Here at “The Business Detective” HQ we have been investigating “LSI” to establish whether Google or other search engines use it as part of their algorithm when crawling or indexing a website.
LSI is Latent Semantic Indexing. It is the indexing on a website of conceptually related keywords to those that you wish to rank for, or a customer may use to search.
Some examples:-
- You want to rank for ‘Photo booth hire in Essex’, LSI keywords would therefore be photography, album, guest book, camera.
- A customer wants to find a ‘low interest credit card’, LSI keywords would be ‘credit score’, ‘bank’ ‘money’
Google says on there website that they use aggregated and anonymised interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries.
They go onto say that algorithms assess if a page contains other relevant content beyond the main key words. (clear as mud hey? but we all know Google are notoriously secretive about their algorithm and what is does and does not do)
Some of the Top ranking SEO service providers SEM Rush, Pro Rank Tracker all provide information in relation to this subject. SEM rush provides a view that LSI is old technology which is NOT used by Google and was created for finding results in smaller document sets, not across the whole web.
What is clear from Open source research, is that any small business writing content for a WordPress website should include semantic keywords.
Below are our 5 Top Takeaways from our LSI investigation, each takeaway may seem obvious, but so often it is the simple things that are missed when you are writing content…
