Improving salience scores for sentences on your website can help you boost your leads and revenue. 

But how? In my latest piece I’m going to break down the steps, and show you how. 

First, what is a salience score? Actually before we talk about salience, I’m going to briefly talk about Natural Language Processing (NLP). 

What is Natural Language Processing? 

According to Google’s definition: 

“Natural language processing (NLP) uses machine learning to reveal the structure and meaning of text. With natural language processing applications, organizations can analyze text and extract information about people, places, and events to better understand social media sentiment and customer conversations”

So in simple terms, without complicating things, Google uses Natural Language Processing when working out where to rank your page in the search engine results. The concept of salience falls under NLP. 

So now let’s talk about salience. 

What Is Salience?

According to Google: 

“The salience score for an entity provides information about the importance or centrality of that entity to the entire document text. Scores closer to 0 are less salient, while scores closer to 1.0 are highly salient”. 

Ok, so here Google is essentially telling you that content with higher salience scores will be favored in the search engine results page. 

But how is that possible, and how can you measure salience? 

How Can You Measure Salience? 

You can measure your salience score with Google’s Natural Language API demo. You can find it here. 

Enter the specific text that you want analyzed. To begin with, I would recommend analyzing the first sentence or two for every paragraph in your article – followed by all sentences that use your main keyword for.  

Let’s test it out. 

So what do the numbers and colours mean?

Under the entities tab, you’ll find where your main keyword, or part of your keyword is listed.  

If your keyword isn’t listed to have the most salient entry, then well there’s room for improvement. 

The colours represent what topic the keywords fall under, so in this case mattress is identified as a consumer good. 

It’s really important that your most salient keyword is identified as the category it belongs to. If you’re reviewing a mattress, then Google needs to identify the mattress as a consumer good. 

Here the API identifies a mattress as a consumer good, but the most salient entry is “third”. 

Our goal is to make “mattress” the most salient entry. 

How Can You Improve Salience Scores? [Without Using AI and With Using AI]

Without using AI, you can try playing around with the order of the keyword in the sentence, sometimes moving the main keyword closer to the front of the sentence helps. Of course your sentence still needs to make sense. 

Let’s see if this worked: 

It did! I rearranged the sentence, and now the salience score for “mattress” nearly tripled. 

There’s another way you can improve salience, and that’s with this prompt:

Can you help me improve the salience score for the keyword [your keyword] of the following sentence:

So there you go, that’s how easy it is to improve your salience score. Now, pick a few articles that are not ranking in position one and improve the salience scores of important sentences. I’m A/B testing as we speak, and I’ll update this article to provide you with the results. 

Over time you won’t need to use Google’s tool, you’ll naturally be able to work out and see if the salience scores of your articles make sense for the keywords that you’re trying to rank for. 

Now for the disclaimer. 

Improving Your Salience Score Alone Will Not Help Your Rankings

You still need to make sure that all of your other SEO elements are in order – improving your salience score can be used as a part of your wider SEO strategy. 

Improving your salience score but no-indexing your URL will not help you rank – so while you’re here why not checkout my guide to completing an SEO audit? 

If you’re hesitant about getting technical, i’ve also created a guide that will help you master the art of keyword research. 

Okay back to salience, 

If you have any questions then feel free to reach out to me with the contact form, or connect with me on Twitter (soon to be X) or LinkedIn. 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/harpreetchatha_ 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harpreetsingh8/

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