SEO: why and how to create your semantic cocoon

Netlinking, relevant tags or keyword strategies... There is no shortage of techniques to improve the visibility of your website. Maybe that's the most frustrating part. In this article, we will present you with a proven SEO technique: the semantic cocoon!

Understanding the workings of a semantic cocoon is the guarantee of seeing the traffic of your pages increase significantly, and above all, of increasing the popularity of your site on strategic pages. It may seem complex at first, but we are here to demystify this prejudice.

Through a concrete example, let's see step by step together how to implement this SEO gem in your editorial strategy.

Semantic cocoon and natural referencing

In Fine, the objective of the semantic cocoon is to distribute the popularity rate of your various web pages.

And for now, the search engines are the only masters of the game to judge your ranking. This is why it is still important to remember how they work, as well as to update ourselves on them.

Concretely: every second, an army of bots is in charge of read, of upload And ofIndex the source code for billions of web pages. To do this, each search engine has its own bots and criteria, but all agree on at least the name of the technique: it's called the Crawl of a website.

Unsurprisingly, our SEO advice will be based on the No. 1 search engine, Google.

So let's remember how Google assigns your visibility:

When the Googlebot reads the code on your site, it is programmed with certain signals to define How well does your content respond to Internet users' requests, and so, define your ranking in the results pages (or SERP).

To do this, two major analyses:

• Is your content relevant? (semantics, keywords...)
• Is your content popular? (netlinking, user interactions with your page...)

NB: Keep in mind that the search engine provides results that it believes are closest to intents of the Internet user.

Tips. With these two ranking criteria in mind, it is nevertheless essential when developing content for your site to maintain a balance between:

• What is the search engine needs to best classify your pages
• and the specific information that is looking for The Internet user by coming to your site.

The risks - if one aspect is excessively worked on more than the other - can be:

• one over-optimization detected by Google (downgrade of the site)
• one Internet user dissatisfaction who does not have an answer to the information they are looking for (it starts from your site).

What is the semantic cocoon?

To meet the Google popularity criterion, it is now customary to rely on Backlink (or external links) of sites relevant to your service, allowing you to link to your pages and thus establish an important credibility index with Google.

But always in order to gain more visitors, a second ranking criterion that is often forgotten, neglected or poorly managed is essential. And this one is totally up to you: it's the internal networking.

To understand its importance, think of your website as a power plant.

Without any improvement in your internal network, your visitors are directed en masse to your home page, which thus concentrates the largest source of electricity on your entire site.

But what if you actually wanted your visitors to be exposed to a particular message, or to be more easily directed to a product page? So you would like to find a way to distribute electricity on these pages specific.

There you go, you just understood The usefulness of a semantic cocoon !

A technique designed by Laurent Bourrelly, the semantic cocoon is a clever mix between:

• the selection of words in relation to a subject (semantics)
• and the distribution of the links that make up your site (internal networking)

Different levels of hierarchy characterize the pages of a cocoon. To put it simply, here is a diagram representing how a semantic cocoon works with parent pages, daughter pages, etc.

This architecture is developed in order to strengthen traffic and natural referencing of the parent page (s).

Note that your semantic cocoon can be asymmetric: you can develop 3 complementary pages of a daughter page even if another daughter page only has 2.

The semantic cocoon therefore refers to the organization of a set of content and links, in order to direct the “electrical loads” of your site (called Pagerank, Jus SEO) specifically to the pages where you want the most visitors.

How do you create a semantic cocoon?

After these few reminders and a pictorial definition, let's move on to the example...

Let's say you have a dog grooming salon in Paris that also offers home services. We could have taken another example, but the dogs kicked us well 😁

On Google, you therefore want to position yourself on searches related to your field, “Dog grooming”.

En 3 steps, we will see how to establish the basis of a semantic cocoon.

Step 1 - Define the different levels of your subject

Think about research intentions on your topic

What are Internet users want to know the most when they ask about “dog grooming”? That is the first thing to clear up.

To help you, you can rely on the most popular queries on Google. What is typed? The most wanted? Etc.

Other tools can also help you:

• SEMrush
• Ubersuggest
• The Google Search Console

Also, feel free to look on social networks, forums, online reviews, etc.

Creating a semantic cocoon does not only depend on digital tools: on the contrary, using your own thinking gives relevance that SEO tools can never match!

In the photo above, we see that 2 themes of intentions stand out in particular:

• Les Methods Grooming your dog
• The hair cut concerning the Australian shepherd breed

Note that you will have to do more research in order to position yourself and list about twenty intentions.

You can find these concepts in more detail in our Guide to optimizing an SEO article.

Take into account the volume and competition of keywords

To find good keywords, use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, Ubbersuggest, and SEMrush to take into account 2 important criteria :

• The search volume

It's the monthly average of the number of queries made on a keyword. The higher it is, the more audience you will attract.

NB: The current trends are what they are, yet nothing prevents you from betting on keywords that do not currently generate traffic but whose future potential you believe in.

• The level of competition

Keyword competition refers to how much the keyword already has a supported by some sites that have a strong domain authority.

For our example, we can see below with the Ubersuggest tool that:

• The word “dog grooming” has a high search volume.
• The SEO difficulty is 43, which is an average difficulty.

A note also indicates that the best positioned sites have an average of 17 backlinks (which is still not bad!)

As you can see, the ideal keywords are those that meet these three criteria:

• Interest (search volume)

• Feasibility (competition)

• Relevance

Do not hesitate to bet on the keywords of Long tail : it is a sequence of at least 3 words.

Long-tail keywords are less wanted, which allows Ranker your content with a much lower competition than using popular keywords.

Long trains are also more likely to convert your visitors. because they are formulations of very specific intentions.

To find a relevant long tail:

• Use your research intentions (what does a potential buyer of your service want to know?)
• Play on the particularities of your service (location, differences with the competition...)

For our example, we could find long trails like: “How much does dog grooming cost” - “Where to have your dog groomed in Paris” - “Do your dog's toilet” - “Cut the hair of an Australian shepherd dog”, etc.

With all this data, Define a lexical field around “dog grooming.”

Develop and prioritize topics around the intentions of Internet users

You now have:

• The knowledge of high volume keywords on your sector
• Of keywords (long tail) Relevant
• Of intentions/requests on which you want to position yourself

So you can decline and organize these data in themes of topics.

For this step, put yourself in the head of your personas and answer these questions:

• “What would you like to know if you had a dog?”
• “What topics around dog grooming can you develop?”

You can now develop a range of high-impact topics! To find your way around, we recommend that you combine them in an organization chart as shown in the following diagram:

Step 2 - Organize your internal networking

After defining and developing your topics and keywords, it's time to integrate them into your site.

Audit your existing links and content

Indeed, if you already have several existing contents, it is a good idea to optimize them before adding more:

• Check your links, including your external links. Some of them may be broken: pages or websites that no longer exist (and that will not alert you of their departure...). It can also be bugs in your site's Internet code.
• Optimize SEO of your content that is already online. To do this, you can use several tools like Yourtext.guru and 1.fr.

Define your home pages

In relation to your goals, define On which pages do you want to have the most reach : they will be your home pages.

Again, we recommend that you bet on pages that deal with the most searched queries and intents by your personas.

Let's recall here - with our great example on dog grooming - that Internet users who are wondering about this subject seem particularly interested in knowing:

• How to cut the hair of your Australian shepherd dog (breed specificity)
• How to clean your dog (method)

Relying on these subjects is therefore a relevant bias to bring a Maximum traffic on profiles of prospects at high conversion potential.

Define your lower-level pages

The lower level pages will be the ones that flow from your mother and daughter pages.

Although they should all benefit from impeccable SEO optimization, their degree of inferiority aims tothicken your cocoon : they are therefore shorter and more numerous to meet the function of feed higher level pages Of SEO juice.

Step 3 - Write!

Mesh in hand, it's time to move on to writing your magnificent semantic cocoon!

The rules for implementing links

To integrate the link management in your internal network, let's use our example on dog grooming one last time.

Your cocoon head is “Dog Grooming.”

Les mother pages “Canine well-being”, “The different dog breeds”, “The methods of grooming”:

• Get all the SEO juice Pages that will follow
• Redirect to your commercial page
• Should detail a rich content and a long one on this subject, including quality media content (video, photos, etc.)
• Take as subject the Girl pages in their paragraphs (grooming methods, canine well-being, different dog breeds)

Les Girl pages “The different grooming treatments for dogs”, “Adopting a purebred dog”, “Behavioral therapies for dogs”:

• Debut With a link to the main pages
• Suggest their sister pages at the end of the article : but not just any one, they must in fact have a related meaning, a semantic link because that is the whole point of a semantic cocoon.

For example, you can more wisely link: “Behavioral therapies for dogs” with “Adopting a purebred dog.” But much less “Behavioral therapies for dogs” with “The different grooming treatments for dogs”!

Finally, integrate these practices with well-written text that offers real value while integrating the right keywords.

NB. Attention, think of our advice from the beginning! Do not over-optimize your texts at the risk of being downgraded! (only a tool will tell you...) Also respond truthfully to what one of your prospects would be looking for.

Then pass your texts through the pinwheel of an SEO analysis tool, and publish!

Repeat for each item.

Final advice:

• Create a Table of contents page with all your links To summarize the structure of your semantic cocoon, then integrate it into the footer or somewhere on your site: so you link your cocoon to it, allowing search engines to more easily analyze the structure and the The power of your cocoon semantics.

A semantic cocoon can be endless! This also gives rise to beautiful visualizations.

Because images are worth a thousand words, we share with you the visualization of a site with poorly organized content:

And that of a site organized in a semantic cocoon:

And after?

Good management of your internal networking Is the insurance for the long term significant traffic on your site, because it you gives excellent natural referencing that is actually stronger than a simple backlink strategy.

It remains a work whose results improve with time and consistency.

In the aftermath, it's about maintenance:

• Keep up to date with natural referencing criteria
• Do a auditing regularly during the year to check the validity of your links on all your content
• Do not hesitate to optimize old articles, and in particular to integrate them in connection with your new networking branches.

However, the establishment of a semantic cocoon remains a careful maneuver : it requires to align your needs, an analysis of the content of your contestants, a good writing ability And a SEO awareness.

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