📚 What is Semantic Content Network?

A Semantic Content Network is a content framework built using semantic network components and understanding. It focuses on connecting entities and attributes to create a detailed and meaningful knowledge base. 🧠✨

🛠️ Key Features of a Semantic Content Network

• 🔍 Attributes and Entities: Combines multiple attributes from an entity or related entities to provide deeper insights.
• 🗂️ Knowledge Domain Terms and Triples: Uses these elements to signal a document’s main purpose and its neighborhood content pieces.

🔄 How Search Engines Use It

A search engine compares its own knowledge base to the knowledge derived from a website’s content.

• If the website content is highly accurate and comprehensive across different contextual layers, the search engine:
  • 📈 Improves its own knowledge base by learning from the website.
  • ✅ Recognizes the website as a source of Knowledge-based Trust.

🌟 Why It Matters

A Semantic Content Network helps bridge gaps in understanding by structuring content in a way that’s:

• 🧾 Accurate
• 🔗 Contextual
• 🧩 Comprehensive

By doing so, it not only enhances the search experience but also boosts the credibility of trusted websites. 🌍🚀

Semantic Content Network Building Process

A semantic content network is not about finding relevant keywords for your main topic, adding some smart filters, and then starting to publish pages on them.

A semantic content network is built through the implementation of philosophical knowledge and the understanding of search engines.

And, that implementation is not possible without a sound understanding of both the selected knowledge and the contextual domain, as well as how the search engine fulfills the intent of searchers in those domains.

Therefore, there are many steps to follow in building a semantic content network.

This is how I approach building the semantic content network (according to Koray Tugberk GUBUR's framework).

Steps to Build the Semantic Content Network

• 🌴 Finalizing the central entity: around which to create the semantic content network. That entity will be the base for building the entire information architecture of the website.
• 🌴 Finalizing all the relevant verb and noun relations: to better understand how people search for information in your targeted knowledge and contextual domain. For example, these relations could include:
  • Brewing coffee
  • Grinding beans
  • Cleaning the machine
  • Analyzing acidity
  • Enjoying coffee
  • Roasting beans
• 🌴 Generating queries: So, millions of queries, or possible search intents and behaviors, can be generated with the initial pairing of verbs and nouns.

For example,

• The possible intents for 'brew coffee' could include:
  • Brewing cold brew coffee,
  • Manually brewing coffee,
  • Understanding the chemistry behind brewing coffee,
  • The impact of water temperature on brewing,
  • The grind size for brewing,
  • And the list goes on...

🌴 You can't cover every topic related to that pair of verbs and nouns because the goal of a semantic content network isn't just to bring visitors to your website; they should also convert into customers.

Even if all the topics are relevant to your website and its users, budget limitations will still be there.

The solution?

The source context will be finalized, and the topics will be sharpened and deepened around that source context.

For example,

If the source context involves selling manual coffee brewing machines, then only the topic of "manual brewing" will be further augmented by processing all relevant search behaviors and intents around it.

🌴 You still can't build a semantic topical map around your sharpened topics based on your source context.

Why?

Because search engines match the document vocabulary with query vocabulary.

The solution?

Query focused semantic vocabulary configuration. (which is the topic of another post).

In short, it's about matching the vocabulary of your documents with relevant queries.

And, these relevant queries are not just those that appear as suggestions from keyword research tools with their volumes.

But,

⛳️ They are chosen to match the philosophical implementation of knowledge related to the source context and the ways how people express their intent and behavior to search engines.

Semantic Content Network Impact on Average Position

After you publish the semantic content network, you may see a decrease 📉 in your average position in your search console stats.

It may sound like a bad signal for your website's performance, but in reality, it might be the total opposite.

You always need to analyze data with a proper context, and take other metrics into the equation as well before you come up with a conclusion.

Let's say the average position starts to decrease 📉 and your impression count starts to increase 📈 then it’s a signal that new queries are showing into the search console data and the average position for those queries is not good enough initially.

It’s a sign that Google has started testing the source for new queries based on newly published documents in a content network.

A content can never show its full potential just after publishing because Google algorithms work on historical data, which needs to be collected before reranking the source.

Higher impressions can be taken as a signal of higher relevance of content around those queries, but there is always some degree of degraded relevance calculation to allow other ranking signals to also play their role in rankings.

🔮 The bottom line is to focus on impressions count and new queries after you publish the content network, but once it passes a specific threshold, which is variable in most cases and depends on the knowledge domain and content count (with 10k being an average in most cases), then clicks, average position, and CTR can better help analyze the success of your semantic SEO campaign.

🧠 Updating Articles vs Publishing New

If you’re planning to publish new articles on a website that already has a lot of low-quality articles, then it’s always a great idea to improve the quality of the already published articles (recommended 80% by Koray Tugberk GUBUR) first and then publish new articles.

A website's new articles and old articles' rankings are connected to each other.

Newly published articles may increase the crawl quota of old articles as well, but if the old articles are not of high quality, it may impact the rankings of newly published articles, which may result in a waste of your investment in new content.

The bottom line is to first increase the quality of 80% of old articles to match the quality of both old and new documents and then start investing in new content to get the maximum return on your investment in publishing articles on your website.

Publishing a Semantic Content Network is Not a One-Time Process

Publishing a semantic content network is not a one-time process.

There might be new queries and new documents after you publish the content network.

The search behaviors and search activities of users might change.

It may result in the demotion of the documents you have published in your content network.

The solution is to keep performing the relevance configuration in documents based on query data and other semantic relations between topics that may be derived from ranking competing documents.

The queries data might signal the sharpening of the context of certain sub-topics or the pruning of different contexts in the document.

And the contextual vectors of the document can be configured by either prioritizing important contexts or removing certain headings and paragraphs that are now less relevant or important.

The bottom line is to not take publishing semantic content networks as a one-time process.

The users' activities and behaviors plus the documents indexed in search engines keep changing, so the configuration in your content network should never stop.

🧠 No Discrepancy in Declarations

While building a semantic content network, try to make sure there is no discrepancy in declarations across the multiple articles of the website.

Take an example of following declaration mentioned in an article:

👉 According to X, the daily water intake for women is 2.7 liters.

Now the same declaration with a minor change in another article.

👉 According to X, the daily water intake for women is 2.8 liters.

Although the difference is quite minor between both declarations, it can still signal to search engines the randomness in articles and no proper expertise behind the content.

Such randomness may negatively impact the formation of a knowledge base which is the actual purpose of creating a semantic content network.

⛳️ Improving such minor things to optimize microsemantics will result in compounded quality signals across the website which will ultimately give the website a competitive edge over other competing websites.

A Semantic Content Network without BRAND IDENTITY

A semantic content network without BRAND IDENTITY is nothing but random pages published on a website.

Why?

The brand identity helps give context to the topics you’d be publishing on the website.

The same topic would be processed in different ways based on different brand identities.

For example, the processing of topics related to COFFEE wouldn’t be the same for a brand more focused on culture than for a health and wellness-focused brand.

That’s why finalizing the SOURCE CONTEXT and BRAND’S ATTRIBUTES are so important before building the semantic content network.

And, both come from the brand identity of the business.

Source context is how a website monetizes its visitors.

And the brand attributes include:

• 🌴 Staff
• 🌴 Origin
• 🌴 Mission
• 🌴 Address
• 🌴 Founder
• 🌴 Expertise
• 🌴 Nationality
• 🌴 Background
• 🌴 Market Position
• 🌴 Definition of a source on 3rd part organizations

All those attributes will be connected to the source context of the website.

And the source context will play its role, from building the topical map to writing the content around those topics.

But,

You can't ignore the audience while building the content network.

So there must be a strong communication between the target audience and the brand personality and values.

Although those are more related to the marketing aspects of brand identity, they play their role in better aligning the semantic content network with the target audience.

That's why building a semantic content network without a solid understanding of brand identity is not possible.

⛳️ The more you align the semantic content network with the brand identity and the target audience, the more beneficial it will be in terms of ROI.

Semantic Content Network Source Context

A semantic content network should help your site generate more revenue.

Traffic is just a vanity metric.

That's why simply getting visitors to the website isn't enough.

It's important to understand the source context before creating a content network.

The source context defines the purpose and identity of the source.

Simply put, it represents the primary focus of your website.

Questions for Identifying the Source Context

Ask questions like these when identifying the source context:

• 🍏 Why does your brand exist?
• 🍏 Who is the target audience for your brand?

The processing of topics will not be the same for sources with different source contexts.

The entire semantic content network will be centered around the identified source context.

💡 The Takeaway

Identifying the source context is necessary for creating a semantic content network. The source context should be focused throughout the entire semantic content network to help the site not only gain visitors but also acquire more qualified leads. The stronger the contextual connections between the source, knowledge, and the contextual domain, the higher the possibility of success for a semantic content network. Just finalized creating a semantic content network to publish 4000 pages programmatically to target all the relevant query network.

Website Content Update Overview

I published only 70 new pages on this website and have made changes exclusively to the existing content network that is live on the website.

And the results?

40%+ increase in organic clicks and 93%+ increase in impressions in the last 3 months.

Here's an Overview of the Actions I Undertook on the Website 🚀

• 🍏 Identified the central entity and source context.
• 🍏 Ignored keyword difficulty and keyword volume metrics from third-party tools in favor of prioritizing content.
• 🍏 Finalized the proper attributes of central entity, and connected it with source context.
• 🍏 Finalized query templates to target through own document clusters.
• 🍏 Tuned the cluster of articles which were not in the topical authority state to make the facts similar to consensus creator sources.
• 🍏 Justified the contextual flow by using the phrases used in the heading into the previous heading subordinates.
• 🍏 Added contextual bridges between macro and micro semantics on webpages.
• 🍏 Processed different entities (come under the umbrella of central entity) from the same type and the same attributes, questions, and answer formats to improve the contextual relevance.
• 🍏 Added documents optimization methods to follow while creating pages to go wide, for both macro and micro semantics to increase the topical coverage and to consolidate the topics under a context.

Last but not least, my favorite approach. 👇

• 🍏 Focussed on "go wide" and "go fast" methodologies to attain the maximum search engine's confidence score.