Collect The Competitor`s Semantics

What is the Semantic Core?

A site’s semantic core (also known as “semantics” or “semantics SEO”) is a list of search queries that their target audience will enter into the search engine when looking for a product or service. These are going to be core search terms that you need to incorporate into your site and optimize for accordingly, building the core semantics into the appropriate places in your site structure.

What is the process of doing competitive analysis with semantics?

You can use sentiment analysis and named entity recognition together as a competitive analysis tool using a text analytics API in 8 steps:

1. Gather data on your competitors from social media pages, Google reviews, news articles, etc.
2. Prepare the data for analysis by putting it in a CSV format.
3. Feed the data through a text analytics API model that can perform the sentiment scoring on your text chunks that express sentiment. Repustate offers one but there are others you can test as well.
4. Have the API classify the text chunks by topics or aspects.
5. Identify important named entities such as people, places or things in your competitor data using Named Entity Recognition.
6. Feed the sentiment outputs into a visualization tool such as Tableau, Power BI, Looker or the Repustate Sentiment Dashboard tool.
7. Analyze, compare and contrast results across all competitors, topics and aspects. You can build a competitors grid if you like.
8. Identify most important data insights to inform your strategy to improve your brand, products or services to better compete and drive growth.

How can sentiment analysis help with your competitive analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a process used by marketers to better understand their customers, through what is often referred to as voice of customer. Understanding customer feelings, opinions and motivations is important to advertising better to target audiences.

Sentiment analysis is the exercise of identifying, scoring and classifying peoples’ feelings expressed through any form of text data as positive (+1), neutral (0), or negative (-1).

This helps marketers make smarter, better choices in the tactics, channels and creative they use to message consumers. Although sentiment analysis can help you understand your own customers, it can also assist you in discovering what your competitors’ customers think about them across various aspects of their business like pricing, value, products, features, customer service, mobile app, etc.

Why Now is the Time to Conduct Semantic SEO Research 

Having a ready-made structure for the client’s future website is important before you start with SEO semantics.

The reason is simple: it’s downright difficult to collect semantics without a ready-made structure, like exploring the world only by touch without sight, sound, taste, or smell. There’s not enough information there to give you the big-picture view you need to do it well.

If you start doing semantic keyword research without a detailed site structure, you’re also likely to end up with some non-target queries built into your site’s core, which can bring the wrong kind of traffic to you. They may not even relate to your business or your products. 

With a ready-made structure, however, everything is easier.

The Process

There are different ways to build a high-quality semantic core, depending on the size of the niche, the availability of resources (including time), and the available tools.

1. Take the semantics of competitors
2. Add keywords using the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool
3. Put together a list of queries for each individual page that needed optimization