Semantic Search and How to Optimize Your Content for Google’s Brain

What comes to mind when you think about SEO?

Many people start to reflect upon the several tactics associated with optimizing websites for search engines. These include link building, keyword optimization, technical SEO, social media marketing, content writing, etc.

For people with more nefarious or ignorant intents, their thoughts may go towards unethical practices such as keyword stuffing, link spamming, purchasing backlinks, and so on.

But should this be so? Is focusing on a semantic search a better approach? Read on to find out.

The Problem with SEO Today

Regardless of what you think about it, the ultimate point is that almost everyone has been conditioned to view SEO as an attempt to game the system.

Thankfully, search engines like Google and Bing have remained adamant about not making their ranking algorithms open-source. Otherwise, the SEO field would have been a free-for-all.

And there lies the fault of many SEO professionals. They always attempt to optimize for the technology rather than the people. In the end, search engines exist for people, not the other way around.

Therefore, the information provided through your website is only useful to the end that people are affected. Technology is just the means of bringing that information closer to the people who need it.

One of the more positive trends in SEO in the past few years has been calls to focus on optimizing for people rather than the search engine.

What is Semantic Search?

Enter semantic search. Because search engines have recognized several attempts by website owners to game their ranking algorithms, they have devised several means to deliver the results that users are looking for more accurately.

The latest revolution in this regard is the introduction of semantic search, a process by which search engines determine the meaning and context behind a search query and provide results that match a user’s intent.

So, if your entire SEO strategy is built upon ranking for specific keywords, you lose many opportunities. In this era of semantic search, it is not simply about matching keywords. It’s about what search queries mean in the human context.

This also helps Google and other search engines to deliver results even if users misspell keywords accurately. Because the algorithm now focuses on intent rather than keyword-matching, it can determine when a word has been misspelled and then point users to the correct results.

Semantics and Search Engine Algorithms

In linguistics (the study of language), semantics is a branch that studies the meaning of words and utterances.

Human communication proceeds smoothly when two speakers converse within a similar context and share the same background knowledge.

Then, each speaker can make correct assumptions about what the other speaker is trying to say and interpret their utterances correctly. This is the same idea that Google tries to replicate with its search algorithm.

In many ways, Google has tried to refine its algorithm toward better semantic search understanding, beginning with the notable introduction of knowledge graphs in 2012. This was followed by updates such as Hummingbird and RankBrain, which featured more deployment of natural language processing.

More advancements in NLP have led to the introduction of the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) updates through which Google could successfully consider the full context of a keyword and the words surrounding it to determine search intent.

The Multitask Unified Model (MUM) introduced in 2021 significantly improved upon BERT by over a thousand times, extending the semantic search technology to written text and images, video, audio, and even texts produced in foreign languages.

All these show why semantic search is important for any SEO professional or website owner who wants their content to rank on Google.

How to Optimize Your Content for Google’s Brain

While it remains important to identify the right keywords, build links, guest-post, and so on, it is more important that you can optimize your content for semantic search. Read on to discover how you can do this.

1. Be Relevant

The first step to optimizing your content for semantic search is to ensure it is relevant to human beings.

You can do many things to optimize your content for technology, such as structured data, meta titles and descriptions, header tags, and so on. The Eye10 On-Page SEO tool helps determine if your website meets these standards.

However, it is more critical that you don’t create content just because you want something on your website or to game Google’s algorithms.

Rather, create content that answers your audience’s questions, solves their problems, and generally provides meaningful value.

2. Determine Search Intent

This article has done more than enough to establish the importance of intent and context to semantic search. So, it would be best if you did not ignore this.

Determine the kind of goals that your audience is seeking and optimize your content in that direction. For example, keywords may fall under any of the following types of search intent:

• Informational: trying to learn about a topic or get answers to a simple question.
• Navigational: looking for something specific for which they have no direction.
• Commercial: investigating products and services before determining whether to make a purchase.
• Transactional: determined to purchase and now looking for the site to do so.

3. Use Natural Language

It is necessary to reiterate that your SEO strategy should target humans, not machines. Hence, it is important to use natural language throughout your content.

There are many helpful formulas online about how to write content and so on. However, what ultimately works is that you should write as a human would. This is especially important today, considering the proliferation of AI writing tools and technologies.

Also, don’t forget to use relevant keywords. At some point, you might have thought that semantic search means ignoring keywords. However, that is not the case. Semantic search is all about context and relevance.

So, once you have identified relevant keywords using the Eye10 Keyword Planner, you should also ensure that the keywords are placed naturally that match the context of your content.

Conclusion

If your SEO strategy has previously been about optimizing the technology, it is time to change in a different direction. There must be more to your SEO strategy. You should be able to deliver good value to your audience.

When you have access to the right SEO tools that provide accurate and real-time insights about the state of your website, then your SEO strategy only becomes even smoother. That’s why you must try the Eye10 suite of SEO tools today. For only $3, you gain access to a whole range of tools to enhance your strategy.