I was going to write a post titled ‘Google Voice Search: What does it mean for marketers?’
But then I realised it would be apt to sum up Google’s update with as few written words as possible.
It’s great fun exploring Google’s voice search and knowledge graph, so here’s my summation of Google’s update through some choice screenshots.
Semantic search has been around for a while and many SEOs know it very well.
They understand its importance and that Google is sending more and more signals that it will influence rankings now and even more so in the future.
Wikipedia has been one of the success stories of the internet, growing rapidly to become the de facto reference site for many people.
There are more than 4.4m pages in the English language edition alone, and it is still growing at the rate of 771 new pages every day.
How can its impact benefit digital marketers?
Last week I came across a great thought-provoking article by Carrie Hill on Search Engine Land outlining a few underutilised ways of implementing schema.
Much of the article was technical common sense until I read the words: Schema Now, Not Later.
Anyone that has read my previous posts on Econsultancy (especially those on the Knowledge Graph) will know of my love of all things structured, which is why it was such a joy to hear others lauding the virtues of schema.org mark-up.
Google recently released a blog post outlining how Schema.org organisation mark-up can be used as a way for publishers to tell Google which preferred logo they’d like to appear against their search results.
This had previously been available to brands on Google+ but its availability has been extended following a shift in behaviour by the search engines to try and display this information in a completely new way.
Google was rather busy last year with algorithm updates and product launches, but that didn’t stop it from taking strides towards the “internet of things” and a more semantic web.
As I wrote in my recent search engine analysis 2012 saw Google announce to the UK one of a number of aggressive product announcements that may well prove to become the most game-changing (in the long run) in terms of the web.
Enter the Knowledge Graph, a database of over 570m of the most searched-for people, places and things (entities), including around 18bn cross-references. A truly impressive demonstration of what a semantic search engine with structured data can bring to the everyday user.