First of all, “semantic content optimization” is nothing more than a term that has been coined by the digital community to mean one thing – create a pleasurable experience on your website for as many people as absolutely possible.

Of course this leads to the question, “Doesn’t everyone already do this, though?” and to that the answer is simply, no. This is mostly because online companies are often centered more on conversions than actually engaging the visitor. Let’s look more in depth at what this all means.

SEO + UX = more dependent than ever before

As Google let’s out more and more information about what goes on behind the scenes, it is becoming quite clear that having a positive experience on your pages is actually directly influencing your websites ranking in search results.

Because of this, it has become not only a suggestion, but more of a requirement to drill down to the minute details of your website to make sure they are providing a quality experience for the end user. This has of course, always been a good practice, but a renewed priority has been placed here with semantic content optimization as it is now widely known that UX drives SEO in a big way.

What should you consider when optimizing your content, semantically?

To make sure your website is benefiting from semantic content optimization, take a look at this checklist and follow through with your website.

Do your pages all have a decided focus?

Try not to do too many different things with one page as this confuses visitors and Google’s algorithm doesn’t particularly like this either. To check, find the big pages you pull in the most visitors through, and look at the keywords to check for their optimization. Additionally, try to include clearly unique aspects in you big pages to drive engagement through differentiation.

Does your page clearly satisfy the needs of your online customer?

After you understand what your customer desires from you and are confident that you offer that in full, think about what else they could be looking for alongside that. For example, if you are a retailer that sells customer coffee mugs you might consider offering options for the coffee mug size, style, coaster options, shipping info, specials, advice on what cup if the best for who, and many more little things.

Have you looked into your websites overall usability?

If is entirely possible to have a visitor show up at your website’s doorstep, find out that your product is exactly what they’re looking for, and have them up and leave simply because your website’s design is incredibly hard to use. Understanding that there is a need to have your pages laid out in a easy to navigate fashion is the first step, the seconds step is acting on that knowledge.

Have you considered using term frequency and inverse document frequency retrieval?

Using these two strategies allows you to pull out the phrases that your pages highlights the most and which of these terms makes your page unique. This can help your by analyzing other popular pages that are similar to yours in terms of phrases and how they are different. For example, if your coffee mug selling business is not highlighting woven coasters and others are, you may want to consider that.

Has your website benefited from A/B testing yet?

If you haven’t had the chance to optimize your website from A/B testing, you should highly consider it. As we wrote about previously, this can be a huge way to increase conversions, while making your website more appealing. Whittling down the small details can be beneficial but where A/B testing really shines is when you get to see what people prefer on a large scale, perhaps even in your conversion funnel itself.

Conclusion

Semantic content optimization may be a buzzword, but it means something significant. When you create a positive experience for your users, you not only gain their favor and potential business, you gain increased search ranking on Google. Yes, the process may be involved, but it is every bit worth the investment of time and energy as the benefits are much too large to ignore.