Semantic Search, the key to modern SEO
It has been talked about for more than fifteen years and, as revealed by the late Bill Slawski, Google’s first patents in this direction date back as far as 1999. However, it is only in recent times that semantic search has really become an everyday reality, thanks to developments in technology and applications of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. Somehow, if SEO is still the art and science of optimizing online content to improve visibility in search engines, a lot also depends on this “subcategory” that has prompted search engines to focus on deeper understanding of the meaning behind keywords and search phrases, rather than exclusively on exact keyword matching. Let’s find out what exactly is meant by semantic search and what kind of impact it has on SEO.
What is semantic search
Semantic search is the process that search engines use to try to understand the intent and contextual meaning of the search query, with the goal of delivering results that are accurate, relevant, and relevant-that is, that match what the user had in mind. In other words, semantic search aims to b a person is searching for that particular string of terms in the query and what he or she intends to do with the information obtained.
To achieve this goal, search engines analyze various elements, such as the search context, the user’s geographic location, word variation, synonyms, generalized and specialized queries, concept matching, natural language queries, but also the relationship between words and understanding the underlying entities. This very concept, entities, is one of the fulcrums for Google’s semantic search: in a nutshell, the term describes the essence or identity of a concrete or abstract object; it is something uniquely identifiable and therefore uniquely meaningful.
Underlying the evolution of semantic search are a number of evaluations, but most importantly, consideration of the fact that search queries can be ambiguous in nature, as can the words themselves; moreover, people speak and ask for things in different ways, languages, and tones, which cannot (any longer) be unified with standard SERPs that consider only the old exact match.
It is important to note that we should not confuse semantic search with latent semantic indexing (LSI) or what some might call semantically related keywords: LSIs can help provide context about the topic of the content (and potentially help match search intent), but semantic search is much more than that (and LSIs do not help ranking, as reiterated in various circumstances by Google).
A guide to semantic SEO
Semantic SEO refers to the use of SEO techniques that focus on the meaning and user intent behind a given search query, rather than the exact match of keywords. This approach is based on understanding the context in which keywords are used, rather than simply their presence in a pi