Over the years, few concepts SEO have proven their effectiveness as much as the semantic cocoon. Conceptualized by French SEO expert Laurent Bourrelly, it is one of the most prized techniques in the web world.
If for very small sites you only need a sheet of paper and a pencil, it's a different story for larger sites.
Fortunately, a myriad of tools dedicated to semantic cocoons are at your disposal. Discover them by reading the article.
Rankxplorer
Made in France, Rankxplorer is an all-in-one SEO software. Among its many features, one stands out: the “semantic cocoon” function.
Thanks to it, you only need to enter your target phrase and Rankxplorer will generate all related queries. In addition, it provides detailed information on each keyword, such as its difficulty level, CPC, trend, and the web traffic it generates.
Another plus of Rankxplorer: it provides an estimate of the average marketing budget of competing websites.
Additionally, Rankxplorer has the good sense to present all its data in a polished, easy-to-understand interface. The same cannot be said for the following tool.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a 360° solution for SEO professionals. In addition to its competing keyword visualization feature, Ahrefs offers three interesting tools for creating a semantic cocoon:
- Site Explorer;
- Content Explorer;
- The keyword research tool.
Site Explorer
With it, you'll know everything about a domain, whether you own it or not. Here are some interesting metrics you'll find in this tool:
- The site's most viral content on social networks, useful for understanding what your prospects really want;
- The site's complete structure: to analyze the pages - and their organization - of your competitors or your site in the event of a redesign;
- An estimate of the traffic generated per keyword and per page.
As a bonus, the Site Explorer feature automatically suggests a list of key phrases to use for your SEO and SEA campaigns.
Content Explorer
Want theme ideas for your cocoon without manually sifting through all your competitors? Then Content Explorer is for you.
And for good reason, this crawler will analyze all sites indexed on a specific topic. Afterwards, it will serve you on a silver platter all the topics that generate the most traffic.
Keyword Explorer
An essential feature of any SEO-focused software, Ahrefs' keyword research is extremely precise. Thus, relying on its database of several thousand keywords, Ahrefs provides you with the following information:
- the CPC Cost Per Click of each keyword query;
- the traffic they generate individually;
- the level of difficulty to rank for them.
Ahrefs takes the detail even further: it reveals the keywords associated with each query as well as their LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing). Enough to give you a structural basis for your semantic silos.
However, Ahrefs suffers from two drawbacks: on the one hand, its cost is high for teams, and on the other, it will drown you in a mass of data.
SEMrush
In the SEO world, few tools are as prestigious as SEMrush. Among its array of options, one is particularly useful for the semantic cocoon: the site audit.
After putting your site under the microscope, it will reveal the following information:
- The do-follow and no-follow links present on all your pages and outside your site;
- The authority score of each of your pages, useful for spotting pages with too much or too little link equity;
- The rate of duplicate content and the pages affected.
This list is not exhaustive, of course. But concretely, what will this be useful for when setting up your semantic cocoon? To improve your site.
A brief explanation is in order.
Since the principle of the semantic cocoon relies on the distribution of SEO juice, having internal "no-follow" links is a disaster. Indeed, Google's spiders will be unable to access the pages the link points to. And as a consequence, users will have difficulty reaching those pages.
The authority score, meanwhile, proves essential for identifying the best-ranked pages. Those are the pages you will likely use as the parent page for a category.
And finally, the " duplicated content " allows you to spot poorly implemented or badly designed cocoons. Articles that are too similar, besides being a source of SEO penalties, reflect poor internal linking and topics that are too close.
Yourtext.Guru
Unlike the previous tools, YourTextGuru it is not concerned with designing a semantic cocoon, but with its implementation.
Indeed, YourTextGuru is writing-assistance software. As a webmaster, you may well be impressed by its automatic briefing generation feature.
And for good reason: you only need to enter the keyword or theme of your page to get a detailed briefing: primary keywords, secondary keywords, long-tail phrases… Everything is there.
On top of that, YourTextGuru has also equipped itself with a semantic cocoon calculator and a content idea generator. Combined, these two tools will produce a semantic cocoon plan for you.
Visiblis
After you have set up your semantic cocoon, it's time to finally be able to visualize it. With the previous SEO solutions, at best you would get indigestible Excel sheets that say little to a non-SEO expert.
And that's where Visiblis : it turns your site into a colorful graph that highlights the indexing weight of each page.
Visiblis's graphs make it easy to see the links between pages. This makes it simpler to spot parasitic pages — pages that aren't connected to others — internal linking errors, and cocoon leakage issues.
Yooda Insight
Better known for its excellent keyword research engine, Yooda Insight also includes features dedicated to keyword mind maps.
Yooda Insight returns three crucial pieces of information for creating a cocoon:
- the number of keywords a site ranks for;
- the relevant keywords for a list of queries;
- the main sites for a topic.
Used together, this information lets you quickly build a semantic cocoon. And best of all, you can export your cocoon as graphs before implementing it.
As a bonus, Yooda Insight’s blog features an excellent post detailing the entire procedure for creating a cocoon.
Cocon.SE
Specifically designed for semantic cocoons, Cocon.SE is renowned for its visualization capabilities. And for good reason: in addition to analyzing your site’s architecture and link structure, it creates a writing guide for each page.
All of this is presented as a colored semantic graph accompanied by several metrics.
Moreover, it’s one of the few tools capable of calculating the internal PageRank of a group of pages, and it does so in multiple languages.
SEOQuantum
Equipped with a complete solution dedicated to the semantic cocoon, SEOQuantum is a Swiss army knife for SEOs. The tool runs on machine learning, more precisely on deep neural networks, and crawls the web to uncover the following information:
- By entering a keyword, the tool determines the user's intent and assigns it a similarity coefficient. The higher it is, the more likely it corresponds to users' intent;
- It generates a tree grouping main topics (parent pages) and related topics (child pages) as an interactive mind map;
- For each topic, it suggests paragraphs or pages to add.
In addition to that, SEOQuantum offers two other complementary functions: a semantic crawler, which evaluates the performance of your internal linking, and a tool for creating an SEO strategy.
Bombyx4wp
When you implement your semantic cocoon on your WordPress site, you will face two problems: the internal linking process is time-consuming and WordPress doesn’t make things easy.
Fortunately, you have a solution to implement your semantic cocoon easily: Bombyx4wp.
This SEO plugin, partly designed by Laurent Bourrelly, will create your semantic cocoon for you. But first, you will need to provide it with a mind map detailing the architecture of your pages.
Then the tool will download the images and content of your pages — which you will have written beforehand — and will handle the internal linking by itself.
Best of all, Bombyx4wp will give you suggestions based on 1.fr to boost your pages' organic SEO.
A turnkey content strategy
Redacteur.com's SEO agency offers 3 turnkey SEO content packages.
What's included:
- Conducting an SEO audit focused on semantics and your positioning on Google
- Identifying the best keywords for your activity and developing content topics
- Content writing by professional web writers, optimized for SEO and formatted in HTML
Redacteur.com builds semantic cocoons for you from keywords related to your business. Depending on the chosen package, this can include up to 3 pillar pages of 2,500 words and up to 60 articles or pages of 800 words to help you rank in search engines, while creating synergies through thematic siloing of your content.
Contact our project manager to learn more and set up your semantic cocoon !
Our tip for finding the perfect software for your topic cluster
Faced with this plethora of tools for semantic cocooning, finding the ones best suited to you is almost a Herculean task.
Fortunately, you can find yours by asking yourself the following questions:
- What is your budget for SEO: if your wallet is large, solutions such as SEMrush and SEOQuantum are perfect;
- What type of software do you need? If you already have a keyword generator, there is no need to get another one. However, a visualization tool such as Visiblis or Cocon.SE will always be useful.
