How to find and use semantic words to improve your SEO

The semantic field, also called lexical field, is a set of words or key expressions that belong to the same theme. You have no doubt been told about it during your French lessons at school. It is also found on the web but in another form. Concretely, it is a universe of keywords that can be used to enrich the vocabulary of content. The goal of the game is to optimize your content so that human and robot readers (from Google) can fully understand your theme. 

‍

In 2013, Google launched its “Hummingbird” update (Colibri, in French) to better respond to more complex user requests. With this update, Google is now able to understand longer questions of 5+ words. Result: the search engine is more useful It then takes into account each of the words that make up the query to show the content relevant to the query. 

In 2019, the update named BERT embeds machine learning to improve the user experience. Words are no longer interpreted individually by the algorithm. Google now processes queries as a whole. BERT understands the links between different terms and concepts; Google is acquiring a more sophisticated vocabulary thanks to this. The more relevant the lexical field of your article, the more the SEO quality of your content will increase (and your visibility as a result because Google positions you better in its results). You therefore need a vocabulary specific to each theme to be well referenced. 

‍

It is not enough to write a list of words placed at random in your blog post or your product sheet. You have to choose the words that are priority and secondary on each page to avoid cannibalization problems. You don't want to compete with yourself even if two pages are good candidates for the same query in Google. If Google has the choice between two pages from the same site and a single well-optimized page on a competitor site… you are dividing your chances. 

‍

Each page must contain keywords… but not all keywords are created equal

First, you will need to find the main keyword for each page. It is around this word that we will orient the creation of the lexical field. As soon as you have your main keyword, you will look for other words that could enrich the vocabulary of your content. 

‍

Among these words you can of course include secondary keywords. Here is what we will consider as secondary keywords: secondary

• keywords which are similar to your main keywords but which have less traffic or are more specific (indicating a color, a material or any other precision)
• synonyms
• of relevant related keywords that will clarify the theme

We will take as an example, the theme of the “earring” can be completed with:

• materials: “gold earring”
• synonyms: “jewelry”
• terms Related like: “thank you mom jewelry”

Another example with the theme of weight loss: we can have keywords like weight loss, burn fat, caffeine, hydration for a blogger “fitness” and “health”. But if we ask a nutritionist the same thing, we end up with other terms like: calories, carbohydrates, metabolism, etc. 

‍

Certain tools can help you analyze the semantics of your text and therefore optimize it. These help you know if your content has a sufficiently rich vocabulary for a given query. Unfortunately, most of the time, they are paid or free but require a lot of private data in exchange like the SEM Rush assistant does. 

‍

We advise you to test to start building your own semantic field for each product or each collection of products. If you have a blog without selling products, then you have to think in terms of articles and categories. It's quite interesting to see that the semantic field of “pirate” contains references to a Disney movie, criminals in the modern era, geographic attributes (archipelago), notions of security (hacker), etc.

‍

You should avoid over-optimization of keywords. Do not try to fit everything if it does not fit. Your content should be consistent and easy to read. Fluency in reading takes precedence, so you must always make sure to optimize the readability of your text. Need help figuring out where to put keywords? We offer web writing training courses like no other