We had a nice discussion today with my team about how to improve our on-page content on our commercial pages to increase relevancy and hopefully improve our rankings. As we shared ideas, the topic of using secondary keywords came up. I reminded my team of the concept of “Latent Semantic Indexing” but to be perfectly honest, I had to Google it again myself for a refresher. This article is a great summary of the concept and how to optimize for it: https://www.highervisibility.com/resource/guide/a-look-at-lsi/
In the discussion with the team, we agreed that, like many concepts in SEO, there’s not really a perfect recipe for success. We also want to avoid being super rigid with our content and forcing various tactics. “Content must use the primary keyword in the first 100 words, and at least 2 more times throughout the text. Content must use 4 variations of the primary keyword and 3 secondary keywords. Content must have 3 H2s and 3 H3s. Content must have 4 internal links using secondary keywords for anchor text.” Blah blah blah. I just made all that up. I used to have standard copy decks exactly like that back in 2012 at the agency I worked for where we had those prescriptive requirements for our content writers. I think Google’s algorithm has advanced past the point of this manipulation actually working and I think we as SEOs shouldn’t focus so much on what we assume are “factors” but really just force us or our writers to focus way too much on optimizing for the search engine and forgetting to create really great content.
The connudrum for me is that I manage a team of 16 SEOs working on 14 brands in 15 markets. We benefit from having guides and standard processes. So the task is to find a middle ground between focusing on creating useful content but also optimizing it for search engines. I can’t say that we have the solution. Perhaps I can provide an update later if we ultimately create such a “middle ground” guide. Don’t hold your breath.
The last thing is checking if any of our competitors are doing on-page content really well and if we can learn from them. Also, when perusing competitor sites for ideas, using as much data as possible to determine any competitors who are out-ranking us most likely because they have a better design, format and quality of on-page content. If we can find enough examples of this, perhaps we can determine a good guide or formula for word count, format, LSI keyword usage, and design that we can attempt to standardize for our sites…without losing site of creating high quality, useful content.
In the article, they link to a free tool that helps to generate LSI keywords: https://lsigraph.com/