How using a commonsense knowledge graph can enhance an understanding of the search journey

Human behaviour is complex and never linear. Users employ a variety of queries at each stage of their journey. Marketers have tried creating frameworks or adopting conventional ones to explain the user journey. Sometimes we are guilty of oversimplifying the journey for our own convenience and satisfaction.

A blog written on Moz got into search journey using the popular AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action and Loyalty) model. And the author used the cough medication example to illustrate how users would always start their journey with a query like “how to stop coughing” and proceed to “cough medicine” “best cough medicine for dry cough” and so on.

This journey or framework makes logical sense. Marketers and non-marketers can simply understand how search by a user can progress through the different stages. But in reality, human search behaviour is never linear as our life experience, location and external triggers are different. Some users may start with a query at the 3 stages of this journey and flipflop between a few to before making a decision.

Search Journey mapping using a before and after structure

Interestingly, whilst looking at the different ways search journeys are mapped, I ran into a blog from SEO Clarity that expressed a before and after keywords to a target keyword. For example, the target keyword “bronze glass” is predicted to have such keywords like “bronze glass mirror, bronze glass vase, bronze glass table lamp” as the preceding search term and keywords such as “bronze mirror, bronze tinted glass, bronze glass panels” as some of the next terms users are more likely to search for. Whilst this paints a logical picture of how users are likely to search, it is very lexically structured that it might fail to some degree to mimic human reasoning. But it does make a case that humans are more likely to progress or evolve with how they search for information.

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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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