Rich Snippets & Semantic Search – SEO Video

Welcome to this week SEO video blog, Today we’re talking Rich Snippers & Semantic search and how it effects SEO’s now and in the future.

First then, what is semantic search? Well the principle is to improve the search results delivered, through

a combination of formatted data & artificial intelligence to try and understand the users intent rather than giving you a result based solely on a keyword.

So how do the search engines do this? Well they use a markup language which provides specific information on a web page, Bing, Yahoo and Google got together and announced support for schema.org a format for structuring a wide range of information. We have embedded a video briefly explaining this on the supporting blog post.

Second to how Google gets this information and how it processes it, is how it’s then displayed within a search engine results page and whether this means that your site will receive lower CTR because the search engine is providing the answer to the users query automatically and displaying within the results, meaning there would be no reason to click your sites listing.

Some great examples are:

Searching for your local cinema and the films being shown displayed in the SERP (Image 1)

Searching a question and Google providing all the information before having to click a result. (image 2)

Finally simply searching an artist and Google giving you everything from DOB and Height to their top songs. (Image 3)

How can it help you SEO campaign?

Due to the nature of how the search engines are trying to cleverly process any data from web pages, you can take the opportunity within your copy (naturally of course) to include many of the answers to a query. For example, if someone searched ‘healthy diet’ they could want the answer to any of the following:

What is a healthy diet?
What types of healthy diets are there?
What food counts as a healthy diet?
Finding a healthy diet plans?

The list could be endless, so to capitalise on this you have to consider when writing your content ‘does this answer the searchers question?’. A laborious task indeed, but beneficially if you do use this tactic your copy will automatically include natural synonyms of your keywords within the copy improving your onsite SEO.

Finally then what new technology are we seeing emerge? Well our supporting web video this week is all about ‘twitter cards‘ which we have linked from the supporting blog post, Twitter Cards give the search engines key information about the tweet made, for example:

Site
Creator
URL
Description & Title
Imagery

In summary we feel you should use the rich snippet technology to provide Google with as much information as possible as we feel they will appreciate it when considering where to position your site in the search results, having said that on the flip side Google could have already answered you searches query without them ever needing to visit your site resulting in less traffic due to your good will.

Thanks for watching this week any questions or comments please leave them on the supporting blog post.