01Two scales, not two techniques
Macro semantic SEO is site-level: what entities your whole domain should be understood to represent. Micro semantic SEO is page-level: how a single page proves its coverage of one entity. They’re not alternative approaches — every site needs both, applied in that order.
02Macro: what it governs
- Which central entities the domain owns, and which it deliberately stays out of
- How pillar topics relate to each other across the whole site (topical map, not one cluster)
- Site-wide internal linking architecture and URL structure
- Overall content ratio between core (commercial) and outer (supporting) content
Get the macro layer wrong and no amount of page-level polish fixes it — you’re building depth on the wrong topic, or spreading depth across too many unrelated ones.
03Micro: what it governs
- Whether one page actually covers its assigned entity’s required attributes
- Sentence-level clarity: unambiguous subjects, explicit relationships between entities mentioned
- On-page schema matching the specific content type
- Whether the page answers the sub-questions a fan-out query would generate — see What Is Query Fan-Out?
04Where teams actually go wrong
Macro-blind
Every page individually well-written, but the site has no coherent topical map — pages compete with each other or leave obvious gaps between them.
Micro-blind
A clean topical map on paper, but individual pages are thin, generic, or miss the attributes their brief called for.
Diagnosing which one is failing is usually the first output of a proper Semantic SEO Audit: macro problems show up as pages competing with each other in search results; micro problems show up as pages that rank once and then stall.
SemanticOS runs both checks separately — a site cohesion pass for macro issues, a per-page brief-compliance pass for micro ones — because the fix for each is different.