Content is THE major pillar when it comes to optimising a website’s organic search. No surprise there: content and semantic SEO are how you work in the strategic keywords you want your website to rank for on search engine results pages such as Google’s.
But while spotting key phrases may look easy, building a real keyword strategy with quality content while keeping your website consistent is another matter. Semantic SEO takes a lot of time, semantic analysis and understanding of the vocabulary to use across your pages to lift the website as a whole.
Of course, semantic SEO is part of a broader SEO strategy, and SEO recommendations on the other pillars are needed to give your website’s performance the biggest boost.
Simply understanding a website’s main topic is not enough for search engine bots. There has to be a real semantic relationship, with contextual links across the whole site, to make it crystal clear which searches your website can answer.
That is why a semantic SEO audit is essential. It involves cross-checking data from many different tools to bring out your current issues and, above all, how to improve your semantic SEO.
A semantic SEO audit relies on syntactic analysis, lexical analysis and a review of existing content. But it also includes a whole keyword competition study once the keywords have been identified. In saturated markets, it can pay to start with long-tail keywords that face less competition, rather than pouring effort into keywords with attractive search volumes that are too generic and may bring in too much “just browsing” traffic.
The aim of a semantic SEO audit is to pinpoint existing semantic problems, assess how relevant your current tags and content are, and define a semantic SEO strategy to improve your content strategy as a whole.
For many people, semantic SEO means content, and therefore text. Well, yes, but not only! A website’s content goes far beyond its text.
Semantic data also includes the semantic tags of your URLs (HTML tags and metadata), image optimisation, a site structure with well-named pages, an internal link structure with well-chosen anchors for relevant hyperlinks, and plenty of other items just as important as the text itself.
Working on a website’s semantic SEO is therefore a long-haul, long-term job. You have to prioritise pages by importance and writing quality, identify duplicate content, spend time rewriting outdated content, create new content to strengthen your main pages, keep improving how content is structured, and not forget internal linking (optimising the links within your site to make navigation easier). Yes, your editorial strategy is only the start of a long semantic marathon!
Even if your business has one main topic, semantic SEO happens page by page. Every URL has its own context, its own data, its own semantic cocoon. Put simply, each page should work on one main keyword. Optimising URLs therefore means finding the right match between the text and the user intent it has to answer.
Keyword suggestion tools exist, but finding the relevant keywords, and above all placing them in the right spot, takes real knowledge and expertise in analysing content performance.
Agency SEO experts are usually far better equipped to measure, weigh up and work out how to combine the data to get the very best out of semantic SEO on your website.
A semantic SEO audit involves studying a great many factors. Identifying high-potential pages, deep pages, keyword density, search volume, search intent, article topics, reviewing the FAQ (frequently asked questions) for users, language conflicts on multilingual websites…
Before giving you an overview of your website’s semantic analysis, an SEO expert spends a lot of time looking at semantic SEO from every angle. That takes tools, expertise and the ability to boil information down.
Working with an SEO agency is often the best way to make sure your semantic audit is up to scratch.
Naturally, to be sure of ranking for the right keywords, it is tempting to write for bots rather than for people. That can lead to pages that don’t hang together and a lack of consistency in your website’s semantic SEO overall.
An agency’s strength is its expertise in semantic analysis and in giving you the right recommendations to keep a logical relationship between pages and, above all, refocus the relevance and quality of your content on the user. That is how you attract qualified traffic to your website.
What’s more, offering people genuinely structured information through the topics of your pages and articles is highly valued by search engines today, and quality semantic SEO will always beat churning out text with no real context.
Plenty of KPIs (conversion rate, bounce rate, average position…) help you see whether a page is performing and whether it needs semantic work. Rank tracking and regular semantic SEO audits show whether the recommendations are paying off, or whether you need to rethink your editorial strategy and create semantic cocoons to help search engines understand you.
Here again, it takes a lot of analysis time and, above all, the expertise to interpret the data. Agency SEO consultants are used to it: this semantic workout is second nature to them.
Identifying keywords remains the foundation of semantic SEO. But to work on it and optimise it, you have to write! Either by improving existing content or by creating new content, and very often both. But knowing which keywords to target doesn’t make you an SEO content writer.
After the semantic analysis, an SEO agency can give you invaluable support in defining an editorial line, with writing briefs containing the key information: secondary keywords, related vocabulary, semantic cocoon, keyword frequency, related search suggestions…
That will go a long way towards a semantically optimised text, and therefore one that performs!
You should also know that semantic SEO is not handled the same way for local SEO. Here too, advice from an agency SEO expert can be very useful to know how to approach it and get the most out of it.
Let’s say it again: you shouldn’t write content for search engines, but for your visitors! But that’s not the whole story. If people find your content relevant and interesting but the website’s user experience isn’t up to scratch, you risk getting traffic but few conversions. So it is best to work on semantic SEO and UX together.
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Investing in semantic SEO for a website can quickly add up. In time, in money, in internal resources… Reworking content and writing new texts are painstaking tasks. So it is important to be able to measure the ROI of your semantic SEO work.
What’s more, the right KPIs and well-structured data help you track how pages perform from an SEO point of view. A data analytics service is therefore highly recommended to back up your semantic efforts.
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Reviewing the page markup structure, implementing changes to tags and metadata, creating new pages… a whole host of web development tasks can come out of the semantic audit and the optimisation of your website’s semantic SEO. So you may need a webmaster to help you put the SEO expert’s recommendations in place.
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A website’s semantic SEO analysis means studying many parameters: search volume, keyword competitiveness, search intent, keyword density…
First and foremost, you need the right semantic SEO analysis tools, with relevant databases.
The end goal of a semantic SEO analysis or audit is to identify the factors holding your content back today and the editorial strategy to put in place. It is often summed up in a keyword map (matching pages with their main and secondary keywords, the corresponding tags and URL optimisation).
You study the meaning of words and phrases in the context of the text as a whole. Analysing the syntactic structure to see how it helps reinforce the keyword matters too. A keyword’s semantics therefore depends on how often it appears in the text, but also on the related vocabulary (or semantic cocoon) used around it, always tied together to make the message easier to understand.
That would be too easy, wouldn’t it? But semantic SEO is part of an overall SEO strategy in which the technical side and link building play just as big a role.
A technical audit reveals factors that can block page indexing and the improvements to make (loading speed, image loading times, 301 redirects, cleaning up 404 errors, securing the site with HTTPS, mobile optimisation…).
A link profile audit, for its part, shows the site’s domain authority, its internal and external popularity, duplicate anchors and the links that are hurting you. Backlink campaigns also help reinforce your semantic SEO work.
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