Semantic SEO guide to entities, intent and topic coverage

What semantic SEO means

Keyword-first SEO asks "which phrase should this page repeat?". Semantic SEO asks "what is this page about, who is it for, and what else do they need to know?". The answers decide the page's subject, its headings, the questions it covers and the pages it links to.

How Google understands meaning

Google's ranking systems guide names several systems built to interpret meaning:

Passage ranking is why clear headings matter: a well-defined section can rank for a specific question even inside a longer page.

Entities and the Knowledge Graph

An entity is a distinct thing: a business, a person, a place, a product, a concept. Google describes its Knowledge Graph as millions of entries describing real-world entities like people, places and things.

For a business, the practical step is making sure Google and readers can tell exactly which entity you are: a consistent name, a clear description of what you do and where, and links to your profiles elsewhere. A business with a common name needs this most.

Search intent: one intent per page

1. List your target searchesFrom Search Console queries and keyword research.
2. Label each with its intentLearn, compare, buy or find.
3. Assign one page per intentGroup searches with the same intent onto the same page.
4. Check for conflictsIn Search Console, a query with impressions on two of your URLs means two pages are competing.

Topic coverage and clusters

A topic cluster is a main page on a subject linked to supporting pages that each answer one related question. "Topical authority" is a practitioner term for covering a subject thoroughly; it isn't a metric Google publishes, so treat third-party "authority scores" as rough guides.

The rows above illustrate a cluster's shape; they aren't a recommendation for every business.

Internal links that show how pages relate

• Link from supporting pages to the main page, and back.
• Use anchor text that says what the destination is about, not "click here".
• Link where it helps the reader, not to hit a quota per page.
• Make sure every important page can be reached in a few clicks from the homepage.

Structured data and sameAs

Google says it uses structured data to understand a page's content and to gather information about the world, and that it can make general use of the sameAs property. For a business, that means Organization (or LocalBusiness where you have a real address) markup describing who you are, with sameAs links to your official profiles.

Markup must match what the page shows. It describes the page; it doesn't replace clear writing.

"LSI keywords" and what to do instead

Many guides recommend sprinkling "LSI keywords" through a page. Latent semantic indexing is an old information-retrieval technique, and Google has never documented using it; the systems Google does document, above, work on meaning and intent.

What actually helps is covering what a reader needs: the subtopics, the questions people ask next, and the related things they'd expect a good page on the subject to mention.

Semantic SEO audit checklist

• Each important page has one clear subject and one intent.
• No two pages compete for the same search (check Search Console).
• Headings describe what each section answers.
• Supporting pages link to the main page, and the main page links back.
• Anchor text describes the destination.
• Organization markup with sameAs links to your official profiles.
• Your business name and details are consistent across the web.

The SEO content strategy guide covers planning which pages to write, and the content audit guide covers fixing pages that compete.