Google has been saying that user experience is paramount for quite sometime. A trustworthy SEO company would tell you the same. With the launch of Google Knowledge Graph, it looks like offering top-notch user experience is going to become the most important SEO strategy.
Adapting Your SEO Strategy to Knowledge Graph
The Knowledge Graph is going to make it easier for users to find the exact information they are looking for. It aims to make a connection between relevant content and offer users the opportunity to narrow down their research instantly, instead of having to glance through results that do not match the context of their search.
Though for now, you can only see Knowledge Graph results for certain short-tail keywords, remember it’s only the beginning.
For SEO the launch of this new feature means, anticipating the future trends and incorporating the following best practices:
1. Stretch Your Site’s Relevancy: Knowledge Graph offers an excellent window of opportunity to be found through related searches, even if your site doesn’t rank anywhere for the original keyword entered.
For example, let’s say you want to attract users looking to buy plants from an online nursery. You could create relevant and interesting content about different flower species, say carnations for instance. A user looking for information about the particular flower may enter ‘carnation’ in the search query and here’s what the search page would look like:
Knowledge Graph Results for ‘carnation’
If this user clicked on the Knowledge Graph result for the flower carnation, he/she would be led to a page showing results for the keyword, ‘dianthus caryophyllus’. Now, if you had an interesting article on the flower optimized for several related keywords, including its scientific name, there’s a good chance that your site would figure in the top results and the user that had entered a related search query (but a very different keyword) would find your site.
Now, since this user was looking for information about the plant, he/she may be interested in buying it as well. A student writing a report on the flower for a botany project for instance, may want to place an order for the plant.
Knowledge Graph Results for “Dianthus Caryophyllus”
2. Keep LSI in mind and create contextually relevant content: LSI, is latent semantic indexing. To state it simply, it means a system through which Google can determine which keyword term is your page actually relevant for.
Google understands that the same word used in two different contexts can alter the meaning completely. For instance, the Apple in the sentence “Apple is my favorite fruit”, is very different from the Apple in, “I love Apple’s Macbook Pro”.
In SEO terms this means, in order to make Google understand the context of your page, you need to be careful about what you write and how you write it.
With Knowledge Graph, Google will be connecting related search terms. Therefore it’s going to be even more important to give Google clarity about the context of your keywords.
Top SEO Tips to Stay In Step with Knowledge Graph
In order to extend your site’s relevancy and to make Google see your content contextually relevant, you may find the following strategies useful:
- Add connected videos and pictures to your content.
- Syndicate, share and link your content from websites like Wikipedia, Quora, E-how, Yahoo Answers, etc. Google loves them.
- Add your listings to Google+ for Business, Google Shopping, etc.
- Mention industry leaders, pioneers and celebrities related to your niche. For instance, if you own a sports store, you may consider adding interesting and relevant content about sport equipments used by famous sportsmen.
- Make use of semantically related terms and keywords.
- Make liberal use of synonyms and industry jargon.
To what extent Knowledge Graph will affect SEO, is something we’ll have to wait and watch. However, going by Google’s focus on offering the best possible user experience, it looks like Knowledge Graph is here to stay and grow. For SEO services it only makes sense to take anticipatory steps in the right direction, if they want to stay in the game!
See you at the top!