How natural language processing can transform your content strategy

In my almost decade-long profession as an website positioning expert, I have had the pleasure of working with many leading search engine marketing (website positioning) specialists. But one stood out for its ambitious goal to think like a human and a bot at the same time.

Sharing this philosophy, I admit to doing it myself. Why? Because advances in natural language processing (NLP) require a forward-looking approach to content optimization.

In this text, I delve into some of the key fundamentals of NLP, offering a easy analogy for how it really works. I then focus on optimizing your content using NLP in a way that each the bots and your readers will love. Let’s start.

NLP basics

At the risk of oversimplification, imagine a bridge over a river connecting two pieces of land. On the left are people with literally 1000’s of queries. On the right side are search engines like google like Google, with perhaps the world’s largest library of knowledge available at your fingertips.

How do users get answers to their queries? The answer lies in the algorithms. For example, Google’s algorithms crawl through hundreds of thousands of pieces of content every day, organizing and ordering them to match search queries.

But where does NLP fit into this picture? As a part of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, it bridges the gap between what real humans search and what search engines like google have to supply.

Wondering the way it’s done? Essentially, highly sophisticated computer systems take the language found in sentences and break it down into words, phrases, symbols, and other meaningful elements. This process is called tokenization.

There is also “rooting”, which reduces words to their root form. On the other hand, lemmatization groups together different types of a word, which are then analyzed as a single unit. But there’s more.

Other ways NLP kicks into high gear include syntax evaluation, named entity recognition, sentiment evaluation, topic segmentation, and more. To add icing on the cake, NLP also performs tasks including speech-to-text recognition, grammar tagging, disambiguation, correlation resolution, and more.

With so much intelligence and sophistication in NLP, it’s clear that website positioning experts must rethink their content optimization strategies. Currently, this task is as much about enabling bots to semantically understand content because it is about understanding the user’s intent behind the search term.

While I won’t go into the intricacies of implementing the BERT algorithm or a statistical measure called frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), if there’s one thing you don’t need to know, it’s that meeting user intent on Google has never been more essential.

Gone are the days of gleefully stuffing keywords to get a high keyword density rating just to spice up the rankings of your content. Today, Google is much smarter and prioritizes user experience over all the things else.

That’s why NLP technology is so sophisticated and price being attentive to. So, whether you are trying to revitalize your content strategy or take a completely latest path, you can’t afford to disregard NLP.

Using NLP for keyword research

Now that we have discussed the importance of NLP, let’s look at the right way to apply it to keyword research. First, I need to mention that comprehensive keyword research needs to be the foundation of your content optimization efforts.

Without high-quality keywords, you risk your content never seeing the light of day on the first page of search results. Secondly, you have to discover relevant keywords that generate high traffic, accompanied by in-depth evaluation of user intentions.

To achieve all this, you wish NLP-based tools to streamline your keyword research process. The selection of tool is as much as you, but remember to make the right investment because it’s going to repay in the long term.

Content optimization using NLP

Here are some tricks to share when optimizing your content with NLP tools:

• Use it to each generate ideas and generate content

• Optimize content structure and flow based on NLP insights

• Refine your content to enhance readability and engagement

To do this, focus on creating metadata that is keyword-rich but not keyword-stuffed. Use appropriate content structure with appropriate H1, H2, H3 and bullets or numbering to align with the user journey. Add semantically related keywords to your text, ensuring their natural flow. However, proceed to make use of stop words in website positioning to a minimum.

Write short and clear sentences, with each sentence conveying one foremost idea. Avoid jargon and colloquial language. Finally, get to the point by answering questions quickly and then detailing subtle nuances in your answers.

Measuring the performance of NLP-based content

Any website positioning expert price their salt knows that measuring content performance is a big deal. Ignoring the indicators is at your own risk. Continuous monitoring of metrics is crucial to the success of content optimization.

This is because they let you refine and adapt your content based on user engagement and data to get even higher results. To higher understand and improve users’ experience with your content after applying NLP strategies to it, it is price being attentive to several indicators:

• Search results rankings

• Website traffic

• Data about user behavior, corresponding to time spent on the site, conversions, etc.

Related: Revitalize your content strategy with these 7 powerful techniques

Case Study – Strengthening website positioning with NLP

At InCertain Blogging, we use NeuronWriter to assist us optimize content with the power of NLP. It’s so simple as creating a latest project and entering your primary keyword. Once you have done this, you can select a list of top-ranked competitors from which keywords will probably be extracted and which you can use in your article.

There are options to optimize your title and meta description, either manually or through AI magic. After completing these steps, you will probably be taken to a screen where you can paste the article on your blog. You will receive a numerical assessment of the current performance of your article.

You’ll also see which keywords it is best to naturally include in your copy to enhance your rating, outperforming the highest performing article for that keyword. Using NeuronWriter, we were capable of increase organic traffic to 49,000 in just six months, including 1,623 keywords.

Another article that performed well during the same period saw traffic of 16,020 with 8,082 keywords.

Future trends in NLP-based content optimization

There are also a few trends price mentioning that I imagine will take center stage in NLP in the near future. The most vital ones that can make a splash in the website positioning world include:

• Optimization for mobile searches

• Support for voice queries that typically use long-tail keywords

• Using generative artificial intelligence

• Data-driven and insight-driven strategies

• Hyper-personalized content

Ultimately, if you are in website positioning, you have to consistently stay ahead of the competition by implementing and improving NLP.

If you have not tried using NLP-based tools and techniques to optimize your content, I highly encourage you to do so. NLP is incredibly powerful, and as Google’s algorithms turn out to be smarter and simpler at understanding the nuances of human language, you have to stay at the top of your website positioning and content games to make a name for yourself in the industry.