What is Semantic SEO? – With Bill Slawski

Semantic SEO is a term marketers often use without a clear understanding what it is really about.

Jim Boykin, CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas, and Ann Smarty, IMN’s analyst, have invited a well-known SEO expert Bill Slawski to discuss what semantic SEO is and how to implement the concept in an SEO strategy.

An entity is a person, a place or a thing. It is often but not always capitalized.

In Google you can recognize an entity because it usually triggers a knowledge panel:

Google’s understanding of the world consists of a map of inter-connected entities each of which has a unique combination of attributes.

This is how Google understands relevancy and evaluates quality: Does a page include unique entities and their attributes associated with a certain topic?

One search can trigger several entities because one name can be applied to different entities, so example, if someone is searching for “Lincoln”, they can mean the past president, a place or a car model. You can cluster these things based on entities that are similar.

Google may use your searching patterns and location to try and “guess” which category you are most likely to mean but the search engine result page will include the whole cluster for you to refine your search:

In SEO, Context is King

Using entities and their unique attributes, Google identifies context and manages to meet each user’s search intent.

Google is looking at a search query to determine which entity might be in it.

Paul Haahr, Ranking Engineer at Google, confirmed that at SMX West back in 2016.

Schema helps Google understand entities on your page

Schema is the way of informing Google about which entities are associated with your content and listing attributes that describe those entities.

Schema is the way to help a search crawler extract entities from a web page and correctly categorize them.

Hire ninjas if you need help creating a solid SEO strategy that would include semantic analysis and schema implementation.