Editor's note: On October 25, 2019, Google officially announced that US search in English now uses "a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP)" called BERT. Learn more about it here.
How many times has it happened to you when you optimized the article with so-called perfect on-page SEO, but it didn’t move the needle? Many times.
Especially with the niches that demand high-quality content, and you end up hiring the writers who don’t have any specialized knowledge about the niche.
You may have failed because you thought just putting your target keyword in the title, permalink, meta description, and headings would produce guaranteed results. You need a tool that can help you achieve your desired result. There are so many free and paid tools, but who can make a better tool than Google?
In this article, you will learn about a tool that will take your content to the next level for Google and users. Are you ready to learn? Let's get started.
What is the Google NLP API Tool?
Google has created a powerful tool known as Natural Language Processing for enterprises to derive insights from unstructured data using machine learning technology.
Businesses are using the tool to know more about their customers through e-mails, social media, and chats. You might be thinking this tool must be arduous from using Python to executing functions and using the app script API, but it is not. You will find it easy to use.
Moreover, you don't need to pay a huge amount to Google — you can use it for free; you should not underestimate the power of this tool.
The best part? This tool is based on the technology that Google uses in search algorithms.
The beauty of this tool is it can give you confidence that the content you have written is truly optimized for the given industry and the niche.
How? Keep reading to learn more about the tool.
Why Is the NLP API Tool Important?
Because:
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You can apply it practically.
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It is free; with other tools, you need to pay.
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It builds confidence in your writing as the tool tells the niche and category.
You might be thinking how is it useful?
Let's look at an example. Suppose you are a newbie writer in the health niche. Your client needs an article on “weight loss tips.” What would you usually do?
You would open the top 5 results, read it, and review the main headings from some websites and perhaps create unique headings that were similar.
Based on the article above, you would end up writing content that used the following phrases:
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Drink water
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Eat eggs
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Drink Coffee
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Drink Green Tea
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Cut back on added sugar
Google will not consider this type of content of high quality, even if you created a piece with more than 2,000 words.
Why?
Because you have given a clear clue to Google that you are not the expert of the niche; they can tell just by looking at the vocabulary level of your content. Plus, what have you said that is different and more informative?
Here is what a doctor who knows about the niche would be discussing:
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Metabolism
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Calories
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Protein
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Antioxidants
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High-calorie ingredients
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Catechins
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Low-calorie diets
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Glucomannan
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Type 2 diabetes
Did you get the point?
An expert is more likely to use the terms of the field, and that creates relevance and builds trust with users and Google.
How to Use Google NLP API Tool to Optimize Your Content
So, let's begin.
Step 1: Find the Right Keyword
Finding the right keyword is critical to target for your content; otherwise, you will end up writing content that nobody is searching for in Google.
Why did I say the right keyword?
Because one article can be ranked for more than a thousand keywords. Here you can see with the SEMrush Organic Research Tool that the article in the first position for "Weight Loss Tips" in Google is ranking for more than 1000 keywords.
When you click Keywords, you get all the keywords for this particular article.
Make sure you pick the keyword that has the following characteristics:
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Low KD%: SEMrush provides a robust filter for KD%. KD% means Keyword Difficulty Percentage. In other words, how competitive the keyword is to rank in Google. You can utilize the keywords having low KD%.
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Good Volume: Pick the keyword that has at least 500 search volume. For some niches, even 100 can do wonders, as it depends on your value of that traffic.
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Relevant: The keyword should be relevant. If you pick the keyword “iPhone,” you don’t know why the person is searching it for. Maybe he is searching to check the latest news. Maybe he wants to go to the Apple website. Maybe he wants to buy the product. Maybe he needs a case? Always pick the keyword that shows the intent behind the keyword, for example, “buy iPhone x on installments.” It clearly shows the person wants to buy an iPhone X on installment. If you write content on this keyword, you are more likely to get a customer instead of some generic keyword like ‘iPhone”.
If you need a detailed guide on finding the best keyword, you can read this Keyword Research guide by SEMrush.
Step 2: Open the Top Ranking Website
If Google is ranking websites for a given keyword, it means the site deserves to be ranked highly by Google for several good reasons.
It also means they might be providing the highest quality content for a phrase, and have a good number of backlinks. Of course, other ranking factors matter too: site’s age, page speed, mobile-indexing, social signals, etc.
Before I tell you the next step, please note — you will not be opening high-ranking sites to steal their headings and content. We will be doing something completely different.
Open the site that is ranking for the first position in Google and copy the content from top to bottom. Now it is time to make use of Google Machine Learning technology.
Step 3: Using Google Natural Language API
Go to Google Natural Language, and paste the content that you copied from the ranking number one site and click Analyze.
It divides the content into four categories:
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Entities: What is an entity? Google defines it as “a thing with distinct and independent existence.” Persons, organizations, number, consumer good, and other entities will be separated and will be stored within the brackets from the whole article.
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Sentiment: Sentiment section separates sentences based on sentiments that can be positive and negative. It is useful to check the featured snippet of any given keyword; either Google is ranking positive sentences or negative sentences. Enterprises use this to analyze the customers' reviews from their websites; either they are positive or negative.
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Syntax: Syntax is the study of sentences and their structure, and you will find the syntax of each sentence in this section.
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Categories: It provides useful information about the category of the content. If you write about weight loss, it will tell your content belongs to the weight loss category. How? Keep reading.
Step 4: Google Sheet Work
Now you need to copy the content from the Google Natural Language Processing API Tool to your Google Spreadsheet.
You need to select the words that you seem are important in the niche and can help Google to give a clue about the authority of your content.
If you have no idea of the niche, you can pick the words that have salience more than 0.00.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Make sure the content you are writing shows the same niche that you want to rank for.
If Google doesn’t show you the Confidence in your content about the niche you are writing for, you need to change the wording of your content to match the niche with the Confidence niche Google provides.
Sentiment Analysis
You can also make use of Sentiment that shows in three colors: grey, red and green. Green means the emotion is positive, red means the emotion is negative, and grey indicates neutral.
You should focus on the red and green sentences that may help you to find the perfect sentence or avoid possible problems when creating content.
I have found that red and green convey useful information about the content, but grey indicates the common sentence that everybody knows about.
Step 4: Optimizing Content Based On This Data
This is an essential step that will make or break your content.
You have collected all the important data from the content that is already ranking well in Google. For optimizing, keep the following steps in mind:
1. Intent
The first step, you need to look at the intent of the keyword you are going to optimize for. If you search for a keyword, and Google shows images at the top, it suggests users often want the images.
If you search a keyword and you find a list post, perhaps you need to write a much better list post.
You need to look at the Google results, what it is showing, then optimize for the same pattern.
2. Faster Loading
Yes, your website should be loading faster. I am not saying this only because Google has said it’s a ranking factor.
Can you give me another reason why speed matters? Because if help you in Pogo Sticking.
What is Pogo Sticking?
When the user visits your blog, go back to another blog and doesn’t revisit you, it could mean your website did not load fast enough or did not meet their needs in most cases. Maybe you didn’t provide the quality content that the users wanted, or maybe they could not see it on on a mobile device.
One way to avoid pogo-sticking it to make sure your website is fast, so users don’t need to visit other websites to get the content they are looking for.
3. Keyword Targeting
Now the vital step comes into play: placing the keyword at the right locations. You need to put your keyword in the title, H1, meta description, body, <meta> tag, image names, and more.
You can take hints from the websites that are already ranking from the given keyword to the top positions with SEMrush On-Page Checker.
Pro Tip:
If your keyword is a long tail, you don’t need to write it in the same order all the time. For example, you have a long tail keyword: “SEO is important for the business.” You can write, “In business, SEO is important.” or “the importance of SEO in business is essential.”
Make sure you don’t keyword stuff. Give your content a natural reading style that makes sense.
4. Using Easy URLs
Remember clean URL structure because it is useful for Google and users as well.
How?
You can share on social media without looking spammy. On some platforms, the users can only see the URL structure with no image.
Tell me which is more friendly to share?
Of course, the first one is more friendly to share with your friends.
5. Alt Tags
Alt tags are essential for ranking in Google Images. If you own an e-commerce store, naming your images with terms customers will be searching for can help bring quality traffic from Google Images and Google search, which could bring more sales.
Why? Because Google has started to show products in the images. To achieve this, you need to use Product Schema.
Make sure you keep the alt tags of your image descriptive - what is it telling about the image? Don't try to aggressively use keywords in images that has no link with the image.
Pro Tip:
You can find the best alt tags with a Google Image search. If Google is ranking an image, it is ranked for a reason.
Just type your keyword in Google Image>open the website>go to the source code>look for the alt tags for the specific image.
6. Be Better Than Competitors
Everybody talks about writing better content than their competitors, but they don’t know what to cover.
Some things to do:
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Write more words with better clarity and facts the reader can use.
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Answer questions related to the topic at hand. What do people want to know? What is the second, third and fourth thing they want to know? Answer the questions.
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Show more quality images and videos (optimize them).
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Provide better research data.
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Make content scannable - every headline should be helpful.
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Wow visitors with page speed, imagery, and information.
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Build on-site and off-site backlinks to this page.
7. Use of Images, Videos, and GIFs
Think of your favorite websites? I know they must be using high quality and unique images. People are moving from text to images to videos. The future is video. Videos will account for 82% of all internet traffic by 2022. There are many affordable tools out there to help you create custom videos and images.
Make sure you are using the imagery that matches your culture and norms.
8. Internal Linking
Do you know internal linking has the power to improve your keyword ranking? Find out how by reading How to Improve Keyword Rankings with Internal Linking. Wonder why? It is because PageRank flows from one page to another.
9. Combine the Ingredients
To make any dish, you have to combine everything, and everything must be perfect. One mistake may lead to a terrible tasting food. It is the same scenario with optimization. If you don’t use the Google NLP tool with the latest standard of On-Page, you may not get the results.
The best content is the content that gives a natural sense, not artificial.
Every sentence should provide value to users and Google. If you are writing for the sake of words, and want to write 3000 words with no value, your content is less likely to succeed.
Alternative to Google NLP Tool API
SEMrush has created a great free tool that works the same way Google NLP Tool works called SEMrush Writing Assistant. It also extracts the crucial keywords from your competitors on your given keyword.
You can use it with Google Doc and make your content relevant for the given keywords with minimum effort.
It is just the small part of the ad-on, here you can download the whole recommendations.
The best part?
It provides pages report for free that you can use to optimize your content and take it to the next level.
If you use both tools to optimize your content, you will write brilliant content.
Final Thoughts
Google Natural Language tool is incredibly useful to create content that Google ranks. Because it’s one of the technologies used by Google to rank content for the relevant queries.
Moreover, you will feel more confident in writing any piece of content for Google with the categories section.
Did you like the tool? Let me know in comments below.