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Google’s release of their feature, Google Knowledge Graph, served as a dawn for an easier search on the most powerful search engine of the world. Google once again made a huge leap over its competitors last year.With it, you can get much quicker access to the information that you are looking for without having to jump back and forth to different websites.
As they explain it themselves, Google’s latest modification enables a faster search with more in-depth information taken. It enables a semantic search that garners from an extensive range of resources to make your search more accurate, ultimately providing the information that you are specifically looking for. Basically, it’s an integration of so many complex search ideas and presenting it in a very simple way, understanding the human brain.
The Google Knowledge Graph was initially announced in May 2012, having been released in the United States later on, subsequently worldwide. The information that is derived through it is greatly detailed and structured accordingly to the topic that the user seeks, providing links to other sites as well. The idea of it is to help the users get a hold of what they need without the need to navigate through various websites and structuring the information they get on their own.
Google has stated that the ideas derived in Google Knowledge Graph are from various sources that include Wikipedia, Freebase and others. In essence, it entails the same intent as answer engines such as Ask Jeeves. An estimate back in 2012 reveals that it held a semantic network of more than 500 million objects, which contains 18 billion facts. These facts are used to determine how each object is related to the others and what they are. This lets the Knowledge Graph understand the keywords used for every search that is made.
For example, if you search “Da Vinci”, then you will get the block about Leonardo Da Vinci within the search result page on the right hand side.
(Image Courtesy: Screenshots from Google search)
You can only expect Google Knowledge Graph to grow even bigger sooner or later. Its rising popularity is apparent and you can just imagine the measures that Google is making to enhance it. In that respect, you can choose to ignore it, or better yet, you can take advantage of it for your business. Other business entities have probably failed to see, but this Google feature certainly makes for new, perhaps even better, online opportunities. If you take the time to weigh on the possibilities, then you can easily see the ways in which you can benefit from Google Knowledge Graph. One of the ways is through Search Engine Optimization.
You might think otherwise, but this feature might just make your SEO efforts that much easier. Arguably, it has made several websites lose a significant amount of traffic. One clear example is Wikipedia, which is the website where users usually gather the information they need for various topics. The wide scope of information that can be taken was a definite hit for many people.
With the Google Knowledge Graph, Wikipedia is one of the sites that will typically lose visitors. At such, Google’s smart feature gives out the most relevant information from that website, giving the users the option of skipping the process of reading the whole page that Wikipedia has on the topic. Hence, it becomes an advantage for the user but not for the website. On the other hand, the semantic search also makes several websites lose traffic.
Google Knowledge Graph makes the search so accurate that the user is essentially taken straight to where they need to go. It chooses the more credible sources and shows them to the users. More often than not, the big companies with prominent brands are selected. Thus, smaller companies lose their chance to make their products and/or services known.
Going back, there is definitely still a way for you to use this feature to your advantage through SEO. You might even find that it is not at all that hard to do. First of all, you need to keep in mind that the biggest reason that Google made this enhancement is to help users discover how information online is connected to each other. Be mindful though that there are times when these things have no real connection, except perhaps a similar name.
Branding is everything for Google Knowledge Graph. To use the graph to better your SEO efforts, you have to focus on enhancing the graph of your own brand. Since the search results are more polished, this feature makes it a lot easier to get a higher ranking than less relevant pages. There are fundamentally two ways in which you can attain SEO benefits through the graph – result information and synonyms rankings.
For the former, knowing the information source of Google is key. Through this, you can see that your brand will be exhibited positively. The latter on the other hand, synonyms or targeted words are the focus. If in the past, the trend is to have two different web pages to rank for synonyms, then the graph feature from Google gives a better solution today. Having two pages with similar content decreases a website’s value and it will probably not rank high since it will be seen as unhelpful for the users.
Using the feature to your website’s advantage is something that is definitely worth your time. You can create pages about your brand on websites like Wikipedia, Freebase or any high authority sites. Google is using them to create the knowledge graph. Google will definitely make enhancements in the future so it will be smart to know your way around it as early as now.
Hardy is a SEO specialist at Supple Solutions, writes about social media, web design and all online marketing trends on Supple’s blog.