Why Is Semantic Search Important?

In 2020, there are some confirmed updates by Google which creates a major impact on many SEOs and their client’s websites. In 2021, Google will start considering many things they released last year, such as Core Web Vital and Mobile-First Indexing. Similarly, Google will update its algorithm just it is frequently changed.

What is Semantic Search?

Semantic search is the ability of search engines to understand the intent and contextual meaning of search phrases when serving results to users on the web. Google will now try to understand the intent of the search and the meaning of the search terms to generate a better result.

Semantic search is not introduced overnight, but Google updates its algorithm periodically to understand the user’s query in a more appropriate way.

Knowledge Graph

The history of semantic search is since 2012 when Google introduces a knowledge graph. The knowledge graph was rolled-out in 2012 which is a collection of entities and the relationship between them. Knowledge graph helps Google to understand the facts and information about the billions of connected entities.

Sometimes Google Search will show special boxes with information about people, places, and things. We call these knowledge panels. They’re designed to help you quickly understand more about a particular subject by surfacing key facts and to make it easier to explore a topic in more depth. Information within knowledge panels comes from our Knowledge Graph, which is like a giant virtual encyclopedia of facts.

– Danny Sullivan

HummingBird

In 2013, Google release the Hummingbird algorithm in a context to return better search results. The most important change with Hummingbird as it gives a better understanding of conversational search queries.

RankBrain

In 2016, Google rolled out the Rankbrain algorithm which helps to understand the meaning of the words that are entered by users.
RankBrain harnesses artificial intelligence to implant words into numerical entities to make them more understandable to computers. Any words or phrases unfamiliar to RankBrain will be converted into words and phrases with similar meanings for filtered results. This increases Google’s accuracy and efficiency when tackling new search queries.

— Courtney Capellan

BERT

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers also known as BERP was released in 2019 and it considers the full context of a word entered by the user. Danny Sullivan confirmed that it impacts about 10% of search queries when BERT is live in.

How to perform well with Semantic Search?

In 2021, you should perform certain things to enhance your organic performance with semantic search.

• Target Topics, Not Only Keywords
• Utilize Schema Markup
• Build Your Brand to become a Knowledge Graph Entity
• Manage Relevant Backlinks

When you are going to manage content, you have to make sure about more keywords, don’t just go with the few targeted keywords which you want to rank for. Utilize some similar or long-tail keywords as well in content so Google will rank your page for different keywords as well.

Apart from the keywords, you have to optimize your website for schema markup as well. Google frequently changed the SERP result with the latest and helpful SERP features and you have to manage it accordingly. Since Google considering Mobile as the first indexing device, you have to make sure about the mobile SERP as well.

Links are always helpful to improve the performance and you have to make sure about the relevancy as well. Both Internal and External links are important which creates relevancy for the particular entity and Google can easily understand it.

Final Thoughts

Semantic search helps Google to deliver more useful and valuable content to users. You have to change some content-related stuff by managing the semantic search queries as well. If you are still targeting a few keywords then it’s time to utilize additional supportive keywords as well which gives you better visibility and traffic.

To understand keywords with semantic search SEMrush will give you a better idea. You can utilize SERP features as well with the SEMrush tool. Get a paid subscription to the SEMrush tool and manage your project with the latest updates.