Over the weekend, my family and I did a little shopping at the Westfield Shopping center in Annapolis Mall. We walked into a shoe store after reading a sign that said, buy one pair of shoes gets the 2nd for half off.
Although a deal like this is common in many shoe stores, my fiance and I both felt it was time to get a new pair of shoes, so we decided to take a look. Of course, I was only looking for a new pair of black and since my foot size is of the most common, (10.5), I didn’t see an available pair. A sales associate of the store approached me and asked if I needed any help and I explained that I was looking for a pair of black Chucks in a 10.5. The sales person went to the back of the store and brought me a pair of 10.5 black chucks. Perfect. We checked out and I got what I wanted.
On our way home, I thought about the simple buying experience and compared it with buying shoes online and it led me to think about semantic SEO and how important it is to your content strategy.
What is Semantic SEO?
Semantic SEO is a content marketing strategy designed to include content based on a searcher’s intent. Here’s an example related to my shopping experience:
Since I was in a shoe store, it was safe for the sales associate to assume that I was there to buy shoes. The salesperson also saw that I was a male, so again it was safe for them to assume I was looking for size 10.5 in “mens”. Finally since I showed the salesperson the type of shoe, they automatically were able to eliminate searching their inventory for high-top Chucks over low-cut chucks and every color variation except black.
Search engines like Google try to do much of the same things. They use all of the available data they have about you to assume your intent. Search engines like Google look at things like your past search history, geographical location, buying habits, and so on to determine which results to return to
If I run a search for “black chucks” how does Google know whether or not I am intending to buy a pair of shoes, research information about black Chuck Taylors/Converse
However, if I run a similar search but instead say, “black chucks size 10.5” Google uses “size 10.5” as the “intent keyword” to assume that I am only interested in buying a pair of shoes. See below:
Notice: In the screenshot above the keyword “chucks” is not used in the page title or the blurb in the first organic search result. The reason is because Google knows that “Chucks” is a commonly used keyword variation of “Converse”, and thus they keyword is treated the same. Most importantly, Google is able to identify my intent and offer me what it believes is the best possible result.
We can get into why Google might return Ebay and Amazon over the official website of Converse, but that is a deeper conversation that I’d rather have with you over your business. Just know that Google knows my online buying habits and that Ebay and Amazon might have a larger inventory and better prices than Converse itself.
Either way, I hope I was able to teach you a bit about semantic SEO and I also hope that you add content to your website that All-Stars on what people are searching regarding your products and services.
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