Understanding Semantic Search and SEO | Search Engine Journal

Tools to play with

  • Aaron’s tool has some interesting ‘Phrase Match’ data, but it is marginally effective for this excercise and would need sorting.
  • KW Map is interesting, but also is marginally effective and has no export option to speak of. Close, but no cigar
  • Vseo Tool – Also not the greatest, but certainly presents some reasonable semantic concepts and can be exported.
  • WordStream – also comes close, (I am helping develop a tool tho) but nothing default to really group deeper semantic relations for our purposes. Emails the list to you for sorting purposes.
  • Nichebot – these guys almost have it with the poorly named ‘LSI’ tool. This produces probably some of the best lists for our purposes. Fully exportable for sorting.

Googly Tools

  • Keyword Tool – about as use(less?) as the others. It has some insights, but not deep enough for this excercise. Although it is easier to sort and does support downloads
  • Search-based Keyword Tool – not as good as the above KW tool in the testing I did recently for this. It does support exporting though.
  • Google Sets – this one isn’t obvious right away, but handy. If you look at the ‘description’ element, you can start to see some supporting terms that might come in handy (since Googly is recommending them). Problem is that it doesn’t give results for granular/obscure terms.(also try Google Squared)

Semantic relations

  • Onelook reverse dictionary – returns the list of related terms, each word linked to its definition (more tricks from Ann here) – does a reasonable job but doesn’t have export function.
  • Reference.com reverse dictionary – clusters related terms into groups by their meaning and gives the actual definition for each cluster: barely usable.
  • Rhyme Zone – define your term and find rhymes, synonyms and antonyms. Using the ‘Find related terms’ option you can get some pretty usable lists, unfortunately they are not exportable.

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