If you’re not clued up to the benefits of TF-IDF, or what it even really is, fear not – this article will explain what TF-IDF is, and why it will help your site rank higher on search engines like Google.
What is TF-IDF?
Google’s algorithms have been changing dramatically over the years – keyword trends have been following suit, given that a 2013 update allowed Google to begin interpreting the searcher’s intent as opposed to specific keywords. This is why it’s easier than ever to search online using whole phrases and sentences, as opposed to a jumble of keywords to try and get at what you want. Google has, in essence, turned into a knowledge assistant, and is closing the gaps between the searchers and the relevant results returned on the SERPs (search engine results pages).
This has done several things to SEO trends: there’s less keyword stuffing, and less trying to include every keyword variation or synonym out there on a webpage to rank highly in SERPs. It’s increased the quality of content, and its relevance, as this once again ranks webpages higher on SERPs than just a lot of keywords!
Now, Google can rank content on its relevance and number of related concepts included in any given article, to ensure that the pieces with the greatest breadth and depth rank highly on SERPs. If you want to remain competitive in the internet marketing world today, you need to have a sound knowledge of how and why Google ranks content on SERPs. In-depth content analysis is called TF-IDF analysis: that’s term frequency inverse document frequency analysis.
Basically, TF-IDF shows how often concepts appear on a page to identify what content is the most informative and relevant. It’s Google’s way of determining the quality of a piece of content, based on expectations of what a quality piece of content contains.
TF-IDF measures the importance of a keyword phrase and compares it to the frequency of the term among large sets of documents.
Reason 1: TF-IDF analysis will help your site rank for a few reasons.
TF-IDF lets you see the top-ranking results and allows you to get more traffic.
TF-IDF allows you to analyse top-ranking search results for your own keywords, enabling you to see what phrases are performing well in the top 10 or 20 pages returned for these keywords. It’s impossible to do this by yourself, but TF-IDF tools can do so effortlessly. As a result, you will have a list of relevant keywords that you can use!
Reason 2: TF-IDF allows you to spot gaps in your current content and optimize your content to rank higher and faster.
Using TF-IDF analysis, you can see what related topics are missing from your own content. This means you can add them in, in a natural way, making sure your content covers everything important related to your keywords!
As discussed, the higher quality your content, the higher it will rank on SERPs. This is because Google can analyse if your content contains all related concepts and pieces of information related to your keywords!
Reason 3: TF-IDF will help you get high-potential content out of the 2nd page of SERPs.
A lot of good content on your site may get stuck on the second or third pages of SERPs. Even though it is well-written and optimized for keywords, it may be missing that extra sparkle – and that’s what TF-IDF can give your content!
Reason 4: TF-IDF can be used for high-ranking content that is slowly losing its position.
Google’s algorithms are always changing, and you need to stay up to date with them – SERPs often change every day. TF-IDF will help keep your high-ranking content where it deserves to be – at the top!
Reason 5: TF-IDF will help your product pages rank
It is often hard to get your product pages to rank for money terms – TF-IDF can help you identify what content is missing from them and get them onto the SERPs.
Conclusively, using TF-IDF will improve your content’s relevance in SERPs. You can use this to optimize your entire site, from lower-ranking pages to product pages that don’t rank at all, to maintain your high-ranking pages place in SERPs. Improving your content’s TF-IDF in relation to your competition is crucial to getting your site ranked on Google!