The Crawl Tool Blog

Understanding Topic Relevance in SEO

What is topic relevance in seo? An article, such as a blog post, should be about a certain subject - known as a topic. It is important that the article is tightly focused around a specific topic, enables search engines to use semantic algorithms to know what the article is about and if the keywords used are relevant.

Over time the idea of keyword stuffing articles has fall out of practice. The development of semantic algorithms means that ranking is able to understand more than just a direct match between the words a search engine user types and those listed on a page, they take into account meaning.

This fundamentally changed the way that search worked. The intent of the search and the semantic meaning became more important. While keywords and keyword phrases are still important, the topic in general and their relevance to it (and therefore other phrases on the page) has taken over.

How to Enhance Topic Relevance in Your Content

Understanding what your users are searching for is key here. You want just not the keyword phrase you will targeting, which will still be the main focus of your article, but all relevant keyword phrases. You will want to use your main phrase, but also sprinkle in these other phrases to help keep your article focused on your topic.

This should be both part of and feed into your methodology of creating content. Understanding the associated keyword phrases people might be looking for should give you ideas for what you should be writing about.

Using these keyword phrases can therefore expand your content, whilst keeping it on topic. Because of the semantic connection, this helps your main keyword phrase be more relevant to the article as a whole.

The Impact of Topic Relevance on User Experience

This semantic topic relevance is a win-win. Your article will cover the topic more fully whilst maintaining a tightness and topic relevance that means that visiting readers will be getting what they expected.

The reader ends up with a positive view of your site and what you have to offer. That can have immediate benefits, they may decided to buy something! Or it can have long term benefits where it improves their perception of the site as a brand and increases the possibility they'll return - hopefully by clicking on search results in the future.

Not only that, but well written articles about a specific topic are more likely to be shared on social media or to get those precious backlinks.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Topic Relevance for SEO

Describe tools and metrics used to measure topic relevance and their impact on SEO, such as Google Analytics and search engine result rankings.

There are few tools to help measure this topical relevance. The Crawl Tool does it in several ways.

The Crawl Tool provides AI based similarity scores for pages to a site average. This allows you to see how broad you are generally. That's great for an overview.

The new Writer feature works with Wordpress. From within The Crawl Tool you can edit or create posts. Clicking the "Calculate Page Info" button will highlight keywords that an AI algorithm finds topically relevant, it will calculate the relevance of the title for you, and indicate "Low Relevance" content in your article. Cleaning up that "Low Relevance" content is a great start, as it nearly always leads to an increase in the relevance of the article as a whole.