Semantic Keywords: Understanding, Finding, And Using These For Your Content

You could easily rank on Google when it was before 2013 when Google Hummingbird was not released. In those times, professionals would stuff the whole content with targeted keywords and Google ranked their pages. But the algorithm has completely changed now.

Today in this article, you will know how you can still rank with these massive changes by using semantic keywords in your content. What semantic keywords are, how to find them, how do they work, why do you need semantically relevant keywords, examples of them, and how to use them in your content to write well-crafted perfect content for your blog?


So, keep reading!

What Are Semantic Keywords?

Semantic keywords refer to those keywords that are topically relevant to each other. These are words that are different in structure but in meaning they point to the main topic. 


For examples, check out the below section:

Examples Of Semantic SEO Keywords

Let’s say, our targeted keyword is ‘semantic keywords’, then our semantic keywords could be ‘search term’, ‘search results’, ‘finding keywords’, or ‘natural language processing’. Now, you can’t brainstorm these words' ideas. You need to follow a specific process (that I will show you in this same article) that will help you come up with these.


Actually, these are the keywords that help google understand what the page is actually about. To understand this, you need to consider a few things in detail:

Why Should You Use Semantic Keywords?

Semantic keywords are used by Google to understand the content better and to match the user’s intent as well. When a user types in a query in the search box google first tries to understand his search intent, because when a searcher is spending time searching on Google he must have a specific intent behind it. Google starts analyzing his search query and shows up the most relevant results possible. 


But, how does Google also show up the results? Because, when Google indexes a site, it understands the content with its Natural language processing models. It looks for the keyword occurrences, semantic keywords, and all these things in the content, to understand for which reason the content is written. Is it for commercial, informational, transactional, or navigational content?


For example, if you typed ‘pizza’ then Google can’t understand what you are actually thinking about. In other words, what do you want from Google? You might be looking for recipes, and shops or looking for some nearby shops to order that. In this confusion, it shows up all types of results to fulfill your needs at that point. It shows nearby restaurants, a Wikipedia link, some recipes, reviews, and even YouTube vlogs and videos.


But, when you type in something like ‘Pizza recipes’ then it only shows hundreds of results that contain pizza recipes because Google can now understand that you don’t want to go anywhere else, you just want to see some awesome lavish recipes of pizza. That’s all.

Semantic Keywords: Something You Must Know About

Back in 2012 google and other search engines were a toddler. For ranking a page in the SERPs, the crawlers looked for the occurrences of the target keywords in the whole page content to determine what is the topic of the page and whether or not it should be ranked. 


Then SEOs stuffed the page content with a specific targeted keyword and got high rankings. But the whole game changed when the Google Hummingbird update rolled out. From that update, Google crawlers started to understand the content by not only just looking at the targeted keywords but also the semantic keywords, and started to understand the content. Then time passed away, and Google can now actually understand whether or not the content is qualitative and helpful. 


To help creators create superb content google has given the term “E-E-A-T” which means  Expertise-Experience-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness. Google crawlers always check if the page meets the following requirements.


And, stuffing the keywords in a page’s content started to be considered spam and Google penalized all those sites that engaged in this manipulation process. As keyword stuffing reduces the readability, content quality and the overall purpose of the content “Helping people to solve their problem” Google hates it and it’s no longer a ranking.


But all this doesn’t mean that you can’t rank on Google now. Despite that, you have to write comprehensive content optimized with your targeted keyword and conceptually or topically relevant semantic keywords.

How To Find Semantically Relevant Keywords Or Semantic Keywords?

As I have told you before, you can’t find semantic keywords without any tools. Luckily, here are the top 5 strategies for finding semantic search queries and creating comprehensive content for your blog.


Semantic SEO With Google Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner by Google is an awesome tool that helps advertisers primarily to manage everything. But, we can use it to uncover new opportunities. 


First, log in to your Google AdWords account and start by entering your sees keyword in the search box of the Keyword Planner tool and click on search. Now, it will show the data of your inputted keywords and will also show you some new ideas around that keyword that are also well-searched in the SERPs.


This is a free tool and can be very useful for newbies and beginners.

SEMRush

Though SEMRush is a paid tool that is reasonably worth it. You can find thousands of potential keyword ideas (not only semantic keywords) for your blog in just a matter of a few seconds.

Keyword Magic Tool

  1. Login to your SEMRush account

  2. In the Left Sidebar, Go to SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool

  3. Paste your targeted keyword in the Search bar

  4. After the results come up, click on the related button at the top

  5. Now, you can get hundreds of related keyword ideas for your blog post.


Maybe some of them may differ from your main content idea. But, from these keywords, you can easily enrich your content with new sections, pieces, questions, and a lot more.

SEO Content Template

  1. Log in to your SEMRush account

  2. In the left sidebar, Go to Content Marketing and then click on SEO Content Template

  3. Paste your targeted keywords, select the territory, and then “Create Content Template”

  4. Wait for the results and check out the key recommendations, you can find actual Semantic keywords analyzed by SEMRush.


On both of these SEMrush tools you can easily see the search history of your account easily.

Google’s People Also Ask Section

PAA or the People Also Ask section of Google SERPs can be a gold mine for all of your keyword needs. As you can find hundreds of new keyword ideas here that you might not even think about before, you can build a comprehensive list of high-quality semantic keywords.


But, as a beginner writing for a new website, the main problem that I faced is that the keywords are usually having 0 search volume and super high competition. But still, to create in-depth and helpful content it’s important to check out the Google PAA section.

Google Autocomplete

Whenever, we type in a search query in Google, before pressing the “Enter” key, we can find a list of keywords, that people search on Google related to what we typed in the search bar.


This is extremely useful because this also helps us to create content with more essential parts needed and everything else.

Google Related Searches

When we search for a keyword in Google. At the bottom of the page, we could find potentially related keywords that are own suggested by GOOGLE’s algorithms. This can also give a basic idea of new keywords.


I check for the keyword difficulty and all and think if I should include a keyword in my content. Because we don’t want to ruin the readability and the helpfulness of our content and also don’t want to waste our time and efforts. I also check if I could create a brand new content page on the topic. These processes also help to find new content ideas, but obviously, these are time-consuming.


Still, if you want to read more things in detail about how to find semantic keywords then I have written a complete article on that topic.

How To Use Semantic Keywords?

After building a list of semantic keywords, it’s harder to start using them in your content. Here’s what you can do:

See If other Sections Could Be Included

Most of the time, we can include some new pieces of content in our main content and increase the length and depth of the content.


For example, if you are writing about ‘Pizza recipes’ then you can also include a section in that article that ‘What makes a pizza recipe more delicious, lavish looking and superb. This makes content greater, and more helpful and maintains Google’s guidelines about E-E-A-T.

Semantic Keywords Summary

In summary, semantic keywords are important for every SEO strategy. Including these keywords in your content can enrich your text with more information and can increase the potential to get ranked for the most keywords possible.