Semantic Search Simplified and Decoded

What does Semantic Search mean?

Semantic search works to understand a searcher’s intent and the contextual meaning of a search rather than simply the keywords. In other words, search engines such as Google finds meaning and relationship between the words to provide you the best results.

Not only does Semantic search system consider the context of search but it also looks at several other factors such as the location, intent, variation of words, synonyms, generalized and specialized queries, concept matching and natural language queries to provide relevant search results.

For example, if one searches for “Kings” then Google will use artificial intelligence to understand the contextual meaning and may show results of either a sports team, business, TV show etc.

The approach to Google’s semantic search is known as the knowledge graph and it is currently only available for U.S. based searches for now.

What does this mean for SEO?

The focus in SEO is shifting away from just keywords and more towards user intent whether it’s in the content of your site or in the keywords. The focus is on people and the meaning behind their words.

Overall, an improvement in the accuracy, usefulness and relevancy of search results is the ultimate goal of semantic search and it will continue to benefit sites that have good quality, unique and relevant content with more qualified traffic.

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Contributed by Bhawna Sharma, Sr. eStrategist