Case Study and the Power of Semantic SEO

I have been testing and studying Semantic Web since 2015 when I first read the fundamental Google Semantic Search book. If you want you can still find the fiche I did on Medium.

You can read my texts on Medium, on Linkedin or here on Blog.

But what I want to show you is the most recent test I did, this time using two tools that I like very much, I have a lot of knowledge.

I usually recommend it to everyone who is creating a content project and they are WordPress and a plugin called Wordlift.

About Wordlift I already wrote when I talked about “The right tools for semantic SEO are strategies and tactics.” but to summarize for you this plugin analyzes your content and identifiesentities and organizes them into four basic categories: Who, What, When and Where. It then automates the markup of the article you wrote by adding contextual information, with internal links to a semantic vocabulary, which is updated with each new piece of content.

Creating new entities that will enrich your site‘s vocabulary and strengthen its relevance in your market is very simple to do.

And it was by using this strategy: WordPress content with semantic markup via Wordlift that I got to the result I am now showing you!

But first…

I want to leave here a presentation I made on September 11, 2021 on the group’s Youtube channel IA Biblio BR with the theme “Semantics in Practice”. My presentation was showing exactly the practical use of semantics in SEO using WordLift.

Case Study: Bezerra de Menezes.

I attend a spiritist house here in my city, Porto Alegre, in Rio Grande do Sul. I volunteer in the communications field and have started helping with the website, which is done in WordPress. Since I have so much experience, I decided to help in this area.

It was when I met the Wordlift people that the idea came to me: can I not optimize the house site using the plugin?

I installed the plugin and started creating the entities that would make up the semantic domain of the site. I did a little planning and decided to fence the name “Bezerra de Menezes” for this semantic optimization.

I mapped all the contents already created that could have entities related to Bezerra de Menezes and the Bezerra de Menezes Spiritist House.

Finding entities, optimizing vocabulary

Most of the work really is optimizing the vocabularies created by the plugin, Wordlift.

The content created for the site is not made by me, there are people who write on it. I just take the written content and, using the plugin, identify people, places, events, books that are of interest to people looking for a spiritist house and the plugin does the rest of the work.

Through Machine Learning and NLP the system does the whole process making my life easier in optimizing.

After that I go into all the entries that make up the vocabulary of the site and optimize them one by one.

I have noticed that the richer the entry gets, the better ranking it achieves. And the example I am going to give you is exactly that of Bezerra de Menezes:

This result of a search done in Microsoft’s Edge browser using Bing shows results for the term “Bezerra de Menezes”.

Here the first result is from Wikipedia, for the page about the physician and spiritist, Dr. Bezerra de Menezes.

And the Side Snippet too, using content from Wikipedia. The second place (pointing to the website), the fourth (with the map to the site), the fifth (with the schedules, and the sixth (with Facebook) are all from the semantically optimized site.

Let’s now do a search using Google.

This result of a search done in Microsoft’s Edge browser, using Google Brazil, shows results for the term “Bezerra de Menezes”.

Notice that the first result, as expected is also from Wikipedia for the page talking about Dr. Bezerra. The second, third and fourth results are from the Sociedade Beneficente Espírita Bezerra de Menezes, pointing to the site that I optimized.

The Knowledge Graph Knowledge Graph from Knowledge Graph ) next to it also shows results from the spiritist house. Google is further advanced in the use of data semantically tagged data and therefore shows more data . I did this search to isolate the influence of my navigation and location on the results.

This result indicates the possibilities of using semantics in all website projects, especially those using WordPress, because of the ease of use of these plugins, which extend the reach of SEO .

The result I showed you was achieved in a short time in a word that does not have much competition and the amount of sites optimized for it are few.

But I know that the point is proven: semantic markup of your content is a competitive differentiator of your site, for sure.

June 2019 Update

This is another use case of structured entity marking. We got good results for position 0 in the search(as seen below) as the content source was an entry(the divine laws) from the created Vocabulary.

The goal is to have mobile performance.

Semantic Optimization: Results

In this second part of the Semantic SEO track I show some results that I have already achieved using semantic optimization in 3 different types of projects.

The Power of Semantic SEO

As you can see, with the correct use of knowledge planning and strategy, it is possible to achieve a very interesting result. The investment in a WordLift subscription pays for itself with the addition of new visitors impacted by the results they found in the search .

Sure, you can do some of the work that WordLift does with free plugins, but vocabulary building is manual and several features are missing.

But what is fundamental to this test of mine is the validation in practice of semanticSEO.

This work is still in the beginning, and new and better results should still emerge as I continue to optimize.

Frequently Asked Questions

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