Podcast Ep. 22: What is Semantic SEO and Why Should Law Firms Care?

 

Shownotes

Google has placed a focus on connecting visitors to pages with the meaning they’re looking for rather than just exact phrases and keywords to help provide users with the best possible results. For marketers and lawyers, this means thinking about the broader topics around the keywords you’re trying to rank for.

Targeting topics instead of keywords only

Ask yourself: how many different ways will people search for a topic? By creating series of pages answering their questions in multiple ways, Google will value the meaning your content is providing and you may then rank higher for multiple types of keywords.

Tip: Use Google’s search engine suggestions to discover related keywords and phrases you can use to create content. 

Voice search

Search is evolving as more people turn to their phones and connected internet devices to ask questions verbally. For SEO, this means that optimizing around long-tail keywords and natural language is key.

Tip: In order to accommodate for voice search, blog posts should now reach 1,500 words instead of just 500-1,000 to truly be search engine optimized.

Think relationships instead of link spam

Off-page SEO relates to the authority of your site which is mainly measured by links. The more links your website has, the higher your authority. However in the past, black hat SEO  tactics often involved link farms. Now, Google is disavowing and penalizing these types of links. Google wants the highest value result for their users and therefore is not supportive of artificial link building.

To develop links, you first must develop relationships with people in your industry and write content for their websites that will link back to your site.

Tip: Subscribe, retweet, and engage with influencers through social media with the goal of creating meaningful relationships with industry leaders.

Make your content topical and interactive

You don’t increase SEO or domain authority from social media backlinks. Social media does, however, have an impact through user interaction signals. If you link to a blog post that creates high engagement on social, Google will see that it has high value. If users visit the blog on your website and the blog post has good internal links, this will help SEO.

People won’t share content or revisit your site if they don’t find the information useful. Find a way to present the topics you’re targeting in a way that people will understand. When you place a focus on content, SEO will almost take care of itself.

Tip: Utilizing images, videos, and bullet points makes your content more engaging to users visiting your page.