What is Sentiment Analysis in SEO and Why Is It Important?
Have you ever thought of the impact your words have on your audiences?
If the answer is "NO", you're not alone — many SEOs rarely consider sentiments, even though research shows higher-ranked sites have more positive content.
Want to learn what sentiment analysis means and why it matters for SEO? Continue reading!
What is Sentiment?
Sentiment refers to the emotional qualities inherent in all forms of communication — whether oral or written. The sentiments expressed in a piece of content can vary depending on the writer's choice of words. For instance, an article can be positive, negative, or neutral in its tone.
Sentiment isn't limited to content, however. What your consumers say about your company and how they feel about its products are examples of sentiment. Classic examples include customer reviews, comments on posts, and social mentions.
What is Sentimental Analysis?
Sentiment analysis evaluates content to measure the degree of positivity, neutrality, or negativity expressed by the writer. Sentiment analysis leverages powerful machine learning applications or natural language processing software to detect sentiment in texts.
When creating content, sentiment analysis is useful for evaluating the dominant tone. It is also possible to analyze online comments about your company to understand the feelings of people around your brand.
Companies use sentiment analysis to measure public opinion, assess brand loyalty, and evaluate audience reaction to products. As SEOs, we can use sentiment analysis to evaluate its impact on audience engagement, bounce rate, and search engine performance.
The Role of Sentiment Analysis in SEO
For beginner SEO professionals, understanding the importance of sentiments in SEO may be difficult. At the beginner stage, you only know the general factors affecting SEO performance, such as load speed, page content, site security, keyword optimization, etc. Hidden ranking factors — like sentiment analysis — only become obvious as you gain more experience.
While the jury is out on whether Google incorporates sentiment analysis into search results, there is some evidence that sentiments influence featured snippets. Google even has a tool for analyzing sentiments.
Here are other reasons why you should consider sentiment analysis in your SEO campaign:
- Trustworthiness
It's an open secret that Google ranks sites using the E-A-T criteria (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). While it's easy to match expertise and authoritativeness, fulfilling the trust component takes some work.
That's where sentiment analysis enters the picture.
With sentiment analysis, we can determine public sentiments around our brand. For Google to consider your site trustworthy, online sentiment around your brand must be overwhelmingly positive.
Better Keyword strategy
Sentiment analysis can help you figure out what keywords will generate the highest return on your investments. We can review product reviews to understand consumer sentiments and create content that answers their questions and addresses concerns.
Imagine sentiment analysis shows a huge number of sentiments among car buyers revolving around, say, fuel economy. You can improve SEO performance by optimizing keywords like "most fuel-efficient cars".
We can do the same for product descriptions and meta tags as well. Instead of listing random information about products, descriptions and meta will focus on specific features and qualities that audiences are looking for in products.
Relevant content
Analyzing comments for emotional indicators to know what posts audiences found relevant, giving you content ideas for future purposes. Also, you can understand the feelings, thoughts, and attitudes of readers -- all of which help in creating consumer-focused content and reduce bounce rate.
How to Conduct Sentiment Analysis
While it sounds difficult, sentiment analysis is easier than most imagine. If you are handy with code, you could manually analyze content for specific emotions. However, the chances are that you may not have the skills nor the time to run manual sentiment analysis.
I use the Sqwizo Sentiment Analysis tool to check my content and detect if it's overly positive, negative, or neutral. The tool can highlight blocks of text and determine the exact sentiment they convey, making it easier to fix problems in tone.
Additionally, you can spy on competitors to know the prevalent sentiment in their content. Simply copy your competitor’s website URL and paste into the tool to extract sentiments expressed in their content.
Conclusion
Sentiment analysis will continue to play a critical role in SEO performance, as search engines focus on consumer interaction with brands and their content. Lower bounce rates and positive mentions of your brand will bolster your site's trustworthiness and (hopefully) correspond to increase in search rankings. Try sentiment analysis today!
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