Collecting semantics

To create a website that meets the user’s needs, you need to collect the keywords that your target audience uses. First, let’s understand what are seo keys (or, as we called them, keywords).

Keywords are phrases or words that your customers use to search for certain information, goods, services. All these “keywords” break down user queries into 3 main categories:

• Informational queries. This is about 50% of all searches. This type of queries involves answering the question “How?” How to make a cake, how to start a business, and even how to promote a website on your own. These are all informational queries.
• There are navigational queries. They answer the question “Where?” Where can I have breakfast today, where can I buy a gift for my wife, where can I change my tire, and so on. They are in the overall mass – 30%.
• There are transactional inquiries. These queries express a clear desire to buy something. “Order seo promotion services in Moscow” – clearly expressed transactional query with a reference to the geo. Such queries are about 20%. Issuance of these requests is formed on individual rules. This includes the presence of a catalog on the site, the presence of prices in the product cards, the availability of price lists for downloading on the site, and the ability to buy from the cart in one click.

Separately there are a couple more groups of requests:

• Branded. When the name of brand gets in the search bar – this is a brand request. Usually these queries show pages with catalogs of branded products.
• Vitale. This is when the search bar contains just the name of the company or brand. An example of such a query is the brand of construction equipment “Caterpillar”. From this query, the intent of the searcher cannot be determined. Therefore, the official website of the company, pages in social networks and an article in Wikipedia will be shown as the answer.

What are the best queries to use? It’s best to use whatever you can reach. If your audience uses those words, why not use them for you. As an additional criterion, you can use filtering queries by frequency.

The following keys are distinguished by frequency of use:

• Low frequency queries (LF). These queries in the search engine comes up to 100 per month (some people expand this boundary to 1000).
• Medium frequency queries (MF). Their number in the search up to 1000. Sometimes the bar rises to 5000.
• And highly-frequency. From 1000 impressions per month. The bar rises similarly to the lower boundary of 5000-10000 requests per month.

Each theme has its own frequency. For the query “search engine promotion price” – 84 hits a month, and on the request “Creating a website price” – about 3500. This suggests a different demand for services and differences in the definition of such a parameter as frequency.

Another classification – by geo-dependence. Geo-dependent are queries in which a keyword varies from region to region. An example is the query “movie theater Moscow / St. Petersburg / Samara,” where geo-dependence is evident. Geo-relevant queries are keywords, the results of which are NOT different for different regions (do not depend on location).

Search engine algorithms have been taking into account the region where a user is located for quite a long time, in order to give a relevant answer to his query.

An interesting point: if we are in Kazan and enter the word “bakery,” the output will show us bakeries in Kazan. And if we make a request “bakery in Moscow,” while being in Kazan, then the results will show us in Moscow (geo-relation is lost).

How to pick up keywords for the site, if you are a beginner, or at least not an expert? You can do this in several ways:

• Collect manually. Pick up the keys for seo and analyze them with the help of a tool for analyzing queries in search engines. The main and only tool here will be Yandex.wordstat (wordstat.yandex.ru). With wordstat you easily gather your keywords and analyze the frequency of occurrence.

Enter into the search box your main query, let it be “trucking. You will see that it has over 700,000 hits each month. Note that below you will find queries with “price”, “by Russia”, “gazelle” “telephone” and many others. This is almost unlimited potential for promotion.

Collect the words that suit you in an excel, and then click through those that have selected and again write out those that were missing before. At the output you will get a few dozen or hundreds of queries on your topic.

Make sure to reduce the frequency of your keywords. Otherwise, you will have to compete with the “mastodons” of the market. In the world of electronics – it is a large home appliance stores that have thousands of indexed pages. You just get lost among them.

• The second way to build a core – machine. Use one of the services for the automatic collection of semantics. Of the free – SeoPult. Paid or with varying degrees of free – KeyCollector, Spy Words, Semrush, Mutagen and others.

If you are collecting semantics for yourself, there is no point in buying paid. It is sufficient to simply scan several competitor sites with free parsers and remove duplicates, which will certainly pop up.

If you want to engage in systematic parsing for yourself or for commercial purposes, then buy paid products.
The third way is not free but it is reliable. You can order this service from a specialist. He himself will do all the research and give you a result already filtered from the garbage.

And a little more about the collection. A very important moment, which allows you to collect the best quality core is the ability to distinguish such elements as “body”, “specifier” and “tail” in the request. Now let’s talk about this in more detail:

• So the query “machine” consists only of the “body.” The user’s intent itself is not clear. This explains the large number of results in the output (almost 24 million).
• The second element – the specifier. This is a specification of the purpose of the search (buy, fix, sell, etc.).
• The third – the tail. This parameter details the user’s intent. “Sell a car quickly”, “fix a car inexpensively”, “buy a car in Moscow” and others.

Using in the work “bodies” of queries together with “specifiers” and “tails”, you will ensure yourself the best promotion in search results.

Now that the theoretical calculations can be considered over, it’s time to get down to the practice of collecting. We talked about why you should pay attention to such a careful selection of semantics, and now let’s talk about the practical side of the issue.

How to choose the keys to promote the site

This stage is divided into three smaller: the collection of basic keys, expansion, filtering.

• Collecting Basic. As mentioned, this is where we gather the basic keys for your topic. If you are a pastry chef, these will be: cake, pie, eclair, bun, cheesecake and more. Don’t forget to analyze frequency.
• Expansion. Supplement each of the keys with a “specifier” and a “tail.” The word “cake” can be a “made to order”, “for men”, “with delivery”, “for your birthday + your city”, and so on.
• Filtering. Remove the words you wouldn’t want to show up in a search. If you do not do diet cakes or, for some reason, do not bake cakes for a wedding – delete these requests.

This is not a complete list of undesirable queries. The following categories can be included:

• Branded queries of your competitors.
• Keys “cheap”, “free”, “discount”. This negatively affects not only your revenue, but also underestimates the average cost of a product or service in the market.
• Duplicates are mandatory to exclude. Otherwise, when writing texts you get a mishmash of ceo – keys. If you bake cakes for birthdays, then use the words “cake to order for your birthday, and exclude requests like: “custom birthday cake” and “custom birthday cake”.
• Geo (but only if you don’t work there). If you only bake cakes in your neighborhood (let’s say Central), then exclude other neighborhoods.
• Typos. You won’t intentionally write the word “croissants” with one “s” in the text on the site to capture some of the hits on that word. 🙂

After that, do the same with all the other basic queries.

Grouping keywords

Once the keys have been collected and filtered, it’s time to gather them into “semantic clusters”. These are groups of keys that are combined by meaning with the main word. For our “confectionary” examples there can be such a group: the word “eclair” additions can be – order, price, and other.

Each cluster may have nesting levels, which depend on the vastness of the goods you sell or the number of services provided.

Within the “Eclairs” cluster can be a level below “photo”, “recipes”, “order”. And on the third level of nesting could be “recipes for eclairs with curd cream” and “recipes for eclairs with custard”.

In the allocation of semantics is very important to paint all possible clusters.

Separate attention should be paid to specific queries in your niche. If you see a steady demand for cakes shaped like minions from the cartoon “Ugly Ya,” it’s silly to exclude them from circulation. But be prepared for this trend to change direction and have to refocus.

Grouping keywords can be difficult for someone who is dealing with this for the first time. Then, we can suggest automating this process with KeyAssort or SemParser. Be prepared to have to wait a few hours.

Analysis of promotion difficulties

After collecting, filtering and distributing, it makes sense to check the “promotion difficulty”. This is due to the fact that these keys may already be used by competitors. Promotion for them to the top may simply be impossible.

To assess the difficulty of keywords use Ahrefs. Just add your list of keywords to the service in the “Keyword Analysis” section.

In the finished result study: KD (Keyword Difficulty) score – the lower, the better for you. Similar topics. Expand the stock of keywords in this group.

Keep in mind that the collection of metrics is paid. Keep track of the number of spent metrics in the service.

How to increase the chances of reaching the top

Is it enough that we did everything we did before to get the site in the top search engine results? Alas, no! It is necessary to apply all the knowledge gained in the future. This is especially important when compiling the title of the page as the most important tag for promotion.

Why the most important? According to the latest 2019 data, the situation with tags is as follows:

The keywords tag has long since fallen into oblivion.
The description tag is not so relevant anymore either. Google used to use this tag for snippets, but now (according to research from the company “Yoast”) prefers the first paragraph in the text. This tag is no longer recommended.

The only tag for promotion remained Title (headline) page. Recommendations for the title is as follows:

• The length is 60 characters. This is up to 10 words maximum.
• Specify in the beginning of the phrase the most high-frequency key in the exact occurrence.
• It should be readable – first of all for people, then for the search engines.
• Use in the title numbers. These are so-called numerological headlines. “I lost weight in 2 days by 15 pounds” – from this series.
• The use of numbers in the headline increases clickability by 35-40%. This is also an example of an “information gap” where intrigue is created and users click on the link animatedly to find out more.
  Surprising fact: Parentheses increase clickability. An Outbrain and Hubspot study found that headlines containing parentheses get 38% more clicks. How you can use parentheses: mention bonuses, add details, create intrigue.
• Use dashes (-) and colons (:). Use them if you want to include a clarification or introductory phrase in the headline.
• Negative headlines. Sometimes people forget about them and write only positive headlines and articles. And negative headlines with “Top Mistakes” or other negativity go over well. Just don’t overdo it.
• Capitalize every word in the headline.

What to do with the collected semantics

The document with the collected search queries will accompany you all the way through the design, content, and use of the site. You can use this document whenever you have the question, “What should I write about?” Fill your headlines with keywords, use keywords in your text (in moderation). Write text that benefits people. Focus on giving usefulness, not putting keyword phrases in the text.

What you can’t do with semantics

There are some things you shouldn’t do with semantics. It greatly affects the result of the work. Note that our recommendation covers the stages of constructing a semantic core and content strategy planning and implementation.

We do not recommend:

• Exclude HF-queries. You do not need to get to the top query “cakes. But having this word in the semantic core – a must.
• Exclude low frequency queries. Some exclude them because of the small number of hits. And this deprives you of the possibility of these “crumbs” to get sales.
• Use formulas and coefficients to evaluate the key. You shouldn’t evaluate words with formulas. Much more important is the practical value that the word can provide in the text.
• Creating pages to “be.” It’s getting to the point where people create pages for “buy” and “order” requests. Two different pages, Carl! The action is supposed to be one thing, and the page should be one.
• Over-optimization. You shouldn’t trust all the work to machines. They are still imperfect, to say the least. You can trust the machine to gather queries, but you will still have to clean and supplement them manually. Only a person who has deeply studied the subject of the business is able to distinguish between productive queries and trash.
• Excessive key gathering. Creating a semantic core at the stage when you are just getting ready to launch your project does not require sophisticated software tools. You are perfectly happy with the tools provided by Yandex and Google. Later, when the need arises to expand you can resort to the programs and help from specialists.

Summary

Today we have told you about the collection of semantics for website promotion. Let’s summarize our article today:

• Collecting semantics is the first and main stage of site promotion in search. You can collect the keys manually using wordstat services and keyword planner from Google.
• Use not only the “body” of the query, but also the “specifier” with the “tails” of the query. This is necessary in order to promote your site for a variety of queries.
• Cut off unnecessary keywords that do not fit your niche.
• Do not exclude queries with high and low frequency. You are losing traffic.
• Collect the resulting queries in clusters. They in turn distribute the pages that have planned in the structure of the site.
• Pay attention to the title of the page. It will analyze the search engine in the first place. Make sure that the most important keyword was closer to the beginning.
  Attention should be paid to the first paragraph of the text. Tell your readers why they should read to the end (in our case, why they should click on your link).
• The most important tip: Write texts for people. Sales through usefulness are the future of commerce. Even now thriving professionals and agencies who run their own blogs – giving people useful information for free. Visitors to the blog have it in their heads