What is an LSI keyword?
Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2025 5:11 am
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are a divisive topic within the SEO community. Many are confused about what they are and whether they actually help improve your website’s ranking in Google.
There is no denying that there are a lot of misconceptions about them.
We want to clear up this confusion and help you understand what LSI keywords are, and whether or not they are important. In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at LSI keywords.
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are words that saudi arabia telegram number database are related to a main keyword and are considered semantically relevant. If the main keyword of your page is "credit cards", examples of LSI keywords would be "money", "credit score", "credit limit" or "interest rate".
However, they are not synonyms (different words that mean the same thing). They are closely related words that help define the topic of a page.
At Semrush, we use “ semantically related words ,” and if you want your web pages to rank in the SERPs, you can’t ignore the importance of including them in your content.
Google has moved beyond indexing a page based on specific keywords (which was the case before). Its algorithms use closely related keywords to contextualize content, especially in cases of ambiguity.
In the past, Google would look for occurrences of a keyword on a page to determine its relevance to the query. In our example above: if your page is about credit cards, that keyword was used to determine its relevance, and simplistically, the more mentions, the better.
But this wasn't an accurate way to determine the relevance of a page, and it led to keyword stuffing and an obsession with keyword density. So the search engine evolved. By using semantically related words, it can now define a topic more precisely than by considering the number of times a keyword is mentioned.
There is no denying that there are a lot of misconceptions about them.
We want to clear up this confusion and help you understand what LSI keywords are, and whether or not they are important. In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at LSI keywords.
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are words that saudi arabia telegram number database are related to a main keyword and are considered semantically relevant. If the main keyword of your page is "credit cards", examples of LSI keywords would be "money", "credit score", "credit limit" or "interest rate".
However, they are not synonyms (different words that mean the same thing). They are closely related words that help define the topic of a page.
At Semrush, we use “ semantically related words ,” and if you want your web pages to rank in the SERPs, you can’t ignore the importance of including them in your content.
Google has moved beyond indexing a page based on specific keywords (which was the case before). Its algorithms use closely related keywords to contextualize content, especially in cases of ambiguity.
In the past, Google would look for occurrences of a keyword on a page to determine its relevance to the query. In our example above: if your page is about credit cards, that keyword was used to determine its relevance, and simplistically, the more mentions, the better.
But this wasn't an accurate way to determine the relevance of a page, and it led to keyword stuffing and an obsession with keyword density. So the search engine evolved. By using semantically related words, it can now define a topic more precisely than by considering the number of times a keyword is mentioned.