If you’re in the field of SEO, you may have seen the term LSI keywords used on multiple occasions.
SEO charlatans tend to use the phrase LSI keywords when they want to sound smart, and they use it to describe “keyword synonyms” and “related keywords.”
Some legitimate SEO professionals also mistakenly use the term, and this further muddies the waters on what LSI keywords actually are to the layperson.
The reality is: the SEO concepts that the LSI keywords term is supposed to illustrate do not have any relation to LSI at all.
In today’s episode, Brian explains why LSI keywords are SEO BS and SEO snake oil and why you must steer clear of using the term.
Why? Because it is not grounded in reality, and there are no facts to back it up.
A post by Bill Slawski explains as well.
You can watch the video here:
Ask an SEO Episode 14 Transcript
Today’s question is: what are LSI keywords?
All right, LSI keywords is a term that is used to refer to synonyms and related keyword phrases.
Now, it should not be used in that vein because—let’s take a look at a couple of things here. With LSI, that refers to latent semantic indexing. And this is an indexing technology that was invented by Susan Dumais—who worked at Bell Labs and invented this technology in the late 1980s.
That’s how old this is.
So to be using this in the year 2021 is really irrelevant.
And Google very likely has overhauled their algorithms far and above what any kind of LSI would be capable of doing, right?
So it stands to reason, then, that one should really just use “related keyword phrases” and “keyword synonyms” when describing what they mean.
Don’t use LSI keywords.
Because all that does is perpetuate the myth that Google uses LSI, which is actually false.
And you can be sure that if people talk about LSI keywords and they use that term, then they’re really just spreading SEO BS and SEO snake oil—all rolled into one.
That’s it for today’s Ask an SEO Episode 14.
This is Brian Harnish signing off.
Please be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel for a brand-new episode every week! Have a great day!
