Introduction to Semantic SEO: How It Works and How to Get Started

welcome to another episode of 10x marketer podcast today we have Hamid with us he has done some great work in semantic SEO and we would be discussing some important and practical SE strategies around building the topical map improving the semantics of your website and also improve your search engine ranking if you're coming here for the first time make sure you subscribe and follow us on YouTube apple or Spotify wherever you're listening from we are available on all three podcast channels so welcome Hamid so thanks for inviting me okay so my name is Muhammad Hamed Khan

and uh I'm from lore Pakistan a city famous for his qual music and uh I started as coo back in 2015 and I've worked with many companies as a full-time employee and help achieving their growth numbers and uh worked with many big Brands like hire like big SAS companies like milil Munch and some multi-million dollar Ecom brand as well but after uh you can say like 2019 I've like uh started learning about semantics and how search engine works and my that kind of interest and passion turned into my uh you can say I'm now you

can say working in semantic SEO so uh I I'm like inspired by Bill slas then K and uh I've like U the framework introduced by cor mainly I've worked on that and right now I'm working with some high ticket clients and helping them uh achieving their uh growth numbers and building their topical Authority and uh by providing services like topical Maps semantic briefs and content writing services so this is uh what I do and uh yeah so far so Hamed you're quite known for the semantic SEO work that you have been doing uh why don't

you uh quickly Define for my audience what is semantic SEO and how does it work all right so first of all uh I would like to thank all of the people who've been like following me on uh my socials and giving me the like kind of affection so I'm very uh happy to have such community like that and uh okay so for a newb uh semantic SE is you can say approach or you can say some uh smart way to achieve higher rankings by understanding the main challenges of a search engine and helping or understanding

the SEO from more search engine perspective and aligning all the activities around that specific uh uh search engine challenges and problems so basically uh let me interpret it further when it comes to uh SEO or website management what we have to do we publish a specific type of content Network around a specific type of query Network targeting query Network in order to achieve the topical Authority State and topical Authority state Works differently for different knowledge domains like for example there's knowledge domain like uh Health like some supplements knowledge domains some more like food so we

beat the competition right and we publish more semantically optimized content Network and more you can say relevant with relevant and accurate information or in simple words high quality information content Network so machine can understand our content in a more faster and cheaper way and serve the content to its user to satisfy the need simply need is basically the query so this is what we do in semantic this is a basically a process or approach of publishing a very high quality semantic content Network okay so my next question is how is different from the traditional Su

approach that we have been using so far okay so it's a quite uh I think relevant thing I mean most of the people are like still uh I mean they're saying that the semantics working on the same approach that been introduced uh even like the before the years for example and uh it's like working on the same methodology by just changing the names of the terminologies or the process names so I think I should clear here right now semantics is basically uh more is more tend or you can say towards understanding the behavior of the

users from search engines point of view this all study we say in semantics is query semantics to understand how your users behave or search specific terms or around specific outcomes on Google and we and we pivot that specific outcome and then connect all the context verbs or behaviors or attributes or queries around that specific topic or outcome and then we map everything together but in traditional SEO traditional SEO like I've been also doing traditional SEO before and uh what traditional SEO one main thing that separates traditional SEO is traditional SEO mainly focus on the quantity

I mean like the the experts tend to claim that if you publish like more articles if you create more backlinks if you if your article length is more in terms of words or if you put more links or if if you put more key wordss more headings then you will be ranking better but this is not the case in semantics in simple words a search engine you have to be more qualitative than your competitors not in terms of the numbers but in terms of the quality and search engines prefer or search engine calculates the cost

First in order to rank a specific type of query Network or specific type of knowledge domain so you have to prioritize what matters for such instead of what matters for you basically so this is the main difference and in one short example I will I would like to give you for example if you're like publishing a page you are in normally like in traditional what people do they simply uh copy what already been uh the top competitors are doing in terms of they export their keywords their headings and they just within that Circle within that

bubble they do everything around that specific competitors but in semantics what we do we reinvent the wheel we follow everything the knowledge coming from Google patents we basically if if we have like understood what how SE engines operate like The Crawling not just from crawling indexing how they have stored the knowledges how they're representing the information then from that perspective we figure out what matters for such Eng and competitors looking at the competitors for Authority hacking that's just a part of semantic SEO okay so I think that answers this question now let's say if someone

wants to build a topical Authority for their website what is the first thing they have to do what is the starting point can you explain the process maybe in a step by-step guide kind of situation all right so topical Authority building topical authorities basically starts with understanding the current situation of the website for example uh let's say a website is 10 years old right and a website is starting from scratch at in both cases what we normally try to do to find a specific entity that is that we will be using or will be creating

a Content Network in the future for example if a website that is like 10 year old and has like published around around 2,000 Pages what we try to figure out from the existing data the historical data Maybe from the search console in simple words we try we try to check that okay what the main queries or the main attributes or the main entities Google is ranking this website against so for an old website we try to uh get our hands dirty and figure out what will be like the future uh entity around which the topical

map will be built so first step is always creating a topical map so topical map is basically a list of Concepts or contexts you can say not just list of keywords with their volume like in traditional SEO is a list of Concepts or context that are centered around a central entity and prioritized by different types of attributes and it has in simple words a course section and outer section and uh more uh components uh it has like a topical map has like a central entity uh around which the topical M will be uh will be

built and a source context then Central search intent and then the core section and outer section this is normally a topical map con consist of so the topical map is the first step when uh going for achieving the topical Authority State and after the topical map is built we prioritize okay this chunk of topic like 50 if you have like 500 pages you're going to publish you prioritize okay these 20 or 30 needs to be published first because they are targeting a specific type of query template or attribute or specific type of behavior or context

for example and you publish your topical maps in chunk and for for publishing definitely for each page you create semantics briefs that's another chapter in semantic a long practical thing and by by the way I've been publishing uh some videos uh recording some videos on this as well and then after creating the briefs uh we normally write content based on semantics so that's another a very long uh C basically you can say in terms of information yeah so this is a short road map for achieving the topic ofor set and once All Things Are are

like published like the first 20 30 pages are published on the website you wait for a certain type of uh uh you can say some time to help Google come your site in the first call and understand and then put your web in some time of in some type of testing phase and then give you assign you the topical Authority State around a certain type of query Network for a certain amount of time after uh beating a certain type of for example website all right so my next question is around uh the topical Authority uh

or the topical map itself like uh when you say there's a traditional keyword research and then there is topical research how both the things are different from each other and when you are building or when you're searching for a uh topical map how do you really research on the competitors mhm because you're suggesting the traditional way of researching like the keyword and volume is not so important for semantic SE right I think there's some type of uh certainty or importance for volume in uh semantics like the search demand we normally say because we have to

prioritize search demand definitely but making our decisions all around that specific type of metric which is volume is not always give you the whole p picture or whole outcome that you want to achieve yeah so getting back to your question uh how to uh build a topical map and how it differs from different uh for example uh how it differs from traditional keyword research and how to incorporate compet research in building a topical map so as I mentioned first I explain like for people like what traditional keyword search normally means it's simply about uh searching

your main seed phrase On Tools like HF and exporting all the data which tool has not what is like actually being searched tool not has like all uh uh all all kind of data that user res searching tool has some specific type of data okay so it's like just uh using some certain third party tools and uh relying on those tools in terms of the phrases that maybe your comp is targeting or maybe that tools database has and you just export those things and you just maybe prioritize okay this based on this volume you have

to publish this and then this then this without any uh symmetry uh symmetric approach without any synchronous without any for example holistic approach you just go left and right and without any for example thematic approach for machines but in what we do normally is uh one one more time I would say you pick a central entity and then around that Central entity you capture all the behaviors of the users of your target users around your city so before Target users basically you figure out your Tam Target uh address market and then you figure out your

buyer personas your icps and from those after uh deep diving into your customer research search definitely then you figure out what this customers might be searching on Google in terms of the for example uh attributes in terms of the context or verbs for example right let me give you example I think to make my things more uh aligned with with the users uh mind so basically I would like to give an example here uh for example if you are like uh if your Source context is about renting chairs you're like just renting chairs for specific

type of events right and uh which means that your users renting here is the verb or the behavior around that specific outcome which is chair so chair is an outcome or entity there might be different behaviors like selling buying renting inquiring comparing purchasing or simply exploring learning everything might be Associated all these behaviors might be associated with the chair so you have to figure out what your ideal customer what behaviors or what verbs he might be searching on Google then you connect your research with those verbs or behaviors okay so you figure out okay these

five that's basically a normal thing in as Central search intent what as cental search intent normally do normally does so you figure out all those behaviors then you connect the competitor research and connect with those behaviors not just you follow what everything your competitors are doing okay and then you figure out from uh query semantics perspective from search engines perspective okay these behaviors activities users might be performing then from language perspective like lexical relations you figure out that as well and uh in simple words this is I mean a normally topical map takes like 15

to 20 days sometimes more so it's a very long and lengthy process so this is how we uh create a topical map and then we filter it further based on attribute prominence relevance and popular and lot more criterias uh based on the business overall objective okay so once you have the topical map what is the next step for you so topical map is ready maybe for a client I've been working for like I've created topical map next I'll ask the client okay what is your main priority section of the topical map may maybe you want

to go with specific for example uh I normally give this type of example that uh if uh if client is selling for example car paint right car paint this is the source context selling car paint and uh definitely he will figure out the most closest entity related to his Source context so car would be maybe you can say the more uh most closest entity okay so he's has built he's chosen car as an Central entity then there might be some different attributes for car like car uh tires car engine car lights and car maintenance car

history car brands etc etc for example and car pains obviously so if I buil topical map for example and covering all these attributes and and uh maybe based on the client's suggestion we'll prioritize first the car paint attribute because that's more related to the business model or Source context of what client is offering so we'll first all we decide which specific type of section or attribute we need to go first then the next step is to create brief documents and when it comes to brief document we try to decide in order to saving cost and

time and obviously helping Google more understanding the information what the semantic content network is about we go for query templates and the good thing about query templates is we can create a specific type of brief template document template like for example if uh a a document might be like uh best car paint uh for X brand right or you can say there's uh AI is the model right and there's uh ODI is the brand for example and they're like different models in AUD right so what we can do is we create a specific document brief

document around all those models that are coming in AI brand like best car pain for X AUD model best carpent for y AI model best carpent for Z Audi Model this is how we can save our time and create a document template and uh first of all this is how we what we decide and then we create unique brief templates as well like the root document that obviously needs to go like for example uh car paint or anything that your root is so then we create like briefs and after creating briefs we definitely go with

content creation okay so uh what is the content creation process in semantic SE and how is it different from the traditional one do you first analyze uh the content that is already there on the website and start by improving it or just start creating the new content straight away I first uh as I mentioned uh what normally I do instead of like saying client okay we need to build this we need to build this we need to build XYZ I apart from everything on top everything first of all I audit the existing site I figure

out what needs to be done done in order to get the recovery state of the for example if a site is old most of the cases clients come to me okay they say website has a lot of like traffic in the past maybe one year back and now the traffic is down due to some maybe algorithmic update or something like that so I figure out what is the best solution for the website so in terms of if a website as pag is published we try to figure out with content configuration and we like update the

existing content and we align the new topical map that that will be building on new semantic onet network uh with the existing pages that are already published we try to connect those because without Bridging the information without Bridging the context with each other without the proper flow Google won't be able to understand your site in a better way so we try to bridge information and then uh basically uh I figure out for example in terms of the content audit as well the technical s audit as well in content audit we figure out okay which Pages

needs to be deleted and that's another chapter how we decide which Pages needs to be uh updated or refreshed in terms of the information or media and everything and which P Pages needs to be merged or Consolidated together and have been like uh added through rrex 301 and which pages that needs to be leave as it is for example so these four things I figure out and then based on those things the pages that needs update we do content configuration for those pages like simply without uh deleting the existing page rank or the Authority or

the topical relevance or the contextual coverage or the context Vector that been uh targeted on that specific page we try to in uh keep that thing intact and we try to uh improve the existing document in terms of all the behaviors activities that we have been searching before okay and uh one thing is content configuration and then one thing is publishing new document douments that are like introduced in our topical map so in terms of content writing getting back to your question uh like content creation is now we figure out okay objective first of all

what's the main objective of the page then we figure out what is the macro context of that document and what are the micro context for example of that specific document and then we create uh and definitely the briefs template which is uh ready which is now ready from the Su side the writers are uh being trained properly on semantics and on those briefs how to cover that brief uh how to write based on that briefs so in simple words uh let me give you couple of ingredients that we focus on in atic content number one

is uh from a machine perspective we try to do everything responsive the information needs to be responsive for machine and information is sponsor is a concept basically uh it's coming from Google patents for example information retrieval information extraction basically is an you can say an important uh concept coming from information retrieval and information uh extraction is uh like extracting information around around a specific subject U within a carpus so basically information responsiveness uh is basically we make our information responsive for machines and there are like multiple factors that come into information responsive uh n for

example the accuracy of your information the completeness of your information the uniqueness of your information and for example the reputation of your information and for example the accessibility of your information and uh and for example you make your information responsive uh around a specific subject for machines to read your document and within spending less cost understand more context or meanings or extract more information from your from your document and then uh instead of like for example reading the whole document you you should be able to help machine to understand your document in a very faster

and cheaper way as compared to your competitors or your C documents that are ranking for example you're trying to beat so information respons is the one key component and one other thing we basically focus on semantic triples in our content like entity attribute value okay this is the entity and this is its attribute and this is the value and uh we it's all about helping machine to understand like a child five year old child for example okay this entity and this attribute has this value we create all the pairs of that things and then we

do question answer pairing like a passage indexing uh Google Patent uh uh concept coming from U passage ranking uh coming from Google Patent and uh the passage is indexing that's being U normally what Google is doing you search a question it pair a specific answer and rank on the feature snipper on top of everything on zero search result for example so what we try to do in our content we uh optimize we create question ANS paars first of all we extract for example we get the seed query we turn those seed queries into questions format

and those question format we create answer pair for those question format and then we try to rank those on machines so again this is going very technical and deep and by the way I've created a complete road map or system like uh to train a new person from language point of view on all these methodologies in order to write a better content based on semantic perspective so I think this is the whole overview of everything okay so uh the other question is uh most centic SEO is slightly technical as compared to the traditional form of

SEO or content creation yeah and for any industry the content is created by a subject matter expert which most of the time is not the technical SEO or semantic SEO expert so how do you create a Content brief that explains everything in the simplest possible form for any person who is writing the content for you I think uh before working on a project I've like by the way creat an Sops like first of all we get the smes uh interviews as well sometimes the already customer research that been done by the brand we figure out

almost the first two three days we uh understand or uh simply learn about this specific topic I mean again some topics like uh for example medicine topics some for example topics like that has something to do with like your money your life topics for example I mean uh first of all my priority is to find smmes subject matter experts and train them uh based on the Spanx framework and the good thing most of the time normally what clients they already have a team something like that they understand the business from it score or the knowledge

domain they've been working on I mean the I just train those people who already has a business knowledge had good understanding of the uh or the specifications of the business or the industry I just train them and they would be able to write that kind of content right so 50% of the job is done in terms of the information now the semantics of the optimization they learn and they simply able to write content but for a new be that's the real challenge comes in they know the SMC they know the rules but they don't have

that kind of idea so for that we have uh what we do we try to um find some research papers find some courses maybe from LinkedIn learning and find some more authoritative websites that are publishing good content or some authoritative factual information around that specific industry we try to read those information first of all again the mainly the writers who going to write the content and then after a week of training then and definitely they have already the training of semantics and the Frameworks approach they just get trained on uh the business model or the

simply the industry they've been going to write content for and then it's a win-win situation so again it's still challenge we try to review the content uh back and forth from the client sometimes as well to understand if it's aligned in terms of the business information because semantics it's obviously L and client don't know uh very much about is it for semantic so this is uh I think a go-to approach in terms of aligning the U semantics work with the facts or with the uh with the client's objective for example so Hamid my next question

is related to the semantic seos is uh what mistakes do you see people usually make when they create a topical map and how they can avoid that yeah related to mistakes uh first of all I was I was also struggling with those things number one is to to prioritize what matters for a website uh based on the current situation or the objectives of the client in terms of like for example creating topical Mage is obviously the first component of like semantic content Network so they they try to like uh the this struggle most of the

time most of the semantics people who are like just learning or implementing SEO they try they struggle based on the objective what really they have to research or publish in terms of content and what not so that comes in prioritization before prioritization researching information I think uh researching information is another thing by the way uh the main problem here is they have all kind of for example knowledge bases in terms of the information on their for example simply in Google sheet like 30,000 40,000 contexts or concepts are there around specific entity because entity could be

bigger there would be more context if if entity could be smaller there would be less context the next thing is which specific context they need to associate on the website and publish first and which not and then uh the prioritization one more time so this is the main uh mistakes or you can say the challenge I've been observing and um and now the solution is simply you first decide uh your objective whether you want to if you are like for example a new site or if you're like on the other hand one site is basically

selling a specific type of service right or product so you align the topics with your objective if you just want more traffic or historical data or and you have a new site definitely you can go with everything but then you prioritize the most prominent attributes first I mean that defines the important definitions of an entity other than on the other hand if your Source context is about selling a specific if you have a proper Source context like you're selling something or offering some consistency anything think you prioritize from business perspective okay this topic needs to

be published first or this documents needs to be published first so this is the solution basically and uh on specific example we can maybe see if and an else statement something like that and the other mistake which is very I guess important here to address is people focus on macro semantics too much and let me put a condition here for example if a subject is very has not lot of contact like around thousand contacts are there only for example almost all of the competitors have covered the things that been uh present currently in that specific

type of subject you cannot maybe differentiate a lot in terms of macr semantics your topics will be almost 80 or 70% will be overlapping with your competitors topical coverage in that case what mostly people Miss is the micros spenic the micros mainly actually helps you to rank your content Network by playing with each and every bite pixel each and every word you configure everything together and that overall contributes to the overall success of a semantic content Network or the outcome you want to achieve so micro semantics is the real game changer that mostly people are

missing so these two things I think are uh the main challenges of the problem or mistakes people maying making currently okay so my next question is let's say somebody is just starting with the semantic SEO they have no prior knowledge or they may have worked to some extent in the traditional SE approach what should be what would be your advice where should they start from what should be their next steps can you outline a journey for them MH yeah if I consider myself I'm just starting and uh based on my experience definitely I will try

to uh map a picture uh for for a newb actually there's there are multiple disciplines that connect that if you connect everything those discipline together then you can be a semantic Su expert I mean uh and the main thing come here is understanding the search engines number one thing so you have to at any cost first of all you have to understand how search engines work or how search works for that you can deep dive into Google even own guidelines Google search Central for example understanding how what Google's documentation is saying obviously I'm not saying

you should uh you should only read that that's a good starting point understanding the Google own documentation and some important Google patents like uh not patents some guidelines as well some documents like Google quality data guidelines some more like on information tral some more like query parsing for example you understand these kind of things and after that you can maybe start with some uh Linguistics and like language how language work because language plays a very important or pivoted role in semantics so language or Linguistics is one of the most important component and in language or

in linguistics we have like NLP we have like computational linguist we have we have to like then understand those uh how those nlps and languages working together how simply uh machine extract meaning from a text written by a human this is the like real challenge which for for a machine so basically if you figure out what is for example what are the main challenges for a machine to uh in in in understanding those text then you can maybe make your strategy better and then there are more things like llm large language models you to understand

those once you got the basics then you go to some semantic SEO proper Channel like maybe it's like holistic s. digital the course uh I would highly recommend the course launched by Kore first you read his case studies watch his YouTube videos and understand what are the basics then you go for the paid course as well and uh these learning sour and experts the industry leaders were also helping the community in uh grabbing the con grabbing or grasping the information around spenting you can follow those as well so this is a good road map for

anyone who's just starting all right awesome thank you so much Hamid for joining us and sharing such a valuable knowledge with our audience uh we would look forward to have you again in future if possible thanks once again thank you for joining and [Music]