What are LSI Keywords and How They Impact SEO?

How LSI keywords impact SEO? Gone are the days when marketers were obsessed with a single keyword to get good rankings. Today, the key to making amazing content is context. And for a good reason: over 15% of Google’s daily searches are new terms that users have never searched before. And with trillions of searches being carried every year, that adds up to any further queries.

With Googlers finding so several different and unique ways of searching for common issues, this is precisely the reason why LSI keywords have become such a large part of Google’s ranking factors. From an SEO perspective, using LSI keywords has very positive outcomes. By using them in your content, you will boost its contextuality and improve your search visibility.

In this article, I will present everything you need to know about LSI keywords so that you improve your SEO, drive more relevant traffic to your site, and attract more customers. I will cover:

• What LSI keywords are;
• The key benefits of LSI keywords;
• What LSI means for SEO;
• Tools you can use to discover related keywords; and
• How to incorporate them into your content.

You’ll finish reading with a clear understanding of why LSI keywords are crucial to content marketing and SEO and the tips and tools to implement them in your strategy.

So if you’re ready, let’s get started.

What are LSI keywords? 

Google has been discussing the importance of LSI keywords since 2015. However, they haven’t spent much time describing to Internet marketers exactly what LSI keywords are.

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Index(ing). This is a computer program that is intended to learn a wide variety of synonyms based on context. It’s a method that uses mathematical methods to find relationships between words and concepts within a piece of content.

Here’s a more practical definition of LSI keywords

In terms of SEO (search engine optimization), LSI keywords are search terms linked to your target’s main keyword. They help support your content and add more context to make it simpler for both users and search engines to know what your content is about.

• What are LSI keywords?
• LSI keywords examples
• How to use related keywords
• Tools to find LSI keywords
• Do related keywords affect SEO
• Semantic keywords

As you can see, each of the phrases above is fitting for accompanying the main keyword (“LSI keywords”).

Don’t worry if this sounds a little complicated (mainly since our keyword includes the word “keyword”). Later on, we’ll look at the different ways to quickly find LSI/related keywords, as well as how you can use them in your content to appear higher and more frequently in relevant search results.

Are LSI keywords the same as synonyms?

While some LSI keywords can be synonyms, not all metonyms are LSI keywords. The majority of LSI keywords are words and phrases that are nearly related to your primary keyword. So, using synonyms in your posts can help your articles on-page SEO, but synonyms aren’t LSI keywords.

For instance, a synonym for the word jacket would be a coat. However, LSI keywords for jacket would add words like: reversible, winter, feather down, warm, padded, puffer, and so on.

An excellent way to know the difference between synonyms and related keywords is to perform a Google search.

What are the benefits of using LSI keywords?

As I mentioned in the introduction, hundreds of thousands of Google queries performed each year have never been searched. Google has made improvements to its algorithm to factor in context to understand related keywords better. Google said:

Incorporating LSI keywords into your content supports the contextuality of your content and yields SEO benefits:

• They boost your website’s ranking in search engines: Sprinkling LSI keywords throughout your text helps search engines to read your page and increase its ranking power.
• Semantic keywords improve your content’s relevance: Adding related words also helps ensure you don’t overload your content with keywords, including keyword stuffing.
• Related phrases increase the number of people who find your content: LSI keywords also help you provide a better search experience for users, which, in turn, translates into improvements in various ranking circumstances, such as time spent on a page, bounce rate, and more.

Do LSI keywords have any disadvantages?

LSI keywords don’t certainly have any disadvantages, but the indexing method does have some limitations. For example:

• It doesn’t think the order of words and disposes of all conjunctions and prepositions.
• It believes words to have just one meaning.
• It does not recognize underlying ideas and irony. In some cases, the meaning of the words may not match the importance of the text.

The Impact of LSI keywords on SEO

In the early days, Google’s crawlers, also known as spiders, would automatically see and scan websites by crawling from one link to another on connected web pages. As they crawled, they would see the keywords on a page to help them identify its topic.

For example, if you were to publish a post titled 21 Tips For Effective Email List Segmentation, Google would scan your page to resolve if you used the term email list segmentation in key areas on your site, including:

• The title tag,
• Content body,
• Image alt text,
• H1 heading, H2, and H3 sub-headings, and so on.

But, after the LSI update, Google’s crawling method evolved, resulting in these SEO improvements:

Google understands pages better

In addition to scanning your page for the main keyword, now it would also scan your page for many related keywords, such as email campaign, MailChimp, audience, subscribers, email tools, and so on.

This means that Google works to find out what the overall topic of a page is and relies on latent semantic indexing to understand the content at a much deeper level than just looking for multiple occurrences of a specific keyword.

Google reads pages contextually

Google’s algorithm now can “read” a page the same way a human would and categorize keywords depending on the determined context. This means that the search engine can now differentiate between words based on even the most minor information.