I still have a book from my primary school called “Words & Pictures”. In it are pages of a 5 year olds’ drawings and writing.
By the age of 11 I’d won both a writing and an art competition for the school and got ourselves a mention in the Essex Chronicle.
At 15 I’d completed my English Language exam a year early and by 17… I’d dropped all language, literature, and artistic studies to be a mathematical, geography-minded, computer nerd.
I liked geography. I was crap at maths. And I loved computers.
Roll On 2025…
After 25 years in the world of digital, I’m now an established digital marketing manager and writer. I don’t do design as I neither have the time nor the software, and besides, AI can do an OK job filling in the gaps for me.
But yes, I’m back into writing and have been for the whole of those 25 years.
And the virtue has come full circle, because the writing skills of a lifetime serve you well when it comes to an age of artificial intelligence and search engine optimisation (SEO).
Semantic SEO. Again
So what is this notion of semantic SEO?
Well, let’s roll back 25 years… I remember being at a business where the “professional SEO company” was hired to do this new-fangled voodoo of SEO.
What they did was provide a list of keywords to stuff in the title and meta descriptions of a large informational website. I questioned their work, but they were “the experts” so I was overruled.
However, eventually, through failure, my employer realised that they’d bet on the wrong horse.I was invited to do my version of SEO and… we started to get better results. Keyword stuffing was rubbish, and my approach to treating every page as individual, having unique titles, and relevant, enticing meta descriptions won the traffic.
I wish I’d screen-grabbed the data from those days, I’d love to look back and boast about my successes from back then, especially after being overlooked as less professional and yet being better than them. Vindicated.
SEO and content, back in the early 2000s and the dot com boom, was a real wild west, a time of snake oil salesmen. I could see that and I railed against it.
What I did was avoid the keyword stuffing and go for the more human-like approach…
Thesaurus-Like Mind
Working on the is4profit.com small business advice website, I was deeply involved in the SME sector.
There alone you get a starter for 5 – small business, SME.
See what I’m getting at? These are the first synonyms for the concept of small business, with the acronym SME standing for Small and Medium-sized Enterprise.
In the USA they say SMB or Small to Medium-sized Business.
There’s also small firm, and small company.
Plus medium-sized firms and medium-sized companies.
Oh – firm and company (singular) and firms and companies (plural) – stemming can deal with that.
And what about organisations? You might not be a business/firm or a company but you can be an organisation, right? Small or medium? Or large?And talking of large, what about those corporations?
From the seed of small business and SME we’ve expanded our potential vocabulary to cover numerous other potential options.
Repetition is Boring
As a writer, use of the same term over and over again is boring. If I were to simply say SME over and over again you’d think me a dullard. And so would I – Being a professional writer I’d be unimpressed with myself too.
So what I do is use that rich internal thesaurus, that wealth of words that I’ve accumulated over my career and lifetime.
Did you know that there’s a notion that the vocabulary of the average person is lesser to that of university students, and then Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon.
The 16th century poet and playwright certainly had a rich and creative vocabulary, but there’s been a lot of pushback to the contrary.
The point here though, is that access to a varied wordset is superior to a limited pool, and if you think about it, that’s so useful for modern day SEO. Because 21st century SEO is not about keyword stuffing, and it hasn;t been for a long time.
So those rich wordpools of synonyms are perfect for tapping into and have been for quite some time. It’s just that this bedrock of best practice is now becoming hugely more popular as SEO practitioners seek for the silver bullet to their organic optimisation efforts.
Why Semantic SEO Now?
Yes, I know, the term “semantic SEO” has been around for a while now. It seems that a few years ago it was more of an ideal, an aspiration.
Today, however, with the prevalence of Artificial Intelligence in (almost) every aspect of our lives, semantic SEO is now a necessity not a “nice to have”.
Take, for instance, the idea of generative search results. These seem to be created on the fly as these large language models (LLMs) are accessible to the search engines themselves. Google has been developing these models for years, with BERT and MUM, and the PaLM models for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Once, a search engine looked up where it should place links in a list of 1-10, 21-30 and so on. Now it provides answers to questions.
In order to have your content ready for AI Overviews, as Google calls them, your content needs to have been more than a bit of “thin content”. The general consensus in the SEO world is that long-form content is pulled in to these AI results, and the keyword rich content is king.
Now THAT is where your verbose writers come in, they can type for England!
Natural-born writers are perfect for semantic SEO because they provide that richness of vocabulary and aren’t afraid to say so… literally.
Where I once kept hearing “That’s too long, nobody’s going to read that” and yet, those pages ranked so highly in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), it looks like we’re still winning.
Yes, I understand and totally appreciate that some long-form content can be a bit much, Sometimes I look for a TL;DR or an executive summary. Hell, I’ll even run a URL through AI to get a potted view of what a page is all about.
But if LLMs are scraping the long-form content because it’s so comprehensive, then that’s where we’re worth our salt.
Get Writers on Your SEO
There are SEOs and there are SEOs.
If you want your website project to flourish in all forms of search, then you need a highly experienced SEO, say with 25 years of experience and expertise, AND an SEO with the same or more talent in natural writing. Who can that be?
If you’d like to talk to me about SEO consultancy, doing well in organic search and being found, or not, in generative AI results, then call me on 01252 692 765 or fill in the contact form.