<b>"Add LSI keywords so Google understands your topic."</b>

<b>"Add LSI keywords so Google understands your topic."</b>

LSI keywords aren't a thing Google uses. They aren't really a thing at all.

Latent Semantic Indexing is a real 1980s information-retrieval technique built for tiny, static document sets. It does not scale to the live web and Google has flatly said it doesn't use "LSI keywords." The phrase was reverse-engineered by SEO tool marketers who needed a scientific-sounding name for "related words."

Here's what's actually true underneath the snake oil: covering related concepts helps, because modern ranking models understand topical relationships. A mortgage article that never mentions "interest rate," "down payment," or "amortization" looks thin to those models.

But you don't get there by pasting a tool's "LSI list." You get there by actually covering the subtopics a knowledgeable writer would. The synonyms come for free when you know the subject.

(If a tool charges you for "LSI keyword suggestions," you're paying for a thesaurus with a lab coat on.)