brand, like National Geographic, which is on here. It's used on a lot of pages that rank well. Maybe Google has an association between rainforests and Nat Geo, and I should potentially reference them or link to them or talk about them, pull a photo from them, that kind of thing. Brazil.
These words, using them on the page can help me to be more relevant, more comprehensive, potentially more useful, and more high-quality. This is especially true for informational style searches, but potentially true for commercial searches too.
2. Use this to expand keyword research
Instead of just saying like, "Hey, I'm going to look for things that people also search for. I'm going to use Google suggest and related searches. I'm going to use KeywordTool.io, or I'm going to go Google AdWords and see what are the other high-volume searches."
I might broaden my thinking to, "Huh, I wonder if things like 'food processor recipes,' or very specific things, like 'pesto made with food processor,' are interesting things for me to target additionally deeper in my site so I can build authority around all the topics and concepts that are related to the word 'food processor.'"
Not every one of these semantic and related topics is going to be a good choice for you. That's definitely the case. You have to use good judgment and the traditional metrics that you would use for keyword research — volume, difficulty, opportunity — to discover the right ones.
What's kind of cool and one of the reasons I'm covering this, this week is that some tools have come out in the recent past, a bunch of NLP, Natural Language Processing tools, and APIs that let you do some cool stuff around this. Those include people like Alchemy, Sysomos, OpenCalais, and a number of others.
Then it's also the case, and this is slightly self-promotional, but Moz Analytics [Moz Pro] recently released their Related Topics feature. So you can now go to the on-page section of Moz Pro and see a list of things. The Moz Pro one is going to be more like the stuff here. Think words and phrases that are used by pages that also already rank for the query you're targeting. Then, in about a month, Keyword Explorer will be launching, which I've talked about a number of times, and that will have more of these things. It's used on pages across the Web that also feature this.
But you can get this stuff currently through some of these tools. You can do your own analyses. There's lots of code out there in code repositories that you can pull from the Web. So I encourage you to give this a try. We've seen some good results from people who are trying this stuff out, who are including these terms and phrases, and who are broadening their keyword research with it.
Look forward to your comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
P.S. Another tool that offer this type of functionality is the excellent SEOZoom suite — currently Italian-language centric, but very powerful (I got a demo at EMetrics Milan that really impressed me).
Everything we do for real people and we have to make sure that our page is actually saying the same that we provide. It sounds too obvious to use semantic phrases for our content but I found this mistake a lot of the time or it just became a habit of ours. We have to get everything from searches so that it can help to find the stuffs related to our business keyword that helps our audience.
Despite this the question is that if we are providing any kind of software related services then it became difficult to find and provide the semantic phrases cos everyone is doing the same mistake. So what to do in this kind of situation?
Hi Rand.
I am reminded by this WBF of Google's patents on Phrase-based indexing, which would look for the appearance of frequently co-occurring good phrases on the top ranking pages for certain queries. Those patents seemed to indicate that such related phrases would also be useful as anchor text that pointed to those pages as well, which would be something worth experimenting with, as well.
Straight to the point (as always, actually)! Thanks!
For on-page SEO - sub categories I think are good for semantic content but you would probably link out to those sub pages.
e.g. if you have a holiday rentals client and have a page for rentals with swimming pools - that page will mention infinity pools, kids pools, lap pools, freeform pools, jacuzzis, heated pools but, you will probably eventually have pages for those and will link out from the main page to them within the text.
Despite losing some link juice from the page I still think this is a good technique as Rand has said, and have seen good results.
I agree, Rumble. I believe that these NLPs (including the new feature in Moz Pro) can be most helpful in identifying subcategories on a page. It fits right in with user experience as well. Giving your audience and search engines smaller chunks of information at a time can be extremely effective.
Another great video, Rand.
Great video and insightful comments! The company I work for has larger service pages that link out to the smaller services within the larger overall service. I've found that if nothing else, the linking out within the page has created a better user experience. We can be more informative while being clear. These sub-category pages don't have do as well, so we're trying to revamp our content to create the semantic/topical pages rather than focusing on the one aspect.
Totally agree!
Hi Rand,
Thanks for sharing great tutorial. It's an awesome guide for On-Page SEO. I use LSI Graph for semantic Keyword Generation.
Do you it's a good idea to add targeted topics along with the semantic phrases as well?
Thanks,
Gaurav
Yes Agreed - LSI Graph for semantic stuff is really good - even wikipedia is pretty good.
I'm a big fan of LSI graph for generating related searches. Another tool which I prefer here is the related topics over Buzzfeed which are quiet helpful too. Google auto-suggest might deceive based on users search preferences. Similarly, another great tool apart from keyword planner is keywords.io and keywordtool.io which gives a list of keywords not only for SERP's but also for YouTube.
LSI graph helps Webmasters for related searches, Agree with you Gaurav !
For related search, LSI is Good Option. thanks Mike .. Agree with you!
The problem with the young or poorly targeted content sites is that they don’t have an amount of audiences. You cannot only write a brilliant article and expect everyone to find it and subscribe. Instead, nothing is better than proactively targeting people that might be drawn in your topic. How? Through keyword research. I think that researching your main keywords for post ideas, using alternate keywords for article ideas, and researching related websites to market your post are also wise ideas!
Hey Dannie, you couldn't be more right on your comment! I also do the same "idea research" :D
Hey all
Very true and useful content. I am fan of LSI writing style to write semantic titles for real search. Currently I am working with digitizing embroidery keywords but not getting a real traffic yet. Could anyone suggest me why is it happening.
My work is all about digitizing embroidery (machine embroidery) and I am using the keyword as follow
1. Digitizing embroidery
2. digitizing embroidery caps
3. digitizing embroidery T-shirts
some more keywords like above but if I am going with 2, 3 keywords I found eCommerce sites whom are selling T-shirts and caps.
Cloud you please suggest me some more about relevant keywords?
Hi Rand - We've been doing something similiar with a client who has a health media company for a few years and its been working really well. Good to see someone with authority talking about it to put my mind at ease that it wasn't just a fluke.
Great Video!! Semantic research on keywords is fundamental to obtain a good result on SERPS, great strategy and well explained. Thanks for sharing
Well done Rand. Tnx
Great and comprehensive content, as always. I read all your post and use the ideas for our online stores. Thank you!
This was great on so many levels for me it was how to build better content through targeting more keyterms. With that said the example on the rain forest was especially interesting as if I was writing a page on it adding all the related terms may help with targeting google but more so help building the content out too.
As always good listen/read and great advice on being a better SEO thanks Rand and the team at Moz!!!
Hi Rand,
You covered right info in this post but few times while analysing the competitors in search results, I have seen that the pages consist of words/phrases not totally related to search terms, also coming up in rankings ( off course, it not happens very often ) . Even, sometimes each URL appearing up in ranking consisting uncommon phrase/words, mean to say that if its hard to find semantically connected words and phrases in ranking URLs then how one should proceed further with this analysis?
I have to tell you that I expected a longer video, but it's okay being concise when you know what you're talking about. :-)
Thanks for another great edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand! We really appreciate what you guys are doing here.
Hi Rand,
Another great video.
The title of this article says to me: How to create smarter content for your visitors by utilizing the power of semantic search.
Nice job explaining related topics and semantic keywords, you're right on with this. Relevant content and keywords are very important for building authority for you site. And this is what Google wants to see. Great job and Thanks much!
Thank you for this article Rand. I have a question for you or anyone above who can help me put this question to REST. Will google penalize our site for sharing links like this one with embedly on our - Articles we love blog? We show a snippet of the article and say full article avialable at (xxxxxxxxxx) with a link value to it. We truly love this articles and are making them our library. Help please.
Our site is Btwagency.com/blog (thank you)
I'm trying to to find the answer and so far I havent had any luck.
Thanks Rand for another WBF. I totally agree, the optimization of Seo On-Page should contain a rich semantic topics related to your keyword, if you don't do this you are in risk to key stuffing
Semantic keyword is a backbone of SEO strategy. In this post Rand discussed very well about it and it's benefits. I am going to do the same with my keywords also.
It’s one of the great post. Really worthy for SEO specialist. Looking further for more knowledgeable articles like this.
Thanks for providing such specified & detailed information.
great wbf :) we have something similar SEMANTIC SEARCH and FREE TOOL ! It's called KEYS4UP, me and my friend dev have built a tool which does exactly that, it extracts semantically related terms for any topic you insert. we've done it since a while now, and it's free :) you can find it on www.keys4up.com
Hi Rand,
Really a useful article on Keyword Research for content Marketing. It reemphasize the importance of including LSI keyword in blog post to rank high on google, while covering the basic Content Marketing Strategy of covering all the related topics in individual blogs.
Thanks.
Great info again. Thanks Rand
it is really good ,Thanks for sharing
Some great info, this is a topic I didn't take into account when publishing our web pages and will definately put more emphasis on.
Thank you very much, Rand, this is so informative with charts to show the relevancy at work and one brilliant idea how to get around the competition in addition to quality backlinks. I hope I can overcome competition for client whose competitor gets backlink from high ranking website, by applying this tactic.
Thanks, Great Video!
love the SEOzoom reference at the end of the article. A great man always knows who to thank :)
Using related topics and connected keywords seems to cover an expanse of what people are on the search of. Let me clarify this issue for a little bit! If you use "office chair” as the keyword, and also want to incorporate the related topics and connected keywords that others can be looking for, don't forget to look at other pages which rank high for your keyword and check what related words and phrases they are making use of. Incorporating words and phrases which are similar to your keyword is just a great way to level up your rankings.
Natural Language Processing tools, cool & powerful AI ! Thanks Rand.
Maybe I missed a key piece of info, but where can we generate the LSI graph for keywords - as shown in the video?
Thanks for informations. Nice info and very important
I gotta say, I am feeling particularly inspired by the use of the semantic web in this post. It makes me want to 1. Go to the top 10 results for a target keyword. 2. Parse all the content for all 10 landing pages 3. All matching relevant semantic keywords within those top 10 sites are used on the landing page we are trying to rank. Adding this method to our competitive research!!
Great timing with this explainer video.
My question is: how important is having a big search volume for semantically connected keywords? Is it a must have or a nice to have?
I think this is the most effective Onpage Ranking Tip next to putting the right words and phrases into the title tag. Rand I thank you that you help others. You are my hero.
you always come up with some excellent contents.. Keep more coming!.
Hi Rand!!
Certainly, we should choose for our segment some keywords for our on-page SEO focused content with our client and not a generic content
Thank you!!
Thanks Rand, Nice and informative. Wonderfully explained using the "Food Processor" example.
Regards,
Vikas Singh
Can i ask how much risk of cross over from keywords themes there can be?
For example if i was running a coffee shop brand. There will be optimized regional landing pages. For example:
So landing page 1 London. I could develop themes for both the location, and coffee, so camden, nottinghill, latte, beans, americano etc.
Landing page 2 Manchester. One of my themes will be unique, those based on the region, however my coffee keywords will already have been used in my other landing pages.
How much repetition is possible without starting to cannibalize my keywords and themes?
Thanks Rand, amazing content as always.
Hello Rand
first time ive watch a whiteboard friday, and i must say im impressed. if i could afford moz i would use it haha, but il have to stick to the other tools you mentioned for now. Will 100% give this a go when im writing my next articles. This stratergy could also help with long tail keywords too.
Yeah, I agree rand now a days related topics with relevant keywords is playing a good roll in content marketing. But we should make sure that our content should that much effective, valuable & informative to our topic with LSI keywords....Thanks for your kind information in this WBF...Rand..:)
Thanks Rand , I've shared this with the content team at Marie Curie where i'm the in-house SEO. It sums up what I covered with them in recent workshop.
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