Co-occurrence

Co-occurrence is an SEO and linguistic concept referring to the frequency at which two terms, expressions, or entities appear together on the same web pages or in the same textual contexts. Unlike co-citation (which involves links), co-occurrence focuses on textual content. Google uses co-occurrence analysis to understand semantic relationships between words and entities, determine the topical relevance of a page, identify synonyms and related terms, and evaluate content quality relative to a search intent. For example, if the terms 'link building' and 'backlink' frequently appear together across many web pages, Google understands they are semantically related. In SEO, optimizing co-occurrences means naturally using in your content the terms that Google expects to find together for a given topic, which aligns with the concept of semantic optimization.