If your goal was to catch tons of fish, what’s a better method: using a single line, or casting a net?
Easy – a net, because it gives you the chance to catch many fish at once.We can do the same with SEO.People tend to get hung up on ranking for 1 specific keyword. And think if they don’t hit positions 1-3 for that keyword, it’s a fail.These people are fishing with a single line.
But we build pages to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, sub-topics, and semantically related terms around a single topic. These pages rank for hundreds of keywords, not just one.
How do we do it?
Actually, Google shows us exactly what it’s looking for. What I mean is this:When Google crawls your page, it looks to find out exactly what your page is about, and then indexes it accordingly. But if Google can find additional keywords and content related to your primary keyword, it will index your page for those as well.Which means the number of impressions increases, which means in turn, the number of clicks increases and the source of this traffic is diversified.Why does this matter?Only when your page appears in the search results is there a chance for potential customers to visit your site. If your page ranks only for a single keyword, you’ll need to wait until that exact keyword is searched before your site has even a chance of getting a visit. But imagine if your page had enough semantically related keywords to show up for 300 or more different queries? You’ve now significantly increased your chances of getting traffic.
So how do we create semantically related pages?
Google shows us EXACTLY what terms and phrases it thinks are semantically related to each other. There’s no guesswork involved.This allows us to build pages full of semantically related content. And doing so is incredibly straightforward.First, decide on the page’s primary keyword.Let’s say we want to rank a page for “weightlifting shoes”
We search our term in Google, then scroll to the page footer, for the “Searches Related to Weightlifting Shoes” section.
Now choose one keyword, that is relevant and decently broad.We’ll choose “olympic weightlifting shoes”, and open that page in a new tab.Scroll to the bottom and compare both pages, looking for related searches that appear in each.
In our case its:Nikes Weightlifting ShoesAdidas Weightlifting ShoesReebok Weightlifting shoesWe now have 4 terms that Google thinks are semantically related to our primary keyword, which can be used to build out our new page. But we can go a step further.Midway up the page, we have the “People Also Ask” box. These are questions Google thinks are directly related to our search query.
We now take those questions and answer them directly on our page; expanding the amount of relevant topics and keywords we have.This process is repeated with all four topics, till we’ve built a page-outline that is completely full of semantically related keywords.Giving us this semantically validated page outline:
- Weight Lifting Shoes
- Olympic Weightlifting Shoes
- Do you really need weight lifting shoes?
- What Are the Best Weight Lifting Shoes?
- Olympic Weightlifting Shoes
- Adidas
- Are Adidas good for Weightlifting?
- Adidas Powerlift
- Adidas Leistung
We’d follow this process for both Nike and Reebok, and then fill out our content accordingly.By building a page with this method we created a semantically related page that Google will love to rank. This helps us increase the number of impressions, and grows our traffic. I’ve said before, the secret to good SEO is hiding in plain sight, and it’s no different when building a page Google loves. Give this method a try next time you’re putting a page together, and let me know your results.
