insight

There are 2 posts filed in insight (this is page 1 of 1).

Rethinking keyword clustering through a semantic and cognitive lens 

Keyword clustering remains an important task for search marketers and is key to driving organic traffic, improving rankings and enhancing the authority of the website on a given topic.

There are a handful of practical and great tools that exist in clustering keywords such as Keywordsinsights.io, SurferSEO, Inlinks and the incumbent greats such as Semrush and Ahref. For clustering people also asked questions the likes of AlsoAsked and AnswerThePublic will come in handy. The former clusters by PAA questions from SERP while the latter uses Google Autosuggests and has also added PAA to its collection.

These and a few more that haven’t been mentioned are conventional tools used for keyword clustering and have yielded ranking benefits and an inspiring source of content generation opportunities for most search marketers. But, I have a problem with the approaches and logic utilised by these tools. They almost pigeonhole human search behaviour into some lexical and linear route which ignores how searchers think, reason and act. They are more focused on clustering based on word cooccurrence and cosine similarity of the lexical nature of words but can often lack the semantic and sequential depth akin to human cognition and behaviour. 

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Introducing the concept of semantic authority in search marketing

As an industry, the importance of providing in-depth coverage on a topic is essential for brand relevance and ranking. With Google’s helpful content updates, there have been cases of companies experiencing reduced rankings and traffic because they employed a spray-and-pray approach. That is employing a content marketing approach that involves creating articles for high search volume topics for the sake of generating website visits. A traffic-first approach that does not cater to the user’s needs and fails to build a solid depth or authority in a particular niche topic. With E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness), there is no room for a blanket content marketing approach. Companies have to build an authority in a given topic that is closely related to their brand, product or service. But the journey does not need to stop there, more concepts need to be developed to help us better understand the intent of searchers and analyse how the available content is catering to these needs. For this, I am proposing the concept of ‘Semantic Authority’, an evolution of topical authority. This concept will be introduced below. 

What is Semantic Authority 

Semantic authority is the degree to which a website demonstrates a contextual, cognitive, and causal understanding of a domain by aligning with user intent, interpreting meaning accurately, and structuring information relationally and dynamically. To put this simply, semantic authority involves a more contextual and cognitive understanding of a topic or concept and developing the required content to cater to the user’s needs. Websites that have fully broken down the semantic relations of a concept or seed term are more likely to create contents that go a step above topical coverage. These brands and websites can be viewed to attain an authority in the meaning or semantic space. 

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