For some time now we’ve been talking about how you can use Schema markup, microformatting, as a way of providing additional semantic information to search engines about the data contained in your website. Schema markup provides additional contextual information about the data on the page, or the entity in general, assisting machines in understanding what is being discussed (read a great case study on the value of adding microformatting).
This markup provides a bridge between Indexing the data and greater Understanding of the data. The focus here is on the search engine and giving greater understanding to the search engine entity, but in many ways this is just the first foundational step of your Semantic Search strategy.
According to author David Amerland,
“Semantic search takes into account searcher intent, search query context, search query meaning and subject relevance and delivers results that are highly personalized and revolve around the search engine’s understanding of the searcher’s purpose when making the query.”
“This also creates the blueprint for the new type of marketing where brands and products can appear along the path to purchase of the consumer at moments that deliver critical, practical value, something traditional advertising cannot do.”
Intent, Context, Meaning and Relevance, four vectors that we can focus on in different ways to implement a strategy of reaching, engaging, capturing and converting our Target Audiences.
So how can we provide semantic data, a greater bridge of understanding, for the End User while also extending our Semantic Search strategy?
What follows are some basic tactics that can be employed, creating those bridges and semantic markup, while being useful aspects of strategies targeting both Human and Machine understanding.
Schema and microformatting
In a study of over 850,00 search queries, Stone Temple Consulting found that Google offered some form of rich answer (knowledge box panel) 19%+ of the time. Various case studies have shown the benefits of achieving Rich Answer recognition for your content, including:
- 30% increase in click through rates (CTR) of each result with a rich snippet
- 4pt increase in search rank positions compared to domains without schema
- 36.6% of search results include at least one rich snippet
- significant increase in search traffic for pages that are semantically enriched
For our own site we’ve found that featured snippets greatly increased search traffic for specific pages that generated these types of queries.
While not always the case, and no guarantee of success, the best way to work towards achieving any of these answer boxes is to structure your content with Schema.
Online Reviews
Take for instance the high school athlete with hamstring flexibility issues, an older gentleman with a changing body and fitness goals, an older lady training for her first triathlon and marathon, another who hadn’t seen relief from years of pain and physical therapy but became pain free…
All of these reviews add human credibility, but also add valuable content to the search profile of the studio. Their website might never mention “pain free”, “student athlete”, etc., but that content in the form of the reviews all adds semantic value from a search engine perspective, and even better, can create valuable associations for the human end users that are reading it. “I’m in pain and looking to be pain free just like this review… I should check them out!”
These reviews also play an even more important role in local search where personalization can become a huge factor, and a contributing psychological factor when you see an abundance of positive reviews and gold stars.
Staging of Products
Instead let’s look at a real life example that many people are familiar with: the IKEA showroom.
When you browse through IKEA, what you’re presented with are products within a family of related products, looks that work together to create experiences. You’re seeing individual products, and all of the information about them individually, but also additional related information and related products enabling the same relational metadata but from a human perspective. In a way, their associations to other products are more important than the products individually. And not only are you seeing relational data about the products together, but you’re establishing relational data to your own Needs and being able to Visualize how those products could fit into your own life.
This greater Contextual Data Layer adds depth and relevance to the individual entities on a Human level.
In schema language, these other product associations might be represented by the itemprops of “category”, “isRelatedTo” and “isSimilarTo”. At IKEA you’re being provided an Experience based around real life Semantic Search.
Focused Content Strategy Implementation & Quality Content Curation
By focusing our content strategy and providing quality content curation.
In much the same way as our parents used to tell us “you are what you eat”, in many ways in the online realm “you are what you share”. What you share, how often you share content on specific subjects, and the value that you add to reshares of other peoples’ content all build your audience’s perception of you – their human Semantic Markup. Your Brand, your Voice, your way of doing things… that all becomes part of the equation. It builds a Reputation Imprint in the audience member, and that reputation can often be shared become part of your public search profile.
And it’s not just the content that you share, but who that content was produced by also is of relevance as it creates Bridges of Association. Is your business surrounding itself with the topics that are relevant to it, the people whose personal brands are related to those topics, and joining or facilitating conversations on those topics?
The more those topics are discussed, and your company’s brand is engaged and associated with those discussions, the greater semantic impact to both human and machine.
Social Listening
Instead, sometimes what’s best is to do Social Listening, looking for conversations to join discussing topics of relevance to the business goals. The business doesn’t need to be pushing content, or even links back to content, in order to facilitate the association of your Identity (and Search Profile) to specific topics. Yes, this discussion strategy has the additional benefit of initiating relationships and brand recognition, perhaps even growing your audience, but more importantly it builds Brand Association and Topical Relevance.
At the same time, by using social listening, you might discover new audiences for your products and services, associations that you didn’t know existed, but could be extremely valuable. And just as discussed in the Content Strategy Implementation, your brand’s association with topics and discussions create those semantic bridges.
Converting the Visitor
While we’ve been discussing content means of improving semantic search, in my opinion one of the most important pieces to focus on is something that isn’t seen: how well you capture and convert the User. We love to discuss capturing the converting visitors because, for almost every business, these conversions are necessary in order to stay in business.
Earlier we discussed the building of a Reputation from a human perspective, but we also know that search engines are building a “Quality Reputation” as part of our search profile and their measuring of the “Long Click”. Our ability to capture and convert factors into our relevance and ranking as the human end users are telling the search engine “this is or is not relevant and valuable” for this query. We’ve witnessed and documented how conversion optimization and intent can be honed in on and used to increase reach and positioning.
By continually capturing clicks in search results listings (intent-driven titles and descriptions help significantly), and then keeping those visitors occupied or converting them, the absence of a pogo-stick behavior is reinforcing the search engine’s scoring of your relevancy for the query, which may also factor into your site’s relevancy for related queries as well.
For additional information on the Long Click and how it can be affecting SERP rankings, you can read this article by Moz entitled The Impact of Queries, Long and Short Clicks, and Click Through Rate on Google’s Rankings or watch the following video by Rand Fishkin:
Frequently Asked Questions
If you think about it, most of the web revolves around questions: search begins with a question, and all of the content in a website is, in someway, answer a question whether obvious or discreet. Your ability to educate the User and educate the Machine, by creating and defining Questions to be answered.
You can read more about how FAQ content is rich in semantic search strategy value, as well as how to put it into practice in your website.
As I think you’ll agree, there is a lot more to Semantic Search than schema markup and other technical strategies. We continually see Google and the other search engines grow in their usage of structured (schema) markup, as well as filing patents regarding the mapping of relationships and other contextual data to determine relevancy and ordering. A comprehensive online strategy that is inward and outward facing, focusing your attention on your Audience and Potential Audiences, can enable you to extend your semantic search strategy and give it depth beyond the markup of your content. It’s important to remember that Google and other search engines are focused on fulfilling the user’s needs to the best ability of the data available to them, while also seeking to build greater depth in their understanding of Entities.
It is then imperative for you to also focus on fulfilling those user’s needs, speaking towards their intent, cultivating a reputation and valuable associations, as a means of influencing the search engine understanding of You.
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