Unless you’ve been practicing SEO, you probably have never heard of this unique term.
No surprises there, as this is as technical a jargon as you can ever expect. After all, to understand what latent semantic indexing (LSI) and latent semantic indexing writing is, you first need to have some foundations in search engine optimisation strategies.
Yet, this is the same skill successful SEO companies rely on when it comes to ranking for long tail keywords and more importantly, competing for the ever lucrative short tail commercial keywords. So, as a SEO copywriter, that kinda leaves me with little choice but to solidify my skills in writing. Not just for the reader… but also for the search engines.
Chief of them all is our dear friend Google and its ever developing search algorithm.
Understanding Google’s Knowledge Gluttony And Why SEO Players Are Forced To Keep Feeding It
Sometime during the third quarter of the year 2015, Google made an announcement that would transform the landscape of SEO as we used to know.
You see, back then, things were simpler. Writing content for a webpage and ranking it for the search engine result pages (SERPs) were a matter of keyword density. (The number of times a keyword was repeated within an article)
The search engines would determine how relevant a webpage was based on the density of a keyword or phrase appearing within an article. If this sounds awfully simplistic, that is because it is.
And you can just imagine the colossal amount of problems this method brought about…
Serious problem in terms of relevant search results for users… after all, just because you repeat a certain phrase a thousand times, doesn’t make it any more relevant than before.
It’s like a stall owner screaming his lungs out… “I have the best orange juice” over and over again in the middle of a shopping mall. It doesn’t matter how loud or how frequent he’s repeating those words. It won’t make his orange juice any better.
Sure, he might attract some attention, but we still need more information to decide if it is really the best orange juice we’ll ever taste. We need details. Critical details like…
- Where were his oranges from?
- Are they organic?
- Are they hand-pressed?
- Did he add artificial sweetening to his drinks?
- How much is he selling a glass for?
Once, we’ve gathered all these little details, we can begin to form our personal judgement. To decide if he has the ingredients necessary to make the best orange juice of our lives.
You may noticed, we haven’t even gotten down to the tasting yet. But it is this amount of data we’re collecting (often subconsciously) that helps us decipher the message we’re bombarded with everyday.
And when all the conditions are met, then and only then, do we make the purchase and finally, have our first taste.
So… here’s how this leads back to ranking for the search engines…
Because Google uses an algorithm similar to the way we process information. On 26 October 2015, they confirmed they had an algorithm known as RankBrain. The third most important factor in their overall ranking algorithm after content and links.
Much like our orange juice seller example, this algorithm works in a similar deciphering manner. Because with millions and possibly billions of webpages floating digitally around the world wide web, Google needed a fast way to analyse every single page available. In less than a second.
In fact, run a google search for ‘best orange juice’ and you’ll find it took no more than 0.68 seconds for Google to scour the entire web and analyse each page.
And from this supersonic analysis, they then rank every page in order of their relevancy for the searcher.
This leads to the top 10 organic search results you see on the SERP along with any other relevant information they can provide to boost your user experience.
And just like our example above, having a webpage screaming out the same keyword over and over again isn’t going to make your page any more relevant. Not anymore. You need details, related information, answers to the question people are asking, and a whole lot more if you ever hope to rank.
That’s where LSI writing comes into the picture.
Latent Systematic Indexing Writing – When Keyword Stuffing No Longer Works
To understand what LSI is and how it works… let’s use the word orange as an example.
When you type the word ‘orange’ into the search engine, have you ever wondered how Google or Yahoo or Bing (whichever you prefer) decides whether to show you results about the fruit or the colour?
Now, suppose instead of just the word orange, I added these other words…
“juice, citrus, sweet, tree, blood” vs “yellow, spectrum, RGB, painter, meaning”
With just 5 additional words, it paints a much clearer picture now doesn’t it?
Naturally, there are a whole lot more synonyms and related words that deepens the meaning and helps give better context to the word we’re searching for. In fact, Google actively offers recommendations on what they think you might be looking for. It’s right there at the bottom of any page.
These results are part of Google’s very own Google Suggest function. Similar to how they seem to always be able to pull out the right data complete your query before you. These predictions are simply a reflection of the countless number of users that have searched for that same query before you ever did.
Interestingly, there are many others who have gone ahead to test Google’s accuracy in processing this information to personalise what your query. It isn’t always accurate but the number of hits to miss ratio is definitely in their court.
But this exercise reveals something valuable to us…
It is this entire directory of search queries that feed Rank Brain with the information and data it needs to determine something critical…
Searcher Intent!
This forms the entire basis behind how the search engine chooses which page to display. And if you’re starting to see where this is going…
It also forms the very foundation behind any good marketing campaign or strategy.
In fact, one of the very fundamental principles of being a copywriter, is to understand my audience. Their fears, their worries, their goals, their desires, and much more. Bring this to SEO and while the platform is different, the principles remain the same.
Now, the type of phrases they’re keying in, reveals a story about what they’re looking. In most cases, there are 4 main types of search intent:
- Navigational
- Informational
- Commercial
- Transactional
By understanding the intent behind the keyword, the search engine is then able to determine the best webpage that answers their request. In response, we want to write a content that best matches the searcher intent.
That means, having relevant information about what a user is searching for.
(You may want to check out this insightful article by David Brim on uncovering your user’s search intent.)
The Art of SEO Copywriting Today
So, with the way the internet is evolving, the copywriter has to evolve to keep up with this ever learning algorithm.
No longer can a writer keyword stuff his way to the top of the SERPS. And that’s a good thing too.
It goes back to basic marketing principles and sales funnel strategies such as knowing your audience and giving them a solution they want. This way, it’ll force web owners, bloggers, and marketers to really understand their readers, their customers, and their audiences to produce quality content.
What do you think? Is LSI writing an important development for the world of content marketing today?
