NLP in SEO – What It Is, and How It Can Boost Your Page Ranking

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Introduction to NLP in SEO

As we move further into 2024, search engines (Google, Bing, etc) continue catching up with the AI revolution, and SEO (search engine optimization) continues to evolve with them to catch up.

One of the most significant changes to SEO is the integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is a branch of AI (artificial intelligence) that enables computers to understand, interpret, and respond to human language in a way that is both meaningful and useful.

In the context of SEO, NLP plays a crucial role in helping search engines better understand user intent and context, leading to more accurate and relevant search results. Understanding NLP is essential for businesses and content creators who want to optimize their content effectively, ensuring it ranks higher in search engine results and meets the needs of their audience.

By leveraging NLP, you can enhance your SEO strategy, making it more adaptive to the sophisticated algorithms used by modern search engines like Google.

In this blog post we’ll start by talking about NLP in general and then jump into understanding why it is so important for your SEO efforts.

But, first thing first, let’s get a bit technical…

How Natural Language Processing (NLP) works?

NLP works by breaking down human language into smaller, more manageable components. These components include syntax (the arrangement of words and phrases), semantics (the meaning of words and sentences), and context (the situational factors that influence meaning). By analyzing these components, NLP algorithms can derive meaning and intent from human language, enabling more effective communication between humans and machines.

What are NLP Entities

In NLP, an entity refers to a specific and well-defined concept or object that has a distinct meaning. Entities can be names of people, organizations, locations, dates, and other concrete or abstract things that are identifiable within a given context. For example, "Google," "New York," "Barack Obama," and "January 1, 2024," are all entities.

How search engines use NLP entities

Entities help NLP algorithms better understand and interpret text. By recognizing and categorizing entities, NLP algorithms can better understand the context and relevance of the information, leading to more accurate and meaningful responses.

Identifying these entities within content helps search engines like Google build knowledge graphs and improve the relevance and precision of search results, ultimately providing users with more valuable and pertinent information.

For instance, when a user searches for 'cold head remedies,' Google's NLP capabilities recognize that the user is seeking treatments for cold symptoms rather than interpreting 'cold' and 'head' in isolation. Google then employs various NLP methods such as neural matching and BERT (It’s a thing, more on that later…) to understand the user intent more accurately.

Additionally, Google uses entities to improve its understanding of content and user queries. This focus on entities helps Google in creating a more precise search experience, ensuring that the content presented to users meets their informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial needs.

It means that search engines are advancing beyond keywords! Don’t freak out tho, keywords are still very important.

What is BERT and how does it relate to NLP and SEO?

BERT, which stands for the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (catchy ins’t it?), is Google's NLP algorithm introduced in 2018.

It’s an open-source neural network model that helps understand search queries better. Its key feature is bi-directionality. Basically, BERT understands phrases by looking at the words or sentences before and after them.

This allows BERT to interpret search queries more naturally, similar to how humans understand language. In terms of its impact on SEO, BERT shifts the focus from individual keywords to the overall content surrounding those keywords, including entire sentences, paragraphs, and the overall sentiment.

It means that creating high-quality, relevant content that addresses the user's intent is more important than ever!

How understanding NLP can help with your SEO efforts?

Now that you understand what is NLP and how search engines use it, it’s pretty clear how you can (and should!) use NLP can be used to optimize your content so that it is more easily understood and ranked by search engines.

Combining the Right Keywords with the Right NLP Entities

To take your SEO strategy to the next level, you should use the right keywords with the right NLP entities.

Keywords are still very important for SEO, as they help search engines understand the primary topics of your content. However, if you want your website to rank higher for competitive keywords, focusing just on keywords is not enough.

By using NLP entities in your content writing, you provide additional context and specificity that search engines use to deliver search results.

Let’s take a look on a simple example:

If your content target the keyword "digital marketing strategies", including relevant entities such as "Google Analytics", "SEO", "social media platforms", and "content marketing" can boost the contextual understanding of your content. This helps Google build a more detailed understanding of your content, improving its relevance and ranking potential.

When you combine the right keywords with NLP entities, you create a more detailed and contextually rich content, so you actually win twice!

Not only you write content that is better optimized for search engines, you also write better content - period. By optimizing your content for NLP, you can find the topics and keywords your audience is look for, adjust your content to meet their needs and questions, and match your writing style to their expectations. Basically, your content becomes more engaging, relevant, and ultimately - high-quality.

To sum things up, these are the steps you should follow when preparing to write you website content:

Perform keyword research: Identify the primary keyword relevant to your topic.

Identify relevant NLP entities: Use NLP tools to find entities that are closely related to your keyword and content topic.

Incorporate them naturally: Ensure that both keywords and entities are integrated seamlessly into your content, maintaining readability and flow.

How WriteSEO uses NLP to help your content rank higher

WriteSEO make it incredibly easy to pair your target main keyword with the right NLP entities and give a nice boost to your SEO efforts.

When you create a new project in WriteSEO you select the keyword you’d like your content to target. WriteSEO than analyze the top 10 ranking pages for that particular keyword and extract NLP entities from their content.

At the final step WriteSEO matches for the entities that are common between the top-ranking pages and build a list of recommended NLP entities to include in your content, including how many times each entity appears on average!

Here’s an example:

The “content” entity is mentioned 24 times on average by 10 of the top-ranking pages.

And you can even see how the top-ranking pages use each entity for some good ol’

Pretty cool huh?! Using WriteSEO's NLP features, you can make sure your content has the right keywords and makes sense in context. This helps your content rank higher and connect better with your audience.

Key Takeaways on NLP and SEO

NLP is crucial for modern SEO as it helps search engines understand user intent and context.

Combining the right keywords with relevant NLP entities can significantly improve your content's ranking potential.

Tools like WriteSEO can simplify the process of integrating NLP into your content strategy, making it easier to achieve higher rankings and better engagement.