LSI-SEO-Content: Occupy TOP position and increase conversion

LSI-content combines two things that SEO-experts often find contradicting: content for people and SEO content. In other words, LSI-content is useful both for people and search engines. And although it was being discussed 10 years ago, not everyone benefits still from the advantages of LSI-content. In this article we will discuss the following questions:

• What is LSI and how is this perceived by search engines;
• How to choose LSI keywords;
• The basic rules of writing LSI-articles;
• Effectiveness of LSI-content; assessing the results from an experiment.

LSI-articles and Google ranking algorithms

It is a known fact that Google began to understand not only the content but also the context of pages, thanks to Panda and Hummingbird algorithms. Thematic content becomes extremely important. How are search engines able to determine the context of a page? Using LSI (latent semantic indexing).

Imagine that a user enters “Cars” as the search word; Google tries to show the user the most appropriate result option. LSI-words help in the sense that if the page contains words such as “repair”, “new”, “used”, “dealer” and so on, it becomes clear that this is not about the rock band named ‘Cars’, and not about the Canadian Aviation Regulations.

The essence of LSI is to find logical relationships between words, concepts and terminologies. Although Google’s purchase of the Applied Semantics company was claimed to be associated primarily with Google Adwords, tracking changes in rankings and measures to combat spam brings us to the conclusion that it is not only about AdWords.

The more themed a text is, the higher it will be ranked for other equal conditions. Let’s take 2 texts, for example, one of them is about houseplants, and we have keywords such as “flower pots”, the second is about psychology, and it uses the same query. Which one would be more useful for a user who is looking for a page using the keyword “flower pots”? The answer is obvious both for the users and for Google search engine as well.

Thus, making a text themed, i.e. saturating it with LSI words improves page ranking. But it’s not only that. All thanks to LSI, we now witness the emergence of web content with competent structure and resolving all the required issues under the theme of the article. Articles become more useful to the user, which allows the combination of user-friendly content with SEO content and improve behavioral factors.
Interesting? Let’s look at how to collect LSI keywords.

How to choose LSI keywords: tips and tools

1. Ultimate Keyword Hunter (http://ultimatekeywordhunter.com/) free downloadable tool that allows you to collect LSI-keys. Works on the principle of issuing a Google site analysis for the entered query. Sites contents are analyzed and the most important terms and words are selected.
Pros:

• • The possibility of flexible settings: selecting the number of analyzed sites, on how many words should result be displayed, setting of stop words and sites to analyze, specifying target theme keywords, and word count in phrases;

• Free to use;
• The possibility to upload received data in multiple formats;
• The development of several more functions, and hence, the tool will improve soon.

Cons:

• Does not give LSI-keywords statistics.
• There is no possibility to group and filter keywords.
• Synonyms, similar results and Google tips are not considered.

2. Keyword Eye () – multi-functional tool, with LSI-keywords collection as one of its features.
Pros:

• Detailed statistics on the LSI-words, in analogy with those tools to work with conventional keywords;
• The possibility of filtering by countries;
• The possibility of further grouping and filtering LSI-keys.

Cons:

• You come across “trash” among the keywords, which still requires manual cleaning.
• The free version is available only for 3 days.
• Does not cover all the logical relations possible.

Let’s see what steps will help us gather quality LSI keywords for every article according to our content strategy.
Step 1: Google Tips. When you enter a keyword in the search box, you get Google hints. Those ones that make sense and are related to the subject of your article should be used as the LSI-keywords.


Step 2: Google Related Searches. To begin, type a keyword into the search bar, then scroll down the page and see the Google searches related to your query. Choose the ones that make sense from these words and sprinkle them on your page.

Step 3: Synonyms and cognates. Synonyms and cognates are best collected using dictionaries. They also will need to be manually cleaned in order to choose the ones that best fit the context and then include them in content creation.

Step 4. Analyzing competitors’ quality articles. Here you should select between 15 to 50 articles from the competitors at the top of search engines result pages or other articles that are popular among readers and are of good quality in your opinion. All of these texts should be checked using any tool for assessing keywords density. With this test you can select the frequently used words that are not keywords in this case.
Thus, you get a complete list of LSI-keywords. The first two steps can be accomplished with the help of most tools for keywords collection. The third and fourth will have to be done in a semi-manual mode.
Now let’s consider the application of all these to website copywriting.

The basic rules for writing LSI-articles: from task preparation to the finished article

Hence, the keywords have been gathered. But how do we present this huge list to the copywriting services provider in order to get the desired content creation result?
First of all, we evaluate the resulting set of words from a logical point of view and reasonably divide them into groups. So we will get the structure of a future article, where each group of words answers a few questions under the topic of the article.
Then you must create a list of requirements to the article. Let’s take a look at the points that it is worth considering:

1. Article usefulness. LSI content is specifically useful to the user. Therefore, fluff is unacceptable in the article. It should be as precise as possible. The same idea should not be repeated in different words (except where it is a call to action, and it is repeated to encourage the reader to make a desired action).

2. The article must be clear and precise. Long sentences and vocabulary should necessarily be selected depending on the target audience of the article. The longer and more complex sentences and words are, the higher the estimated IQ level of our target audience. And vice versa. In general, texts should be as simple and understandable as possible, except stated otherwise in the requirements, i.e. more complex for specific professionals or scientific.

3. Stop words. In web content, there are these inappropriate terms, taboos, phrases, and vocabulary turnovers in several theme categories. So you should definitely alert the copywriting services provider about such phrases.

4. Text structure. In addition to the points that are worth highlighting in the article are the readability, the importance and visual presentation of the material. Therefore, the content strategy needs to include the distribution of each of the article headings to cover a particular issue within the theme. It is advisable to use lists because they facilitate the visual perception of the text.

5. Rhythm of the text. In order for the text not to be monotonous and become boring for the reader, you should adopt interesting and relatable live cases. When we speak freely, we unconsciously alternate longer sentences with shorter ones. And we do this randomly. Semantic accents in this case are placed in a free manner. All these create a certain uneven rhythm that captivates the reader, encouraging him to read on and on.

6. The keywords and the LSI-words distribution and number of occurrences. It is necessary to give a clear guidance to writers about the use of passages and distribution of keywords in the text as a whole and in relation to each other. This is important both for user readability and SEO copywriting.

7. The relevance, accuracy and originality of information. It is desirable for the author to be an expert in the subject, in which he writes. But even the presence of LSI-keywords and experience of the author cannot guarantee the absence of contextual errors. Therefore, it is desirable to provide the author with materials or resources that will help him choose and correctly present the necessary information to users.

8. Grammar, syntax, and sentence structure. LSI-content are literate articles written according to the laws and rules of the language. Therefore, errors are not permitted in them.

Once the task has been made and the author has written the article, the next important stage begins – proofreading. The editor evaluates the text according to the criteria specified in the task. At the same time pays severe attention to the logic, structure and SEO keywords usage if it was stipulated in the article requirement. All LSI-keywords should be used logically and appropriately. Headers should essentially correspond to the paragraph that goes with them. Thus, this does not only correlate with the context, but at the lexical level as well.

One of the important problems that can occur when proofreading is the inappropriate use of synonyms and words that for some reason were not indicated in the stop words. The proofreader must correct them, thereby making the text more themed.
At last the content is ready. We really spent a lot of effort to create such an article. And here comes a reasonable question: is it worth it to spend so much time and effort? How effective is the LSI-content?

The effectiveness of LSI-content – assessing the results from experiment

So, for the purity of the experiment site A and site B were taken from the same subject category. Both are new domains, without history. The semantic core and structure of both sites are the same.
The site A had normal content with quality below average, but proper SEO optimization. On site B was LSI-content. Both sites were then equally promoted and the experiment showed that:

• Site B quickly got indexed compared to site A.
• After 2 weeks the traffic coming to site B averaged 8,000 unique visitors per day, while the Site A got 400.
• The number of pageviews of site A was lower than that of site B, and the failure count was higher.

You can freely carry out your own experiment and share your experiences in the comments to this article. Or you can ask questions, we will be happy to discuss!