What is a semantic cocoon

The Semantic Cocoon is an organization of the pages of a website into isolated tree branches. The pages of a branch come together on the basis of semantically close words. This to respond in advance to the most expected queries of Internet users on search engines. It is a concept of architecture and optimization of web pages. French SEO expert Laurent Bourrelly started it. Here are some pointers on what a semantic cocoon is and how to consider it in your SEO strategy.

What’s it for

The ultimate goal of using semantic cocoons is to generate qualitative traffic to each page of a website. By creating a relevant mesh in the SEO tree, it allows to make sure that the page related to a main keyword appears in the SERPs. This in response to the corresponding queries. The user experience is therefore improved, since the visitor gets a result that better suits his expectations.

Difference with siloing

Siloing consists of creating groups of pages, called silos, which are categories of keywords. The link structure is less strict than that of the semantic cocoon. We start with a main keyword and group the pages dealing with secondary keywords by theme. The semantic cocoon starts from the target’s problematic and has a stricter logic in the division of the sub-articles.

How to build a semantic cocoon

Determine, from a semantic audit and an analysis of your target, the keywords, the key search expressions, the themes like search intentions and associated searches, and the editorial sites.  Define the type of content proposed and establish a content hierarchy in your tree structure. Write informative content related to the targeted theme, while paying attention to the lexical field defined on the basis of your semantic audit.

Keyword Research

The foundations of a semantic cocoon are defined by keyword research. You must first think about the profile of your future visitors or in other words, your buyer personas. What are their needs? What queries do they use to find what they need?

Take care of your content

The relevance of the content and the answers given to the Internet users will help to capture the attention of the audience. Don’t forget the marketing dimension of the texts produced.

Remember: The main goal of a semantic cocoon is to provide juice to a target page by using a relevant internal mesh.