In 2013, the big world of “search” went through a seismic shift with the widespread adoption of semantic search technology. Google’s “Hummingbird”, Facebook’s “Social Graph” and Bing’s “Satori” underscored an exciting year for search and new challenges for online marketers. These announcements, the continuous changes in search and the evolving behaviors of consumers across devices and channels have provided clues to what marketers and business owners can expect in 2014.
1) Start Thinking About Consumers - Stop Thinking About the Machines
Search engines have evolved into answer engines. People are typing sentences and paragraphs into search instead of keyword queries, in fact, 20 percent of Google searches are new. Google’s Hummingbird update began its transition away from keyword-based queries to better understanding intent, which allows users to search more in natural language.
As, a marketer your goal is to provide answers to the questions that consumers are asking.
Ask yourself:
2) Focus on Content Creation
The information that you display on your webpages is what draws consumers in, keeps them coming back and drives conversions. Therefore, producing quality content that consumers want is crucial to operating an effective SEO strategy.
Shooting for SERP ranking will get you nowhere in 2014. Work to create stronger associations to the content that relates to your products and services. Don’t just write descriptions about your products/services and don’t just think about keywords. Optimize for content instead of keywords to avoid getting punished.
Focus on creating an organized content program, providing helpful information and, most importantly, think about what consumers will be looking for.
3) Optimize for Entity Search, Not Keywords
Goodbye SEO gaming! Throw your keyword manipulation practices out the window and start focusing on producing better results. Ensure your site pages are optimized for entity search by using tools like Google’s Structured Markup Helper to map vocabulary to relevant semantics, taxonomies and ontologies. Google and Facebook are counting on things like semantic search, social rank and trust rank to give better results for consumers.
4) Provide Immediate and Actionable Results
Your ability to deliver high quality results, faster and better than your competitors will be the “search game changer” in 2014. SERPs are being reconstructed to give users instant access to what they want by taking into account: ‘real time’ data from social networks, product listing ads, geo-location, entity cards, consumer reviews, etc. This transforms the way people search for and access stuff online.
5) Build Smarter Ads
As traditional display and search ads are being displaced by Google’s Knowledge Graph, ensure online visibility by integrating your products into the Google Store, stay active on your Google+ for business pages and other social business pages like Facebook and LinkedIn. With entity search, you can explore creative ads that are based on both the sentiment of an article and a consumers' perception of its content in real-time.
6) Embrace Mobile Search
The number of searches performed on mobile devices continues to rise. Entity search is much more authoritative than traditional keyword search as it’s equipped with natural language processors and predictive capabilities. Take advantage of the mobile search by:
As consumer behavior morphs and technology continues to adapt, marketers will be met by new challenges in 2014. SEO strategies based on keywords will become increasingly obsolete. The number of users who end up on a content creator’s site or see a marketers paid search ad on a SERP will decrease as the nature of search changes. Search engines and social networks are using semantic search technology to make it easier to make connections, learn and explore interests faster than ever before. As a marketer, you’ll need to adapt quickly if you want to soar past the competition in the search world.
Want to know about Google's new humming bird? Read into it here on the 4 Tips That'll Keep Your Business Humming Along in a Post-Hummingbird World.
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