Ultimate Guide to LSI Keywords

Editorial Team April 17, 2019 7 min read

The ultimate guide to LSI Keywords is the hot topics. Everybody wants to optimize their content for search engines and drive more organic traffic. There are many resources available to improve on-page optimization. LSI Keywords is the most important tools for optimization.

If you haven’t heard of LSI keywords, or don’t know much about them. The Ultimate Guide to LSI Keywords will help you to improve your knowledge.

What Are LSI Keywords?

LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) are keywords semantically related to your content main keyword.

When you come across the word for the first time it sounds like something new and not for me type.

But, that’s not the fact.

LSI is a very simple concept to understand and we all are using the LSI keywords in our content without even knowing about it.

LSI Keywords can sometimes be synonyms, substitutions and related words.

But a major of the time you have to take care to include words in your content that are somehow related to your keyword.

For example, if you have a post on “Windows“ operating system, your post should logically have the name of “Bill Gates“, “Microsoft“, “Windows 7”,
“Windows 7” and so on.

LSI keywords will help Google to differentiate your post from the searches related to “luxury windows locks” or “Wooden windows grills”.

In the above screenshot, you can clearly see what could be the potential LSI keywords when you are typing a post on “windows”.

You can also get some LSI keywords from the footer of Google search results that is called “Searches related to…”

LSI Keywords Vs. Long-Tail Keywords

There are some differences between LSI Keywords and Long-Tail Keywords.

LSI keywords do not exactly mean long tail keywords but are somehow similar to them.

The main difference between LSI keywords and long tail keywords is, long tail keywords narrow down the scope of a search whereas LSI keywords broaden the scope with more related keywords.

Search engines use LSI keywords to check how deep your knowledge is on the written topic and also rank your page for related terms.

That is why you get organic traffic to your blog posts from keyword phrases that you haven’t ever targeted or even heard before.

Why Does Google Use LSI Keywords?

Once upon a time when the only measure Google had for relevancy of a page to a given search query was keyword density.

As we all know, keyword density was horribly abused and also spammed.

So, Google moved away from this practice and began looking at LSI keywords.

The main reason was:

A content about ‘Apple computers’ will likely contain a host of other words that are related to Apple computers (such as ‘apple stores’, ‘apple iphone 5’, ‘apple new iPad’, ‘apple stock price’, ‘discount computers’).

On the other hand, a keyword-stuffed page about ‘Apple computers’ will contain just that one keyword.

So, LSI keywords provided Google with a way to differentiate the sheep from the goats.

But there’s another reason why Google started using LSI keywords.

Latent Semantic Indexing helps Google to better understand the meaning of any search query and the meaning of any web page.

And that allows Google to improve the exact match between what people search for and what they find in the search results.

Hummingbird and LSI Keywords

Hummingbird update (introduced in August of 2013) was targeted towards the misuse of keywords. It was designed on the basis of the semantic algorithm.

The Hummingbird algorithm focuses on synonyms and improves Google’s ability to understand the context of any web page.

Hummingbird algorithm is particularly interested in searcher intent.

Whereas previous algorithms was focused on individual words in a search query, Hummingbird looks at every word within the context of the whole search query.

In other words, the Hummingbird algorithm is trying to understand the meaning – that helps Google match user intent with search results.

Benefits of Using LSI Keywords:

LSI keywords have so many advantages as far as it is related to SEO and user experience is concerned.

Here are the few key benefits of having LSI keywords in your content:

1. Prevents Content From Being Labelled as Spam

LSI keywords prevent your content from being marked as spam in the eyes of search engines.

Having a varied keyword phrases that are semantically related to your primary keywords increases your content’s credibility.

This also differentiates your content from spam content.

2. Decrease in Bounce Rates:

LSI keywords help you to reduce the bounce rates by preventing your site from ranking for the wrong terms.

Let’s have a look at this example:

There are 2 articles nearly at the same term “Notebook”.

But essentially they are about:

Notebook, the movie (2004) and Notebook PCs

Here Google takes your LSI keywords like “romantic film”, “MTV movie awards” and “deleted scenes” to distinguish the first article from the second.

This way a movie lover doesn’t land on Lenovo site and thus no bounce rates.

3. Increase On-Page Time Spent By Visitors

It helps to stay visitors on your site.

LSI keywords make the flow of content natural and meaningful and thus attract readers.

4. Improve Search Engine Rankings

It helps you to rank better and higher for related searches.

Google bots automatically crawl your site and make a perception about what your content is.

Now Google use LSI criteria to rank your site for semantically related searches no matter what your target keyword is.

5. Increase Sales

LSI keywords are also like long tail keywords and hence you can rank higher without too much competition.

For example, Amazon.com makes 57% of sales from keywords outside of the “popular” terms.

This is only because there is less competition and exact buyer intent down there in the LSI keywords zone.

How To Find LSI Keywords?

Here are some tools for finding LSI keywords:

Google Search

Just type your main keyword in Google search and Google will bold any LSI keywords related to your main keyword.

Here’s an example:

My main keyword is ‘coffee machine’.

In the first search result, Google bold the main keyword but it also bold an LSI keyword: ‘espresso machine’.

Go through each of the resulted keywords and look for keywords in bold.

Google Auto Suggest

As soon as you start typing a search into Google, Google’s Auto Suggest function suggests a number of terms that people are also searching for that are related to your search term.

These are LSI keywords – Google’s search algorithm has identified them as words that cluster together with your search term in predictable patterns:

Google’s ‘Searches Related To’

You can also get some LSI keywords from the footer of Google search results that is called “Searches related to…”

Here you’ll find some more related LSI keywords:

commercial
royal cafe
commercial

Add these to your page as well – they’ll help you rank higher for your main keyword.

Google Keyword Planner

Google keyword planner is the best related keyword finder to get the best results.

You can get the initial LSI keywords from Google auto suggest and related searches below the search page of your query. This tool would be to get some useful LSI keywords from the Google Keyword Planner.

LSIGraph

LSIGraph is a useful free keyword generator tool.

Just enter your main keyword and you will get the LSI keyword:

NicheLaboratory

NicheLaboratory is a another free LSI keywords generator tool.

Just type in your main keyword in the search box and you will get the LSI Keywords. You’ll need to use human judgment to decide which of these are actually related in meaning to your main keyword

SEOPressor plugin

“Revolutionary Google-Emulating On-Page SEO Analysis” SEOPressor plugin inlcudes advanced LSI analysis.

It contains two main features that will help you with your LSI keywords:

the ‘Progressive LSI Keywords Engine’ and
the ‘SemantiQ Density’ analyzer

Ultimate Keyword Hunter

Ultimate Keyword Hunter is a software that specializes in finding LSI keywords.

It’s free but is currently only available for the Windows os only.

SEMrush

SEMrush is an ultimate suite that helps you to find out keywords that actually benefit you.

You can use SEMrush to find out keywords that your competitor actually uses and then use it for LSI keywords or completely new projects of your own.

Go to SEMRush page and type in your competitor’s website URL in the search box and hit enter.

Now, select Organic Research > Positions from the left-side menu to go to the ranking keywords page. It will look something like the following:

Now simply pick up the keywords, find LSI keywords in combination with other tools and use them into your blog posts.

MarketMuse

MarketMuse accelerates content research and builds AI-driven content strategies. Today, content marketing is driven by manual website audits that take weeks or months to complete. By analyzing hundreds of millions of articles on the Web, the MarketMuse platform builds content blueprints that show exactly how to write to cover a topic.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is created by an Italian SEO guy and one of the best free keyword tool for getting lots of keyword suggestions.

It help you to quickly brainstorm and find Keywords in your target niche that people are searching for.

The tool uses Google suggests, and few other Keyword suggestion service for Keyword suggestions and you can search for Keyword suggestion based on your target market like Web, news, shopping, video and more.

How To Use LSI Keywords To Rank Your Content Higher?

The ultimate guide to LSI keywords will show how to use LSI Keywords.

Now that you have got all the valuable LSI keywords, the next question is how to use them?

Most master blogging site uses either inserts the LSI keywords into their content without any strategy or mess up their primary keyword with LSI keywords.

However, placing LSI keywords correctly in your content has an importance of its own.

Correct placement of LSI keywords can break the rankings and credibility of any post.

Here are the main places where you should use your LSI keywords:

Page title
H1 and H2 tags
URL address
META tags
Images alt text
First paragraph of text
Links anchor texts
Last paragraph of text

Some tips to make the most out of your LSI keywords.

Choose The Right Keyword

Most LSI keyword generator generate related keywords based on a set of an algorithm.

They aren’t human generated hence they lack that personal touch.

Moreover, you have to find out that in each list of generated keyword, there are phrases that aren’t related to your primary keyword or are too broadly related.

TIP: If you use more than one tool to generate LSI keywords then there will be a chances that you might have some of the keywords twice or more.

Place LSI Keywords Naturally

Having too many LSI keywords might be a disadvantage to some extent because you have to place them naturally and not inject them anywhere and everywhere.

It is not necessary to use all of the generated keywords in every single article.

Only choose the perfect ones that have value for your content.

Target More Positions

You can also use your LSI keywords in your article title, as a question in the conclusion and also as anchor text to an internal link.

You can also place them in title tags, permalinks and most importantly in introduction and conclusion section of your article.

This appears natural and gives a flow to your article.

What To Avoid With LSI Keywords

In this Ultimate guide to LSI keywords article we’ll focus on a;; important points.

Though the main purpose of LSI keywords is to optimize your page, but as with your main keyword, try to avoid over-optimizing your page for any particular LSI keyword.

Overusing an LSI keyword will put you in keyword stuffing territory and you will get penalty from Google.