This post is first of a multi-part series exploring how marketing is shifting from search to semantic.
Let’s take a journey back about 3-5 years in the world of online search. Imagine it’s a Friday night and you are trying to determine where to have dinner. It isn’t a typical night out, but a nice night out. You’ve lined up a sitter for the kids and you are eager for a night among adults. You are a suburban Chicago family, but tonight, you are heading to the city.
Where do we go? Perhaps you seek to find a place where you can get a nice steak and a good bottle of wine? Let’s go online and search it out?
“Chicago Steak Restaurant” or
“Steak Chicago” or
“Chicago Best Steak” or
“Great Steak Chicago Downtown”
Now, we look at the above “Search Phrases” and we ask ourselves, should this be the right way to find what we are looking for?
Perhaps more clearly, is this the best phrase to enter to get the search result we are looking for?
The Early Days Of The Web Were About SEO
In the early days of the web, and more specifically of search, your findings in a given Internet search really had little to do with your searches.
Rather the outcomes of your searches had to do with the sites that were best developed to be found when you entered certain, often-incoherent search phrases.
Consider the example above about the steak house. Why would someone type a search query like “Chicago Restaurants Steak?”
Wouldn’t it make more sense to type, “I’m looking for a great steakhouse in Chicago?”
I think the answer is obvious, of course it makes more sense to type the question as you are thinking it, but even just a couple of years ago the results would have been disastrous.
In the earlier days of the web, it was about search engine optimization, keywords, easy-to-spider menus and footers and other “Tricks” to help the search engine find your site more successfully.
For the SEO professional that knew what they were doing it would have been easy for them to have a steakhouse in Milwaukee yet win your “Chicago Restaurant Steak” query by just setting up the page correctly.
Great for the restaurant in Milwaukee, sort of, but for the couple just looking for a night out? What a mess. Well, at least if they were hoping to solve their restaurant decision by using a [entity display=”Google” type=”organization” subtype=”company” active=”false” key=”google” ticker=”GOOGL” exchange=”NASDAQ” natural_id=”fred/company/1821″]Google[/entity] search.
Fast Forward To The Modern Web
So here is the thing, when search engines were first developed, it was really about making the Internet more manageable.
Now with Petabytes of data being created on a daily basis, much of which is unstructured, highly disorganized data, the complexity by which we search is becoming more complicated. But not because what we are asking is more complicated, but because the search engines have more information to filter through in order to find us the results that we are looking for.
Let’s move this from Date Night to [entity display=”Business” type=”channel” active=”false” key=”business” natural_id=”channel_1″]Business[/entity] 101, if you are a [entity display=”business” type=”channel” active=”false” key=”business” natural_id=”channel_1″]business[/entity] and you have a product or service to sell, chances are you are online. If not, I’m afraid for you.
But in serious, businesses today are largely online and they have in droves taken their web presence from where it was a few years ago which was likely an “Online Brochure” to some type of second generation website that considers trends such as social media, content marketing, and of course search engine optimization.
The reason we as business owners do all of this isn’t because we love technology (not all of us, at least), but rather because we know that people are doing more and more of their research about what they want to buy, and who from, online.
The Future Of Search Is Semantic
Why are we online? Really?
In the modern age of the web, we have reached a point where business, social, intelligence and emotion are all intertwined.
While our business presence and our personal presence may have great disparity, our existences are largely captured online and the way we interact with the web are completely intermingling with how we market our businesses online.
In essence, we have reached the point where the web is no longer about filtering search results; rather it is complex, emotional and intelligent.
Today the web is being filtered in a new way, in a way that has us asking questions much like we would over the course of a civilized conversation.
In a world where our queries are more tan “Thing, Location” we need to be able to get answers that tell us not just who, what, when, where and how; but why.
This is the semantic web, where search results are driven by more than just how keywords are stacked on a page or even by how many inbound links you have, but rather how socially engaged your site is and by how well you contextually provide relevant information to match a search query.
I’m by no means here to challenge the likes of Matt Cutts, or the team at Search Engine Watch as to the mechanics of SEO for the modern web. When it comes to that part of Internet, there are many, many great minds.
I for one believe that even in an age of semantic search where social and context are the guides to search results, that all sites can benefit from the proper use of best SEO practices. However, having said that, I believe in the future the web will be entirely about connecting consumers (people) with better information and ideas from the most relevant sources by allowing them to converse with the web the same way they do with people. The only difference is that results can be drawn from the depths of the Internet rather than just those sitting with you across the table.
In next weeks post we will explore how search is changing to better understand human queries. We will look into what Google’s Hummingbird algorithm meant for marketers and how the future of the web will be based on deconstructing our sentences to capture more than what we are saying, but what we mean.
