Do LSI Keywords Matter for Your SEO Strategy?
SEO is a constant work in progress! If content marketing is the center of your search strategies, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an interesting concept for you to review. Regardless of whether you believe LSI directly factors into SEO ranking or not, the knowledge and the use of such keywords can help you create better quality content, which is a major win for your SEO efforts!
Let’s explore the answers to some commonly asked questions around the concept, tools, and use case scenarios.
What is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)?
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a method of indexing and extracting the hidden meaning in a volume of text by using the patterns and relationships between loosely but contextually connected terms. It is a natural-language processing technique developed in the 1980s.
- Latent → Hidden
- Semantic → Relating to meaning in language or logic
- Indexing → Information Retrieval
Is LSI an SEO ranking factor?
This has been a question often discussed among digital marketers with experts arguing both sides; however, there is no confirmed answer.
What is an LSI keyword?
LSI Keywords are conceptually and semantically related terms but not necessarily synonyms.
For example, if you have a web page discussing running, your content can include contents about running shoes, marathon training plans, diet plans for runners, etc. Although these terms cover slightly different topics, they are all related. While indexing a page on the site, looking at relevant terms, search engines can better understand the content on a webpage.
The following are some popular LSI tools to generate LSI keywords related to the primary keyword.
· LSI Graph: https://lsigraph.com/
· Twinword Ideas Graph: https://www.twinword.com/ideas/graph/
· Google’s Related keywords. You can find these words at the bottom of the SERP.
How does LSIs influence SEO strategies?
The LSI process has no known effect on the SEO ranking factor. However, by using LSI knowledge, you can favorably influence your SEO strategy by creating more engaging, useful, and comprehensive quality content covering more sub-topics with less repetitive use of primary keywords.
How are SEO strategy and LSI related?
Engaging and useful quality content is the key to a successful SEO content strategy. LSI keywords can play a significant role in shaping material to be complete and appealing to users by providing more meaningful content in the following ways.
1. Modern search engine algorithms penalize repeated overuse of primary keywords as keyword stuffing. Using contextually relevant terms (in addition to primary keywords) in your content, you can prevent keyword stuffing and end up with more comprehensive, organic, and naturally flowing content.
For example, let’s say you are creating content on “Digital Marketing Strategies.” Your content creation will be more effective if the content includes topics such as SEO, PPC, Email Marketing, etc., and includes related terminologies like the Internet Marketing strategy. Such techniques may help you avoid repeating your primary keyword too often while keeping the user informed and engaged with additional relevant topics and alternative terms used in the industry.
2. LSI keywords can provide better flow for your content by varying the words that explain the topic and subtopics. Content related to subtopics encourages the visitor to check out other pages on your site and helps to decrease the bounce rate.
3. The primary focus of your content is to serve up useful content in an engaging manner. The LSI keywords can increase user retention and average duration on the page by providing a natural flow to the content.
4. By using these keywords, your site can rank for secondary keywords. LSI keywords give you an opportunity to use synonyms and related terms to create content. This is an excellent opportunity to rank for secondary keywords by using the same content that fits the context of your primary keyword!
Final thoughts:
As a content marketer, you should take advantage of semantically related words, phrases, and entities to boost rankings. It’s wise to use LSI terms where they make sense since you can create more comprehensive content by providing additional context discussing subtopics and other relevant terms, making your content more complete, engaging, useful, and valuable.
With semantically related topics, you can paint a better picture of the story you are narrating both for bots and your users who searched for the primary keywords and landed on your page.
As mentioned at the top of the article, even though LSI keywords are not a ranking factor, using semantically related keywords makes the content read better, engaging, and complete, and that should be a good enough reason to use these words for your SEO strategy.
Additional resources on LSI and SEO
1. How to do “Semantic SEO” in 8 minutes — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81WeOXS0vfs
2. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) & Google RankBrain: The Complete 2020 Guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd2iL7cJIv4
3. Frequently Asked Questions on SEO https://www.kritionlinemarketing.com/digital-marketing-solutions/search/search-engine-optimization/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis
5. https://www.vieodesign.com/blog/what-are-lsi-keywords-and-do-they-matter
