Improve Your B2B Site Rankings with Semantic Search

Improve Your B2B Site Rankings with Semantic Search

Do you have a top competitor with a fantastic website? Do they get comments and shares on social media that you only dream of? Do you see that all sorts of sites are linking back to their site as a credible source?  Do you see their articles and other editorial regularly appearing on industry related websites? Are you wondering, “how can I possibly compete with THAT?” Read on, and we’ll share what a semantic search is, and how you can use it to bypass that competitor in ranking!

What is Semantic Search?

Semantic search results are what Google and other search engines have been pushing in their search results. They want the query and the results to “fit” into what could be categorized as natural conversation. Semantic search is the practice of the search bots learning algorithms that mimic human conversation.

For example, a Google search for “ticket” could mean anything from concert tickets to plane tickets to traffic tickets. However, a Google search for “pay my parking ticket” or “fight my speeding ticket” or “buy a ticket to an Astros game” – should return amazingly relevant results.

How to Optimize Content for Semantic Search

The best way to optimize your site for this type of search is to create content that is topically relevant to your target audience(s). As you create content, make sure all your pages, social media posts, and even videos answer questions that your customers may be posing. For example, do you get numerous queries as to why a certain pump is vibrating excessively? Write a blog post called “Why My Pump is Vibrating” or whatever is currently being queried on Google around the topic. (You’ll have to do a little research.) You may find yourself skyrocketing to the top of the Search Engine Results Page in short order!

It can be difficult to create content for robots all by yourself. There are tools that have been created for this purpose. We used one called Text Optimizer, a tool that can analyze your text for items such as online marketing, SEO, and organic search. We ran our previous post How to Write B2B Content for Google’s Answer Box through its database to see how well it performed.

The tool showed the following details on the post:

• Which keywords it would rank high for (search engine optimization, digital marketing, etc.)
• Who the post is for: people looking to buy, learn, or get informed.
• How optimized it is for words, verbs, and sentence length and number.
• It even gave helpful words to include in order to reach a broader audience.

How NOT to Optimize Content for Semantic Search

 One of the little-known ways Google has begun to rank content is by disqualifying content of low quality. This includes articles that are over saturated with certain keywords or use other black hat techniques to rank. They also use term frequency-inverse document frequency, which uses the number of times a term is used compared to a predetermined number to gauge the quality of the post. Google and other search engines are getting very good at recognizing what words naturally occur together in normal conversation – and make semantic estimations that are used to flag what they consider to be spam.

Don’t think that semantic search is just a trend. This technique is predicted to grow in use over the coming years. It is more important than ever for your B2B to create content that answers your visitor’s questions, establishes more unique results, and provides a better overall experience in order to convert visitors to customers.