Most folks who know about digital marketing and especially about SEO are familiar with keyword density. It’s a metric that every SEO driven content creator worries about. Or at least to a certain degree, they should.
There’s of course the darker side, or at least there was before Google’s Panda algorithm change a few years ago. Keyword stuffing was definitely a thing for a long time to get your page to rank or words and phrases it wouldn’t have otherwise.
But there’s another metric that you can be tracking and also sculpting your content to gain new traction in the search engines, and that is LSI keywords. If you’re not familiar with the term LSI, it stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. According to Wikipedia, the definition is “ an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text.”
In simple SEO terms, it’s the keywords / phrases that you should also be using to help lift the targeted keyword. It also gives you accompanying keywords that you could rank for.
How Do You Find LSI Keywords
There’s a couple of ways you can do it. There’s a few ways to do it. First you should find the keyword that you want to rank for. In this case we’ll take a look at one that we do rank for, “Michigan Web Design.”
Now, we can use a tool like LSI Graph to type in that keyword and it will give us some additional keywords we can target. This tool is a quick and easy way to see what options are out there.
But there’s an even easier tool, and that’s Google itself. The auto-fill search bar is a great way to find these kind of LSI keywords.
Is Keyword Density No Longer Important?
There’s no indication that it no longer has relevance. It’s just a matter of how important is it? Most SEO tools still look at keyword density to ensure that it’s within the “optimal” range.
However keyword stuffing, like in days of old isn’t going to do what it once did, and in fact will probably harm your website more than it helps. In the end the most important thing is that the content is readable, keywords are important, but not as important as creating good content.
Should You Be Spending Time Researching?
If you’re going to be a consistent content creator the answer is pretty simple, yes. It’s an extra step but could mean the difference between getting your content found or lost because you were trying to rank for an oversaturated keyword.
This is especially important if you’re looking to rank for local keywords. So, if you’re just starting out in your business, you may not be able to rank for national keywords, but using LSI phrases that are locally focussed you may stand a fighting chance.