Topical & Semantic SEO Mapping/Planning

[mrpotato]

I've been reading a lot on topical SEO and semantic SEO over the last few days. The whole thing sparked my interest after reading some case studies by Koray Gubur. Not sure if he's here or not. I'm starting to grasp this concept a bit more but I have a few questions for the gurus and my objectives are two-fold:

1. Review my current sites and see if there is anything I can do to really catapult where I already have some rankings/authority.

2. Start the process of mapping out a brand new site from scratch in a niche I'm currently researching.

That said, has anyone done this successfully and if so, are there tools or methods that you've used to help with the process? To the best of my knowledge, there is no tool that exists that will essentially get you largely there. I hope I'm wrong though.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

I have never done any topical mapping at all. My typical approach is just to look at keywords and grab what I think is easiest and enough volume. Then I just create content. Seems like that approach might be leaving a lot on the table.

Really value all your input.

Have a nice Saturday!

- MrPotato

 

[Ryuzaki]

Quick insert for anyone reading this and needs an introduction to the topic, I talk about Topical SEO and Semantic SEO both in the later posts of the On-Page day of the Crash Course.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no tool that exists that will essentially get you largely there. I hope I'm wrong though.

My theory is that once upon a time, and it still may be the case, is that a lot of the understanding of entities and their relations was coming out of the Wikimedia database which is populated by manual work on Wikipedia.

In the link above I show you can extract entity names and know which ones to include simply by viewing the Wikipedia pages for the topics, nouns, whatever.

If I was building a smaller site of 30-50 pages or even less, I'd go to town on all this stuff. Every little bit extra we can do can accumulate into an advantage and a gain in SERP positions.

For sites where I'm trying to publish 1000's of posts over time, it's not worth doing. By virtue of exploring the topic with sufficient depth (and some but not too much breadth) I figure I cover enough of this stuff. I basically do this:

My typical approach is just to look at keywords and grab what I think is easiest and enough volume. Then I just create content.

For reaching scale, it makes more sense to strip away this extra research and manual effort by targeting keywords that won't require that to win.

What I do think works great (and I still don't do it on my "scale" sites, but do on other projects) is tf*IDF, which is also discussed some in the On-Page day.