Semantic Search And Its Impact On SEO

Semantic Search Engines such as Google, Bing, and others have been working really hard on a regular basis to cut down on spam, junk, and trash content that moves around online.

They are improving and finding better data to deliver the most relevant information for the intended user while personalizing their experience through a search query, relevant content, and other such factors.

The trouble is, being relevant isn’t as simple as it was 10 years ago when you’d do keyword research and then throw those keywords into every available “content space” you could.

And Woah! You’re in the top ranks.

Well, those days are gone! People would simply deceive the system by stuffing keywords here and there. They neither have relevant content to the user’s query nor do they have fear of getting caught by the search engine’s algorithm.

But now, the tech has changed, and the algorithm has updated to its better versions like Hummingbird (understand the content better) and RankBrain (provide relevant search results for users).

These search algorithms focus on improving User Experience.

Making those “loopholes” or suspicious activities being intercepted easily by the search engine while keep evolving themselves.

Think about it. You may have noticed that Google can now offer you practically every answer to the question you ask it?

Here, the semantic strategy works for Google to provide a better appeal to search engines, improve your website’s search visibility, and above all, to attract the traffic that you want for your business.

That is why semantic search is such an important aspect of search engines’ efforts so that the search engine can produce high-quality content that not only answers the searcher’s query but fits their intent too.

Let’s understand the basics first, What is Semantic Search?

What Is Semantic Search?

After 8 years of advancement from the most basic algorithm, Knowledge Graph, Google has become fairly effortless in supplying users with relevant answers to their inquiries. 

We’ve arrived in a new era of semantic search.

We’ve arrived in a new era of semantic search.

Google built the ‘Semantic Search’ tool to understand the searcher’s intent and deliver contextual meaning to their searches.

This tool was always a work-in-progress that produced globally essential content to answer searcher’s questions with relevancy and personal effect.

This wasn’t always like this. Till 2012, the search engines could only know the exact wordings of a search phrase when matching results with a search query which caused many website owners to stuff their content with keywords making them quite irrelevant to them.

But through Google Semantic Search engine and its ever-evolving history, Google got what is semantic memory for you and complex algorithms for the search engine.

1. Knowledge Graph

2012 saw the first solution of keyword stuffing which got under control by understanding facts and info about entities as stated below,

“Entities from materials shared across the web, as well as from open source and licensed databases. It has amassed over 500 billion facts about five billion entities“

This enabled the supremacy of entities and context over keywords as phrased by Google “things, not strings.” In their 2012 blog “Introducing the Knowledge Graph” they gave semantic keywords their meaning and power

Read More: A Beginners Guide To Knowledge Graph SEO

2.Hummingbird

In 2013, Hummingbird update of Google algorithm became the starting step of ‘Semantic search’ history-making Google capable of understanding conversation search better than only a few words.

In an interview with Forbes, Scott Huffman, Google engineering director stated that,

“They want to get into a more ‘natural conversation’ between people and Google.”

This was true as Hummingbird used Natural Language Processing (NLP) which became a gem for SEO experts to expand their business online presence by becoming technically advanced and breaking the language barrier.

Even Danny Sullivan suggested that bringing Hummingbird update to life was like dropping an old engine out of a car and putting it in a new one but this update also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch.

Read more: Google Hummingbird: Celebrating 15 Years of Success

3. Rankbrain

The RankBrain algorithm was introduced in 2015 to address language problems and mismatches in search queries and the relevant user content.

It was used to sort search results and decide which ones were the most relevant to the search engine queries.

“The requirement for SEOs to go deep into understanding search intent”

– A well said the comment by Courtney Capellan about RankBrain, generates the idea of the semantic relationship between content and SEO.

Hence today, Rankbrain is one of Google’s top three parameters that determines your website’s ranking.

4. BERT

BERT was introduced in 2019 by Google. It stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.

Yes, it is difficult to remember, but all you have to remember is that:

BERT is concerned with the user’s intent and the communication context desired by users.

This allows users to access relevant information and content relevancy to their long-tail concerns. Look at the picture given below it shows the after-effects of BERT over Google search.

These are the semantic search engine examples and semantic updates of Google search engines that employed improvement of user-targeted search results.

So, the BERT-enabled search engine was a major breakthrough that clarified the following things for both users and marketers alike:

1. Longtail queries are required.

2. Phrases must contain at least three words.

3. The content must respond to the user’s query.

The overall conclusion of this passage was to know how each and every one of the algorithm updates introduced within the Google search engine was a semantic mapping of google semantics search results that are relevant and personalized for users.

Impact Of Semantic SEO

Search engines is now more advanced, employing semantic search ideas and describing searching beyond its literal meaning and rather into the meaning of words and phrases that are at their basics and most circumstantial extent.

So, to understand the impact of Semantic SEO on your industry, let’s catch up with these features that they provided.

User Intent Is Supreme

Users are the essential part of any marketing business and similarly for Google to remain at the top of search engines, it require an understanding of what is semantic to the online users.

Therefore, they started experimenting with algorithms. As a result, the term ‘search intent’ popularized among website owners and digital marketers that ranks only when their website content answers user queries that may be intended to learn, find, or buy something online.

This intent is considered by the Google semantic search and provides relevant results to the users. The info below suggests Google’s priority is more conversational than is User-entended content.

Similarly, the semantic SEO, here, reveals what most marketers consider to be one of the greatest important features of Google: “User Experience”. As it has an established semantic relationship between queries and results.

Read more: Optimize Your Content for Search Intent

Emphasis On Topics Rather Than Keywords

Topics has taken top priority among the searchers and content-providing websites.

So, instead of trying to rank for one, singular keyword, Google created an algorithm such that the content developers now need long-tailed topics rather than less than 4 keywords to rank in SERPs

For example, a user searched for “House Relocation Service in Houston” and another user searched for “Relocation service for a house in Houston” or “Houston House shifting services”

Such semantic search examples emphasize long-tailed topics that the users may search for and would provide one whose semantic SEO is pretty valid to search engine crawlers.

Read more: 11 Best Keyword Research Tools In 2022

Search Mapping, Monitoring, And Awareness

Understanding and searching for search intent are dependent on regular search semantic updates by Google.

The information easily available to users must serve the intent of their search queries.

This is developed by, firstly, closely examining search intent and monitoring what is the context of users’ search queries around a topic.

Secondly, if you want, you can use competitor analysis to uncover the top-ranking content categories that already exist, which will help you with your content, its SEO, and semantic mapping.

Another option is to consider how your prospects would look for information. What we already know about them, what trends they follow, and why they do so, makes it easier for you to understand their needs and convert them.

Semantic search’s goal is to provide insight into the searcher’s intent to create the most relevant material that depends on numerous circumstances, such as the searcher’s current location or previous experiences with your firm.

Technical SEO: Schema Markup

Your search engine knows the language of structured data, often known as schema markup, is a type of data that provides context to web content making it easy for Google and other search engines to define entities, actions, and relationships better.

Using a set of standard data structures helps in the categorization of the provided content to search engines who decide their relevancy.

For example, if your website has duplicate content of the same webpage, the authority will be distributed among them differently and your page won’t score as you wanted.

Here, the structured data can be improved by using canonical tags which would transfer all the authority of the duplicate URLs of your same content to the main page you want to direct it to.

Being one of the semantic search examples, canonical tagging is an HTML function that can help you rank on your semantic search engine such as Google.

While search engines are always trying to improve, you need to understand that the algorithm is still developing.

So, there’s no reason to discard all of the lessons you’ve implemented on your website because, it helps the algorithm to ‘learn’ about correct and relevant search results, as well as other metrics and features about your website.

Featured Snippet & Voice Search

The words of semantic search have been out for a decade now but it gained its real popularity when voice search started becoming popular.

“According to Oberlo, the voice search has gained popularity”

“40.2% of the US population uses the voice search feature. This marks a significant increase in the popularity of voice search.”

The voice search feature helped the development of the “Featured Snippets”

The snippet is a google semantics search result that shows at the top of the search result page with the most relevant answer to the query. Google created highlighted snippets to alter their result pages to accommodate mobile and voice searches.

Look at the image below, it shows a featured snippet with a listicle format.

Another statistic about voice search is that “Currently, more than a quarter (27 percent) of the global online population is using the voice search feature on their mobile devices.”

The use of voice searches impacted featured snippets to become a need of the website owner that must provide to-the-point content that is always specific about the customer’s query and answers them in a personalized manner too.

Establish Knowledge Graph Structure

The knowledge graph structure is based on individual opinions and the different mentalities of the users. In a simple phrase,

The users search in a variety of ways making the content dependent on the selected entities of Google semantics search that basically depends on entities that are already selected.

As stated before, over 500 billion facts about five billion entities have been stored by the Google algorithm to become a knowledge graph itself. This makes it to be the most difficult semantic SEO that could be achieved.

Use Links To Increase Relevance

Linking, whether providing interlinking or scoring backlinks, your website requires organic traffic for Google and other search engines to understand that your content is better than others, and then only would Google rank you.

The truth is that the alignment of these links is as important as their authority and editorial supremacy among the places that you are getting backlinks from.

Similarly, this is important for semantic mapping of your content within a website while giving google semantics search an easy-to-understand Mapping and Monitoring.

Read more: Anchor Text: An Ultimate Guide About Building Backlinks

Conclusion

Semantic search is a decade-old term that gained its authority in recent years. The main and most highlighted semantic update came through the popularity of voice search among digital users.

You may have used the voice search to find a simple “near me” question to “what is” scholarly question that most probably has been answered correctly to you.

This has all been the work of the historical progression in semantic updates whether it be semantic mapping through semantic keywords or semantic search engines such as Google updating with new and improved algorithms.

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