The Rise of Contextual SEO Strategies

SEO has traditionally focused on optimizing websites for particular keywords and key phrases. However, as search engines evolve to provide more relevant results, contextual SEO strategies that consider the user’s full search context are gaining in importance.

With contextual SEO, marketers aim to make their content relevant not just based on broad keywords, but in relation to the wider context of the user’s query, location, time, previous searches, and other factors. By understanding this broader context, SEO efforts can provide results that match the searcher’s specific question or intent.

Traditionally, search engines determined relevance based primarily on keywords within web pages. But transition, they now analyze numerous contextual signals surrounding the user’s search query.

Some key dimensions of “context” that impact search engine results include:

•Geographic contextual from IP addresses and location data

•Queries within synonym rings and related topics

•Temporal context from timestamps and scheduling

•Historical contextual from previous user searches

•Intent context from understanding the goal behind the keyword query

To optimize websites for this new paradigm of contextual SEO, marketers can:

•Create topic pages around different product categories, industries and local areas your business covers.

•Develop FAQ pages to address common questions within the context of your products or services.

•Produce guided tutorials, comparisons and reviews to cover the full spectrum of a topic.

•Curate and organize archives of older website pages and content by topic.

•Build internal and external links based on related topics rather than just keywords.

•Provide multiple variations and rewordings of the same contextual content for different contexts.

•Conduct customer interviews to better understand their intents and goals behind searches.

•Utilize schema markup such as FAQ, HowTo and QAPages to assist search engines.

As context continues to play an increasingly important role in organic search rankings, a more holistic content strategy will be required. Marketers must move beyond achieving basic keyword matches to addressing the full variety of contexts under which their keywords may be searched. By focusing content efforts at the intersection of topic, intent and audience, SEO can help websites surface in search results that provide the most value to users.