Semantic SEO & Content Briefs: Considerations for Successful Content Briefs

What Is Semantic SEO??

Semantic SEO is the process of optimising content by building meaning, context and topical depth into the content. Doing this helps search engines to better understand your pages.

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about entity optimisation, semantically structured content, and how important it is for SEO. However, I have not yet found a helpful guide on how to take these concepts and brief a content writer on them.

Rarely, the person doing SEO is also the person who will be writing content. So I’m not sure why this is the case. My guess is that this is due to:

• The idea of “good” or “optimised” content is highly subjective. There is no way of knowing what combination of words will perform best, and no one can say X content (ceteris paribus) will rank better than all others in the cohort.
• First and foremost, the algorithm is designed to rank content that resolves the search intent for the most users possible. This means that content written purely to adhere to vanity metrics or “quality” scores won’t (or shouldn’t) work.
• The contents of a content brief depend on the copywriter's experience and the ability to educate them.
• It’s complicated, and although it is of growing importance, most people aren’t employing it as a tactic yet. Basically, it’s a nice-to-have but not necessarily needed – most SEOs can do this (roughly) by feel.

When writing a content brief, these are some things you and your content writer should keep in mind:

1. Focus on People First & Search Engines Second – More often than not, good content ranks. Good content converts better.?
2. Answer Common Questions – What questions are searchers looking to answer? Tools like AlsoAsked and AnswerThePublic can shed some light on this.
3. Focus on Intent – For any given query, Google tries to satisfy the search intent of the majority. Look at the results of the SERP:?
4. What is the intent that Google is associating with the query??
5. Is there a case of fragmented search intent? This is particularly common with shorter and less specific search queries.

Poor quality content that exists solely for SEO is frequently ranked too. It’s not a sustainable strategy, though, and as Google’s algorithm matures, you can expect its performance in organic search to decrease.

When planning content, these are some things that aren’t going to get you there:

1) LSI Keywords:

LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, keywords are terms related to a primary keyword. NLP technology has come a long way since the 1980s. In July 2019,? John Mueller even confirmed that LSIs are not used to rank content.?

The late Bill Slawski, an expert in semantic SEO and Google patents, whom I am a big fan of, wrote a great article on LSIs. Bill’s article details how keywords and “LSIs” relate to Google’s algorithm.?

2) Keyword Density:

Keyword density refers to the percentage of times a keyword is used relative to the rest of the content. John Mueller from Google confirmed this isn’t a ranking factor in a 2014 youtube video and again on Reddit in 2022.?

3) TF-IDF:

TF-IDF is short for term frequency-inverse document frequency. TF-IDF measures how important a word is to a document relative to a corpus. There’s a lot of fuss about TF-IDF in the SEO community. However, it’s not used by Google’s algorithm, and it’s also a dated way of interpreting the context and relevance of content.

4) Keyword Stuffing:

Repeatedly adding target keywords in the content for rankings in a context that does not make sense. Of course, we’ve all seen sites where this has worked, but sites that stuff keywords (at least to the extreme) and rank are in the minority.?

Google’s job is to return the highest quality content; content that will satisfy the majority of users’ search intent for a given query. Trying to trick the algorithm is a short-lived strategy.?

Keyword stuffing can also reduce your chances of producing content that other sites will want to link to. Therefore, hurting your long-term success.

If you’re interested in semantic content, entities and how Google interprets content, these are the people to follow:

• Bill Slawski – Director of SEO Research at Go Fish Digital, founder of SEO by the Sea: Bill does an excellent job unpacking Google patents and revealing how they may relate to content analysis for ranking purposes.
• Koray Tu?berk – Founder and owner of Holistic SEO & Digital: Koray publishes excellent case studies and research in this field. I've found his research into how Google interprets search intent particularly interesting.
• Dixon Jones – Founder of Inlinks and semantic SEO expert. He’s a recognised expert in the SEO community.

Some steps to include in your content brief process:

1) Plan your content

Define your cornerstone content – Avoid doing what a lot of webmasters do. Don't write content for the sake of it. Ask yourself, how will your article fit into the overall structure of your content strategy??

For any given topic you want to rank for, it’s important to define your cornerstone content. A hub and spoke content model (or content silo) and keyword mapping can help you plan this properly.

Depending on the subject, there are a few techniques I like to use:

• Analyse competing content – Tools such as Thruuu and Browseo can help with this.
• Identify Entities associated with a topic/search query – Using information sources like Wikipedia, Wikidata, Google Knowledge Graph lookup and Python libraries can help with this.
• Use topic/content modelling and NLP tools – Tools like SurferSEO, Frase, Inlinks and Clearscope can analyse topics and keywords in competing content.
• Internal link structure – Define your internal linking strategy. Google uses internal links to understand context. It’s also important for passing PageRank and getting content crawled/indexed. Avoid orphaned content and build content silos using your internal links.

Your content brief should include:

1) Your (rough) target word count

• A rough word count for the article
• If it's a longer article, include a rough word count for each section. The words per section should be weighted to the importance of each to the overall topic.
• For example, if your article "What is SEO?" and "link building" is identified as a keyword used more than most, then allocate a higher word count for the relevant sections.

2) A clearly defined topic + associated sub-topics

3) Identify internal link opportunities and CTAs if required

4) Define the search intent?

• Is Google showing results for ecom, informational, transactional, etc?
• What intent signals/KW modifiers are being used around the target keywords in competing content? Eg: how to, when, what, why, buy/sell, shop, discount, location, find, make, learn, brand, year – These are basic, the possibilities are endless. @Inlinks have an intent-based keyword research tool that can help to understand this.

5) Plan your document structure

• The headings in your article (H1 - H6) should be ordered in a logical manner based on their importance. Wikipedia is the best example of this. However, a good example of this in the wild is Investopedia.
• Layout the sub topics in a way that makes sense semantically.?
• I tend to include just the topic of each heading and instruct the writer to expand on them creatively.
• Using tools like Thruuu can help you get an idea of how competing content has done this.?
• Looking at related Wikipedia/Wikidata articles may also help you structure this.
• To test your heading structure, read the headings out loud in order. It should accurately describe your article.

6) Plan out the FAQ/Q&A content for your content writer

• This is one area your content writer needs some direction. That's because Planning this section requires the use of tools they might not have access to or understand.
• You'll want to employ the use of tools such as AlsoAsked, Answer The Public and Ahrefs Keyword Insights.
• Other good places to look are your site search logs, Reddit, Quora, and Other Forums.

Putting it all together

Firstly, if your writer doesn’t understand SEO, it can help to educate them on how Google works, how it uses NLP to interpret meaning, etc. At the same time, if you’re using a tool like SurferSEO or Frase, emphasise that the content score is not the be-all and end-all.?Writing quality content, for people first and search engines second will help in the long run. You can always tweak it later.

Writing quality content, for people first and search engines second will help in the long run. You can always tweak it later.

Content Optimisation Tools

Content optimisation tools are great to benchmark your keyword usage against the competition. Before you get to this stage, it’s important to have your content outline defined. A solid document structure will help guide your content writer.

A well-defined document structure will help you avoid what I call “keyword sprinkling”?

Keyword sprinkling is when writers sprinkle (or stuff) keywords over an article to improve the content score in content optimisation tools. Think Salt Bae but with keywords.

If for example, let's say you’re writing an article intended to rank for “What is SEO?”, and the competition uses the term “link building” 20 times. Sprinkling the term throughout your article isn’t going to help.

Your brief should outline a section where the subject of “link building” is discussed. Naturally, the topic will be discussed in depth here, removing the need for sprinkling contextually insignificant mentions of it elsewhere.

The fact is that you can achieve the same “content score” by sprinkling keywords throughout the document as you could by discussing them in a structured manner. The “sprinkling” method, however, just adds keywords for the sake of it. This provides no value to users and little to search engines. Hence why document structure is important when using content optimisation tools.

Perfect content scores are not essential. You can verify this by running content tools on the content that ranks in position one already. I guarantee there will be keywords used too many or too few times.

Educating your content writers is a huge part of the content development process. However, it's also important not to inhibit writers' creative control.?An effective content brief should give enough direction so that content is effective in search while also providing value. Ideally, achieving both these goals shouldn't be a trade-off; It should be the goal of every content piece.

6) Adding Structured Data Markup

Although this step isn't essential to your content briefs, it is an essential component of semantically optimised content.

Structured data scripts can contain multiple "nested" data types. Someone who does this really well is?Search Engine Journal?with their article markup.

Your markup should provide Google with as much relevant context as possible. For example, for recipe markup, you can nest reviews and video data types.

Multiple data types are unified using the “@id” node as the glue through which each item is nested. Without this, it might not be clear to search engines how each piece of information relates to one another.

Some tips for getting your blog's structured data markup right:

• Start with the easier properties. These are the ones that don't require nesting. You can build out your markup from here.
• If you want rich results, use schema types that are most applicable to the page. These types should be compatible with each other and be nested where appropriate. For example, you can get rich results for a recipe with review markup. But if you add a FAQ and how-to markup, these won’t show, and you’ll risk having no rich results shown.
• Try putting your markup in Google’s structured data testing tool. Read the data types out loud. Ask yourself whether the relationships make sense.
• If your tech stack prevents you from being able to easily add custom schema markup, you can do it via tag manager. You’ll need to add some javascript for it to work properly though. Here is a great tool for that:?https://lnkd.in/dKA-ARph
• Be sure to use author markup. A common misconception in SEO – E-A-T?is not an?algorithm?on its own. It's just part of Google's quality rater guidelines. It's essentially "baked in" to the algorith through various other mechanisms. If the author of your content is well known, then including author markup is a no brainer. In this case, it will hopefully signal your content comes from a trusted source.