Google is getting smarter.
‘Smarter’ might not be the right term, but the search engine giant will update its algorithm over the next few months to make Google.com more ‘human’ (insert obligatory reference to Skynet here). Last week, Google announced its plans to embed ‘Semantic Search’ capabilities (through a new system called a ‘Knowledge Graph’) that will help the search engine understand the context of normal human language to provide better results. For those of you out there with an iPhone 4S, this should sound familiar. It’s what Apple did with its Siri assistant and it feels like it’s the direction the industry is taking.
So what does this mean for B2B marketers that have worked long and hard to propel their business to page one using keywords, content etc.? It’s still to be determined but it may change your keyword strategy. Here are a few things that you should know about the shift, before making any significant changes:
- Keywords: Don’t scrap them just yet. Google is updating its algorithm to put more emphasis on contextual results, but it will still rely on keywords to help it get the closest possible answer to questions when it doesn’t understand what is being asked. If anything, this will force marketers to do deeper research on keywords and the questions that prospects are asking (and how they’re asking them).
- Content: It’s still really important. However, this may change the topics of your upcoming whitepapers, or the talking points for the video that you’re shooting. Your existing content will still help drive traffic, and this change to Google could help ensure that visitors to your site seeking that content are the right visitors. They’re more engaged; they stay on your site longer; they call you for help with their problem.
- Stickiness: Let’s face it; Google wants its users staying on Google.com longer. And part of this move is to provide a more complete experience for the user, where Google can actually provide the answer to questions because it understand the question (not just a list of the top 10 sites that it thinks ‘might’ be helpful). This may not have a very dramatic impact in B2B out of the gate but as Google continues to get smarter it will start to have answers to business related technology problems/question (not necessarily the solutions to those problems).
- Page Rank (and traffic): It won’t be a game-changer right away, but it certainly raises some interesting questions about competitive positioning and internal measurement. It would seem that website traffic may take a slight dip, but the visitors are more engaged because you’re answering the ‘real’ question that they have.
There’s still much more to be revealed about ‘Semantic Search’ but you can absolutely expect the other search engines like Bing, Yahoo etc. to quickly follow suit and work to stay ahead of this emerging trend.
