Before going to tell you about LSI Keywords let me tell you the full form of LSI stands for Latent semantic indexing (LSI). It is a mathematical technique that detects the way words cluster together in predictable patterns after the search query. Search engines use this pattern to understand the context.
In simple terms, LSI keywords are words semantically related to your primary keyword. They are words often found together with your keyword as they share the same context. Therefore they are the keywords that are commonly found within a single topic. They are used to drive relevant traffic and create more visibility on the search engine result page (SERP).
Let’s say your article topic is “motorbike”. Typically you would find multiple related keywords like “motorcycle”, “motorbike games”, “vehicle”, “mileage”, “Yamaha”, “Honda”, “service center” etc. These phrases are called LSI keywords and are indirectly linked to the main topic. Hence having related keywords in your content is critical to sending the right signals about your topic to the search engine.
Using LSI keywords in your content helps the search engine understand the exact topic of the webpage and proves to them that the webpage is relevant to the search query. It also improves your chances to rank higher than other keywords that are semantically related to your search query.
A lot of people confuse it as a synonym of the primary keyword but instead, it uses the keywords which are correlated with the search query which includes synonyms too.
Where to find LSI keywords?
The best place to find LSI keywords is on Google. This is one of the easiest ways to know whether your LSI words are recognized by Google as being semantically related to your main keyword or not.
For example, you have entered the search query “graphic design”.
Here’s how you can find LSI keywords:
- Knowing your industry
This step requires the least research but depends on your knowledge of your industry. You can naturally pair keywords together to give your pages more ranking. Going by the example above if you provide a graphic designing course online, you can align LSI keywords like color, typography, layout, logo, branding, Photoshop, tools, etc. in such a way that the SERP shows your website on the top.
- Google Search results
Just type in the main keyword into Google and look for LSI keywords (the ones in bold letters) in the search engine result pages.
- Google Auto Suggest
As soon as you start typing a search query into Google, its auto-suggest function suggests several related terms which people also search.
As soon as you start typing a search query into Google, its auto-suggests function suggests several related terms which people also search.
- Google’s ‘Searches related to’
This is yet another way to extract LSI keywords from Google Search at the foot of the result page.
- LSI Graph
LSI Graph is a free tool for generating LSI keywords. Just enter the main keyword and you would find the list of LSI keywords for the primary search.
Here’s a list of more LSI tools that you can use:
- Keys4up
- Twin Word Ideas LSI Graph
- Niche Laboratory
- Keyword Tool
- Semantic Link
- Ultimate Keyword Hunter
- KW Finder
The Advantage of LSI Keywords-
- LSI keywords can help research keywords.
- It indicates the potential traffic you can obtain
- These keywords fetch more revenue for the business
- LSI keywords often have high search volume.
- It helps improve website authority
- It helps in improving the overall ranking of the search engine result page.
- It builds an article naturally & increases the reader’s interest.
- It helps in indexing faster in search engines.
Factors to keep in mind while choosing the best LSI Keywords
LSI keyword research is simple but the main task is choosing the keywords with a decent amount of search volume & relevance to your content. You need to understand why someone is searching for
specific information & then accordingly find relevant keywords.
- Intent- A user intends to do one of the following things
- Find information- here a user wants to know more about the subject provided.
- Navigate-this type of search query points in an explicit direction.eg. A user wanting to know the best platform for e-commerce website building.
- Transact- here user wants to carry out a specific task, they use search phrases with transactional intent.
- Content- the search engine will only be able to index & rank your page in SERP if you use highly relevant LSI keywords. It isn’t necessary that all the keywords would fit into the content naturally Avoid using a single LSI more frequently compared to the others.
Hence LSI keywords are the apex of Google’s new approach to understanding content & it helps to get a better grasp of the geography of your topic so use the LSI keywords accordingly.