SEO services providers should understand the importance of semantic search today. Digital marketing professionals need to adopt new search technologies and algorithms from leveraging artificial intelligence for SEO to shifting to voice search.
The trendiest way of doing that is to try to get a deeper understanding of the searcher’s intent in the USA and the meanings behind the search terms.
When search engine optimization started, it only deals with the number of backlinks and keywords. Good SEO meant earning more links and stuffing keywords into the content as much as you can.
That was the case in 2010. Fast forward to 2022, SEO focuses more on the context behind search queries and understanding user intent and behavior. This is called Semantics.
Semantics means the study of meanings. Search engines have become smarter nowadays, thanks to the technologies like natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). These technologies enable search engines to understand users and the context better.
It’s not enough anymore to reverse-engineer content to get it ranked higher and identify keywords. Online SEO companies need to understand the meanings of keywords, offer rich content that contextualizes the search queries, and completely get searcher intent.
Keep reading as we will delve deeper into the meaning of semantic search, its importance for SEO, and ways to perform SEO for it.
Semantic Search Defined
Search engines try to come up with the most accurate search engine results possible by understanding keyword context, user intent, and the link between words. This is called semantic search.
It is necessary because:
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Searchers in the USA often use different words, tones, and ways to make the same query.
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Keywords are sometimes unclear
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Search engines need to understand the links between words
The connections between items and personal interests and connections are also essential. Google splurges hundreds of thousands of dollars on patents linked to this.
Suppose a user types something like “the best TV series of 2022”. Google will show various web pages/ choices for the searcher to pick.
Still don’t get it? Simply, semantic search attempts to recognize human language the way we would.
You can find an affordable local SEO services by spending some time on the internet. But it’s also important for business owners to get an idea of semantic search.
Take this example. Someone asked their friend “ tell me the name of the largest continent?”. And then they also asked “what is its area in square kilometers?” Their friend would get that “Its area” means the area of the largest continent — Asia. Until 2013, Google wasn’t capable of understanding the background of the second query.
Rather than responding to “What is the area of Asia?” Google would try to match the exact words from the key phrase “What is its area?”. And it would show results with those specific keywords.
Now, users see a unique result with a featured snippet and additional information for the understanding of the search term’s context. Online SEO companies should take the semantic search into account while performing SEO.
Because semantic search helps search engines to differentiate between various entities like places, people, and things. And it helps translate user intent according to different factors like:
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Searcher location
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Search history
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Different spellings of the same word
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Global search history
This also allows search engines to offer a better user experience by providing quality and giving priority to relevant SERPs.
History of Semantic Search at a Glance
Google has taken many steps to improve its semantic search capabilities. Let’s discuss them one by one.
Knowledge Graph
Google released the knowledge graph in 2012 to help its search engine grow the importance of entities and background over a series of keywords. The knowledge graph allows the extensive algorithmic changes that came after it.
The knowledge graph shifted Google’s search capability from “strings” to “things”. Or from “finding exact matches for words” to “seeking to understand the context”.
That kick starts Google’s attempts to get searcher intent and the connection between entities. The knowledge graph transformed search forever. It is a huge database like World Factbook or Wikipedia. But it is developed and handled by Google as a fundamental reserve of data.
The knowledge graph gathered data thought as a public domain like the presidential term of a former president of the USA, distance to Mars, or the cast of “game of thrones”. If you want to start providing SEO services, you should learn how the Knowledge graph works.
Hummingbird
Google’s Hummingbird update came out in 2013. It uses natural language processing to guarantee that results matching the meaning perform better rather than search results matching only a few words.
Simply put, SERPs that better meet user intent and context will be more visible than search results with keyword-stuffed content. Businesses in the USA should try to optimze their site’s content for Hummingbird.
RankBrain
Have you ever heard the term “Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI keywords) and wondered what that means? Online SEO companies don’t need to care about what LSI means anymore as Google’s algorithm Rankbrain has essentially replaced it.
Latent semantic indexing was created in 2015 to fill the gap between the language used in queries and the desired information. But RankBrain solves this issue far better than LSI, thanks to the technologies it uses.
It is a machine learning and a smart query analysis Artificial intelligence tool as well as a ranking factor. The core difference between Rankbrain and Hummingbird is Rankbrain’s machine learning component.
In simple words, RankBrain understands even unfamiliar keywords and phrases by employing advanced machine learning algorithms. This helps a lot because 15 percent of all Google search queries are new according to Google.
RankBrain keeps learning, evaluating the well-performing SERPs, and finding similarities between the sites that searchers in the USA find useful.
Resultingly, Rankbarin can render a search result to be a “good answer” to a search term even if the exact words from the query aren’t mentioned anywhere in its content.
BERT
Released in 2019, BERT or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers is a product of Google. It aims to further understand conversation search context and intent. BERT enables users to more easily identify useful and exact data.
Google says that it was the biggest achievement in the past 5 years and one of the most important in search history. It allowed SEO services agencies to use more long-tail keywords and queries having over 3 words and guaranteed that search results answer searchers’ questions.
Plus, BERT is known to be the latest enormous update to the workings of semantic search. It impacts about 10 percent of all search queries since the last months of 2019.
Affordable local SEO service companies had to start focusing on writing clear and concise content for humans that is readable too.
The Importance of Semantic Search for Search Engine Optimization
If you ask for a shallow definition, it refers to a search engine’s ability to better understand a searcher’s question and return more applicable, personalized search results.
However, SEO experts in the USA should consider optimizing for semantic search in terms of:
- Topics not only keywords
- Understanding that highly searched keywords are less important than in the past. And relevant long-tail keywords and useful content matter more than they ever did
- That structured information is crucial
- Knowing how you can develop a knowledge graph entity is important
Many experts at online SEO companies think of semantic search as an SEO best practice. No matter what, the need to develop and optimize content for users and not search engines has increased.
Businesses should get knowledge about their customers’ behaviors when they look for their products and their search intent. And then make it their main focus.
Bottom Line
Companies and marketers put in a lot of resources and time to learn to talk in the language of Google and other search engines. On the top level, it appears as a challenging task for businesses and advertisers.
Marketing experts at Digital Gravity Agency know that to build meaningful relationships with customers, you need more than content stuffed with relevant keywords. As an experienced digital marketing agency, we understand user intent is crucial in today’s online marketing.
Our SEO team understands how you can help customers get the results they are looking for. Semantic search is an incredible technology. Google is our helper in navigating the internet.
People can access a full system of human information, encompassing large numbers of websites across millions of sites.
Search engines let us find the material we need that was impossible before them. Semantic search makes sure that search engines deliver us the best matching contextual answers to our searches.
Affordable local SEO services companies in the USA that don’t keep up the pace with emerging algorithms can get their clients’ sites penalized by search engines. And they could also lose the opportunity to engage with their consumers. The key is to unlock the treasure trove of the semantic search algorithm.
