What a semantic core is in plain words
A semantic core is the list of queries people use to search for your products and services in search engines. Not an abstract “keyword list for show”, but effectively a map of demand: what people ask, how they phrase it, what matters to them — price, timelines, reviews or “near home”.
Without a core, site promotion turns into guesswork. With a core you know exactly which pages to create, what to put in headings and which articles the blog needs.
Types of search queries
By frequency
- High-frequency (HF) — “buy a sofa”. Thousands of impressions a month, fierce competition.
- Mid-frequency (MF) — “buy a corner sofa cheap”. More specific already.
- Low-frequency (LF) — “buy a corner sofa with a storage box in Tver”. Few impressions, but the person knows what they want and is almost ready to buy.
A common-sense rule: for a young site to climb into HF is like opening a stall across from a hypermarket. Start with LF and MF — the traffic there is cheaper and conversion is higher.
By intent
- Commercial — “buy”, “price”, “order”, “with delivery”. They lead to cards and services.
- Informational — “how to choose”, “which is better”, “DIY”. They lead to the blog.
- Navigational — searching for a specific brand or site.
Mixing intents on one page is a classic mistake. A service page with a wall of “how to choose” in the middle ranks for neither commercial nor informational queries.
How to work with Yandex Wordstat
Wordstat (wordstat.yandex.ru) is Yandex’s free query-statistics service. The main techniques:
- A base query. Type “apartment renovation” — you see everything containing these words, plus the right-hand “similar queries” column. The right column is gold: synonyms and adjacent topics live there that you wouldn’t think up yourself.
- Quotes. «"apartment renovation"» shows the frequency of exactly this phrase without tails. The difference between 100,000 and 2,000 in quotes means the main demand is in refined queries.
- The «!» operator. Fixes the word form: «!apartment !renovation».
- Region. Always set your city — nationwide frequency tells you nothing if you work in Samara.
- Query history. The seasonality tab: air conditioners are searched in May–July, Christmas trees in December. Plan content in advance.
A step-by-step plan for gathering a core
- Write out markers — the base names of services and products, as you call them and as clients call them (often different words: you say “oral sanitation”, the client says “fix all my teeth at once”).
- Run the markers through Wordstat, gather the expansions and the right column.
- Peek at competitors. Open the top-5 sites for your queries and look at the structure: what pages, sections and articles they have.
- Collect search suggestions — what Yandex and Google offer as you type. These are people’s live phrasings.
- Clean out the junk: negative keywords “free”, “DIY”, “used”, “jobs”, other cities and brands you don’t carry.
- Cluster — group queries by meaning. One cluster = one page. “Buy a sofa” and “sofas cheap” are one page, while “how to reupholster a sofa” is a blog article.
LSI words: what to “dress” pages with
LSI (latent semantic indexing) — words accompanying the topic. For “apartment renovation” these are “estimate”, “rough finishing”, “screed”, “turnkey”, “foreman”. By them search engines understand the text is written by an expert, not by a copywriter for 100 rubles. Where to get them: the right column of Wordstat, word highlighting in the results, the “people also search” block at the bottom of the search page.
Typical mistakes
- Gather 10,000 keywords and stop — a core without pages does nothing.
- Make a page for every query — you’ll get a hundred duplicate pages that merge in the results.
- Ignore region and seasonality.
- Gather it once and forget — demand changes, a core is worth reviewing every six months.
Takeaway
A semantic core isn’t magic but a careful few days’ work: Wordstat, competitors, suggestions, cleaning, clustering. But afterward every page of the site answers real demand, not the owner’s fantasies. If you don’t have time to figure it out yourself — we gather the core and the site structure as part of our SEO services.
