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Your French Copywriter Expert in SEO & SEA
Knowing how to create a semantic cocoon is essential to organize your website into thematic blocks.
They will make it easier for Google’s indexing robots to understand your pages.
It has even become crucial since the emergence of Chatbots such as ChatGPT or Gemini.
Indeed, these artificial intelligences must understand the semantics of your content to build their responses.
In Nature, a cocoon is a protective and nourishing mesh that surrounds the larva of the future butterfly.
Thus, everything that is necessary for the future life of the animal is contained in its cocoon.
Transposed to the theme of a web page, the notion of SEO semantic cocoon was popularized by Laurent Bourrelly, a well-known SEO expert.
In fact, the semantic cocoon represents the mesh between all the pages that deal with the same specific theme.
Let’s take an example: let’s say your company sells shoes.
All kinds of shoes. You want to get the user who visits your website to buy shoes.
Problem: you need to direct the users who visit your site to the right shoes.
Then, you need to convince them to buy them. Finally, you want the payment to actually take place and without difficulty.
Solution: create a semantic cocoon for each type of shoe.
In other words, make sure that once directed to one of these types of shoes, the user goes in the right direction towards the product intended for them.
When I need to enrich the semantics of a set of web pages, mainly for an e-commerce store, I create a semantic cocoon structured between a parent page, child page or satellites pages and a landing page.
Let’s take the example of a website selling shoes:
This is the page that should attract everyone interested in shoes in general.
So, the semantics of the content of this page should include fairly broad (and often competitive) keywords.
For example:
Each of these pages will deal with a sub-theme of the general theme of its parent page.
The keywords will be more targeted.
Example:
These pages should not just offer product categories, but also contain targeted text that explains in which case and why to choose this or that category of products.
This is what will allow search tools to analyze the content of the displayed page.
In an e-commerce site, this will be a product sheet with all its detailed information.
It will include the add to cart button.
In addition, the product description must include all the keywords from the long tail.
This type of page sequence should seem familiar to you. It is typical of an online store.
Be careful: it is not enough to create the pages and link them together.
Above all, you must create editorial content rich in terms of the same semantic family.
So far, this tree structure logic between pages seems quite classic.
Thus, for the semantic cocoon to be complete, child pages are missing.
This could be, for example, a tutorial that explains how to maintain your ski boots.
Or detailed use cases on the hiking boots best suited to a given type of terrain.
The goal of these child pages is to provide the Internet user with answers to all types of questions they might have.
It is these complementary pages that really create a semantic cocoon around the main subject.
With the emergence of artificial intelligence, tools have even been created to try to provide these answers to the Internet user, without the assistance of a human being.
I will explain this below:
To stay with the shoe store example, you will create a semantic cocoon from the product you want to sell (i.e. hiking shoes).
Most e-commerce stores use a blog in which they publish targeted articles on a range of products.
Another technique: create an FAQ (frequently asked questions) section in which you ask all types of questions about hiking shoes by providing useful and detailed answers.
Consider creating internal links between pages in the same semantic cocoon.
Indeed, the general idea is to follow the logical path of an Internet user who would have arrived on your site via one of your child pages.
To find the most frequently asked questions about a key term, simply do a Google search on this key term and consult the “Other questions” block that the engine displays at the bottom of your screen.
Finally, do not forget that search assistants such as Google’s Gemini or Bing’s Copilot are gradually replacing traditional search engines.
People will no longer enter keywords, but ask precise and concrete questions.
Example: “Gemini, suggest me men’s hiking shoes, light as sneakers and waterproof“.
A semantic cocoon is not only made up of a mesh between different pages of your website.
It is also necessary to consolidate the theme addressed in your text by using as much as possible the lexical field of the main key term.
ChatGPT is well suited to do this lexical field search.
To my request:
suggest me a list of terms synonymous with “walking shoes”
He offered me this answer:
Sure! Here are some terms synonymous with “walking shoes”:
– Comfortable shoes
– Comfy shoes
– Hiking boots
– Hiking shoes
– Outdoor shoes
– Running shoes
– Sensible shoes
– Walking boots
– Athletic shoes
– Casual shoes
– Comfort shoes
– Flats
– Orthopedic shoes
– Adventure shoes
– Footwear¹²
I hope this helps! Are you looking for a new pair of walking shoes? 😊
By using my professional tools SemRush or 1.fr I can carry out this work on your pages and make them richer semantically and therefore make them appear in more search queries.
Do you have any questions about web semantics?