How Semantic Search is Changing Everything

In the digital marketing world the words “game changer” rank right alongside “awesome” in terms of overuse. Yet, when it comes to semantic search nothing less can adequately prepare the marketer for the seismic change that’s coming. The reason for this lies more in the way digital marketing has operated to date and less on how search works. Interestingly it is the practices of the former that are forcing changes in the latter. 

Put a bit more simply, if your online digital marketing strategy is based upon the creation of content that is keyword stuffed, contained tightly within a website and relying solely upon the usual link spamming to help search engines discover it, you are setting yourself up to fail. The reason lies in the way search now grades websites. In the semantic web the content contained in a website, regardless of uniqueness, quality or ‘cleverness’ will fail to do much in search if it does not also engage its intended online audience. 

In Google’s semantic world ‘sentiment mining’ (what is being said about you), engagement (how your content is received), citation (where your website and brand are mentioned) and interaction (how your website is linked to) form the four pillars upon which your new marketing needs to be based on. The good news is that gaming search and creating ‘shortcuts’ in marketing is now so effort-intensive that it makes no real economic search any more, so you may as well do the right thing and create a digital presence that delivers real value to the online visitor, is completely engaging and works hard to clarify the character and identity of your business. 

If that sounds like a lot of hard work it’s because, it is. While the execution of creating a digital footprint is about the same (i.e. you still need to have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a presence in Google+, and a socially-enabled rich media account like YouTube or Instagram) the integration of all this now changes drastically. Pumping out content makes no sense if now it is not also the kind of content that helps create a distinct ‘voice’ and identity for your business and foster engagement with its target audience. 

While all this sounds like marketing 101, in the not too-distant past, many a marketer has been guilty of the “never mind the quality, feel the width syndrome” in their marketing. They could get away with it because search, back then, could be fooled. A strong enough presence on the web could be counted upon to boost ranking in the search results pages and a high enough placement in Google’s search was directly convertible to sales and cash. While this is still the case, in the semantic web, search is a lot harder to convince. 

The detailed, nuanced approach to indexing and assessing websites that Google now has in place is delivering a much more trustworthy, responsive service in terms of surfacing results in search; in response to end-user search queries. This is now forcing marketers, brands and companies, to become more real in their marketing presence. More engaging. More transparent. 

In the lingo of a bygone age, those who “can’t put up” now have no place on the semantic web, and that is not a bad thing.    

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