How to Rank Higher with Semantic SEO

The world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is constantly changing and evolving and you need to change with it or risk getting left behind. It seems like there are always new tricks and techniques to learn that can boost a site’s ranking on Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page). One of the newest techniques is semantic SEO, which is all about anticipating what the user might be looking for and integrating it into your content. It gives your website more depth and makes it likely that it will rank highly for several different, but related search terms.

At On The Map Marketing, we are always on the cutting edge of SEO techniques, which means that we can use semantic SEO on any website we work on. Semantic SEO requires our SEO team and our content team to work closely together and both of them are versatile and agile enough to use that technique for any kind of website. So, if you want to give your website more depth and have it rank highly for many different organic search results, then give On The Map Marketing a call and we will let you know how semantic SEO can help you.

What is Semantic SEO?

Semantic SEO is all about making more meaningful content by anticipating what people are really looking for when they enter a search term. That means your content does not just provide an answer to the question that they are asking about, it also answers the questions that they might ask after that. What this means is that your website will rank highly when people search for those other questions as well. 

When semantic SEO is used in your content, that gives your website the chance to rank highly for a greater variety of keywords. It also means that those rankings will last for a longer time. Ultimately, that means that even if your ranking for certain keywords starts to drop you will still have a lot of traffic to your site.

Why Semantic SEO is Useful

Semantic SEO might sound complex and arcane at first, but Google actually provides clues on how you can use it. Anytime you search for content in Google, they show you a box near the middle of the page called “People also ask” and at the bottom of the page, they show you related searches. Both of those sections give you an idea of what people are searching for when they type in their keywords. You can then use that knowledge to integrate the related search terms into your content.

What happens with semantic SEO is that you answer the user’s question on your page, but you go further by thinking of what further questions that answer will generate and then you answer those follow-up questions. It allows you to anticipate what the user is thinking, which will keep them on your page. It will also help you to rank for those related search terms when people type them in. Finally, it helps your ranking since you will be ranking for several different, yet related keywords at once. Semantic SEO can help to give your site some ranking stability even as organic search results fluctuate.

How to Use Semantic SEO

Semantic SEO starts out by using basic keyword research so any keyword research tool will do. Once that tool has been used for a particular service or industry, the keywords that it generates are used to create a topic on which semantic SEO will be used. When we write the content for the website using semantic SEO, we consider what type of problem the website is trying to address, how the content will help to solve that problem, and how it will address any follow-up questions or problems the user will have after their first problem has been solved. 

In order to create the content, semantic information will have to be taken from Google, and as stated earlier, this is done using the related searches and “People also ask” features. The related searches feature is used first; once a relevant keyword is entered, we look at the related searches at the bottom of the page to find out what customers or clients also want to know. 

When we take an aggregate look at those terms, we can then write content that answers those other questions in addition to the main question generated by the initial keyword search term. That will keep people on your page since their follow-up questions will be answered, plus it will help you to rank for those other related searches as well.

Earn Higher Ranks with Semantic SEO

Is there anything better than a number one ranking on Google’s SERP? Yes, there is, and it is the featured snippet. That is the little box at the top of the page that shows a snippet—hence the name—of a website’s content. Those snippets typically appear above the number one ranked website on the page, which means that they tend to get a lot of clicks. Semantic SEO can help to make your website the featured snippet even if it doesn’t have the number one ranking.

It goes even further than that as your website can be the featured snippet for some of those other related search terms. That means you can be at the top of multiple different SERPs even though you were not necessarily trying to rank for those specific keywords. The reason is that your content will be meaningful and have depth. It will have multiple layers that allows it to be relevant for people who are looking for other popular related search terms.

That means that even if you lose some keyword rankings for some of the search terms, you will still get a lot of traffic to your site. By having a lot of different keyword queries answered in your content, it can create some stability to your site that can help it retain a lot of organic traffic even as your keyword rankings fluctuate.

We Can Incorporate Semantic SEO in Your Content

As you can see, semantic SEO can be a very valuable tool in generating organic traffic and getting your website above the number one ranking with a featured snippet. Does that sound appealing to you? Of course it does! There are pretty much no downsides to using semantic SEO and a lot of advantages. If you want to learn how we at On The Map Marketing can integrate semantic SEO into your content, then contact us and we can let you know how our SEO and content teams can boost your ranking and give your website a steady flow of organic traffic. So give us a call so that we can make semantic SEO work for you.