seo

Posted by ronell-smith

If you think creating content for boring industries is tough, try creating content for an expensive product that’ll be sold in a so-called boring industry. Such was the problem faced by Mike Jackson, head of sales for a large Denver-based company that was debuting a line of new high-end products for the fishing industry in 2009.

After years of pestering the executives of his traditional, non-flashy company to create a line of products that could be sold to anglers looking to buy premium items, he finally had his wish: a product so expensive only a small percentage of anglers could afford them.

(image source)

What looked like being boxed into a corner was actually part of the plan.

When asked how he could ever put his neck on the line for a product he’d find tough to sell and even tougher to market, he revealed his brilliant plan.

“I don’t need to sell one million of [these products] a year,” he said. “All I need to do is sell a few hundred thousand, which won’t be hard. And as far as marketing, that’s easy: I’m ignoring the folks who’ll buy the items. I’m targeting professional anglers, the folks the buyers are influenced by. If the pros, the influencers, talk about and use the products, people will buy them.”

Such was my first introduction to how it’s often wise to ignore who’ll buy the product in favor of marketing to those who’ll help you market and sell the product.

These influencers are a sweet spot in product marketing and they are largely ignored by many brands

Looking at content for boring industries all wrong

A few months back, I received a message in Google Plus that really piqued my interest: “What’s the best way to create content for my boring business? Just kidding. No one will read it, nor share information from a painter anyway.”

I went from being dismayed to disheartened. Dismayed because the business owner hadn’t yet found a way to connect with his prospects through meaningful content. Disheartened because he seemed to have given up trying.

You can successfully create content for boring industries. Doing so requires nothing out of the ordinary from what you’d normally do to create content for any industry. That’s the good news.

The bad news: Creating successful content for boring industries requires you think beyond content and SEO, focusing heavily on content strategy and outreach.

Successfully creating content for boring industries—or any industry, for that matter—comes down to who’ll share it and who’ll link to it, not who’ll read it, a point nicely summed up in this tweet:

I just don’t understand the mindset of ‘build content –> build links to it’. Identify link opps FIRST, then create content to service them.

— Jon Cooper (@PointBlankSEO) April 7, 2015

So when businesses struggle with creating content for their respective industries, the culprits are typically easy to find:

• They lack clarity on who they are creating content for (e.g., content strategy, personas)
• There are no specific goals (e.g., traffic, links, conversions, etc.) assigned regarding the content, so measuring its effectiveness is impossible
• They’re stuck in neutral thinking viral content is the only option, while ignoring the value of content amplification (e.g., PR/outreach)

Alone, these three elements are bad; taken together, though, they spell doom for your brand.

If you lack clarity on who you’re creating content for, the best you can hope for is that sometimes you’ll create and share information members of your audience find useful, but you likely won’t be able to reach or engage them with the needed frequency to make content marketing successful.

Goals, or lack thereof, are the real bugaboo of content creation. The problem is even worse for boring industries, where the pressure is on to deliver a content vehicle that meets the threshold of interest to simply gain attention, much less, earn engagement.

For all the hype about viral content, it’s dismaying that so few marketers aren’t being honest on the topic: it’s typically hard to create, impossible to predict and typically has very, very little connection to conversions for most businesses.

What I’ve found is that businesses, regardless of category, struggle to create worthwhile content, leading me to believe there is no boring industry content, only content that’s boring.

“Whenever we label content as ‘boring,’ we’re really admitting we have no idea how to approach marketing something,” says Builtvisible’s Richard Baxter.

Now that we know what the impediments are to producing content for any industry, including boring industries, it’s time to tackle the solution.

Develop a link earning mindset

There are lots of article on the web regarding how to create content for boring industries, some of which have appeared on this very blog.

But, to my mind, the one issue they all suffer from is they all focus on what content should be created, not (a) what content is worthy of promotion, (b) how to identify those who could help with promotion, and (c) how to earn links from boring industry content. (Remember, much of the content that’s read is never shared; much of what’s shared is never read in its entirety; and some of the most linked-to content is neither heavily shared nor heavily read.)

This is why content creators in boring industries should scrap their notions of having the most-read and most-shared content, shifting their focus to creating content that can earn links in addition to generating traffic and social signals to the site.

After all, links and conversions are the main priorities for most businesses sharing content online, including so-called local businesses.

(Image courtesy of the 2014 Moz Local Search Ranking Factors Survey)

If you’re ready to create link-earning, traffic-generating content for your boring-industry business follow the tips from the fictitious example of RZ’s Auto Repair, a Dallas, Texas, automobile shop.

With the Dallas-Forth Worth market being large and competitive, RZ’s has narrowed their speciality to storm repair, mainly hail damage, which is huge in the area. Even with the narrowed focus, however, they still have stiff competition from the major players in the vertical, including MAACO.

What the brand does have in its favor, however, is a solid website and a strong freelance copywriter to help produce content.

Remember, those three problems we mentioned above—lack of goals, lack of clarity and lack of focus on amplification—we’ll now put them to good use to drive our main objectives of traffic, links and conversions.

Setting the right goals

For RZ, this is easy: He needs sales, business (e.g., qualified leads and conversions), but he knows he must be patient since using paid media is not in the cards.

Therefore, he sits down with his partner, and they come up with what seems like the top five workable, important goals:

1. Increased traffic on the website – He’s noticed that when traffic increases, so does his business.
2. More phone calls – If they get a customer on the phone, the chances of closing the sale are around 75%.
3. One blog per week on the site – The more often he blogs, the more web traffic, visits and phone calls increase.
4. Links from some of the businesses in the area – He’s no dummy. He knows the importance of links, which are that much better when they come from a large company that could send him business.
5. Develop relationships with small and midsize non-competing businesses in the area for cross promotions, events and the like.

Know the audience

(image source)

Too many businesses create cute blogs that might generate traffic but do nothing for sales. RZ isn’t falling for this trap. He’s all about identifying the audience who’s likely to do business with him.

Luckily, his secretary is a meticulous record keeper, allowing him to build a reasonable profile of his target persona based on past clients.

• 21-35 years old
• Drives a truck that’s less than fours years old
• Has an income of $45,000-$59,000
• Employed by a corporation with greater than 500 employees
• Active on social media, especially Facebook and Twitter
• Consumes most of their information online
• Typically referred by a friend or a co-worker

This information will prove invaluable as he goes about creating content. Most important, these nuggets create a clearer picture of how he should go about looking for people and/or businesses to amplify his content.

PR and outreach: Your amplification engines

Armed with his goals and the knowledge of his audience, RZ can now focus on outreach for amplification, thinking along the lines of…

• Who/what influences his core audience?
• What could he offer them by way of content to earn their help?
• What content would they find valuable enough to share and link to?
• What challenges do they face that he could help them with?
• How could his brand set itself apart from any other business looking for help from these potential outreach partners?

Putting it all together

Being the savvy businessperson he is, RZ pulls his small staff together and they put their thinking caps on.

Late spring through early fall is prime hail storm season in Dallas. The season accounts for 80 percent of his yearly business. (The other 20% is fender benders.) Also, they realize, many of the storms happen in the late afternoon/early evening, when people are on their way home from work and are stuck in traffic, or when they duck into the grocery store or hit the gym after work.

What’s more, says one of the staffers, often a huge group of clients will come at once, owing to having been parked in the same lot when a storm hits.

Eureka!

(image source)

That’s when RZ bolts out of his chair with the idea that could put his business on the map: Let’s create content for businesses getting a high volume of after-work traffic—sit-down restaurants, gyms, grocery stores, etc.

The businesses would be offering something of value to their customers, who’ll learn about precautions to take in the event of a hail storm, and RZ would have willing amplifiers for his content.

Content is only as boring as your outlook

First—and this is a fatal mistake too many content creators make—RZ visits the handful of local businesses he’d like to partner with. The key here, however, is he smartly makes them aware that he’s done his homework and is eager to help their patrons while making them aware of his service.

This is an integral part of outreach: there must be a clear benefit to the would-be benefactor.

After RZ learns that several of the businesses are amenable to sharing his business’s helpful information, he takes the next step and asks what form the content should take. For now, all he can get them to promote is a glossy one-sheeter, “How To Protect Your Vehicle Against Extensive Hail Damage,” that the biggest gym in the area will promote via a small display at the check-in in return for a 10% coupon for customers.

Three of the five others he talked to also agreed to promote the one-sheeter, though each said they’d be willing to promote other content investments provided they added value for their customers.

The untold truth about creating content for boring industries

When business owners reach out to me about putting together a content strategy for their boring brand, I make two things clear from the start:

1. There are no boring brands. Those two words are a cop out. No matter what industry you serve, there are hoards of people who use the products or services who are quite smitten.
2. What they see as boring, I see as an opportunity.

In almost every case, they want to discuss some of another big content piece that’s sure to draw eyes, engagement, and that maybe even leads to a few links. Sure, I say, if you have tons of money to spend.

(Amazing piece of interactive content created by BuiltVisible)

Assuming you don’t have money to burn, and you want a plan you can replicate easily over time, try what I call the 1-2-1 approach for monthly blog content:

1: A strong piece of local content (goal: organic reach, topical relevance, local SEO)
2: Two pieces of evergreen content (goal: traffic)
1: A link-worthy asset (goal: links)

This plan is not very hard at all to pull off, provided you have your ear to the street in the local market; have done your keyword research, identifying several long-tail keywords you have the ability to rank for; and you’re willing to continue with outreach.

What it does is allow the brand to create content with enough frequency to attain significance with the search engines, while also developing the habit of sharing, promoting and amplifying content as well. For example, all of the posts would be shared on Twitter, Google Plus, and Facebook. (Don’t sleep on paid promotion via Facebook.)

Also, for the link-worthy asset, there would be outreach in advance of its creation, then amplification, and continued promotion from the company and those who’ve agreed to support the content.

Create a winning trifecta: Outreach, promotion and amplification

To RZ’s credit, he didn’t dawdle, getting right to work creating worthwhile content via the 1-2-1 method:

1: “The Worst Places in Dallas to be When a Hail Storm Hits”
2: “Can Hail Damage Cause Structural Damage to Your Car?” and “Should You Buy a Car Damaged by Hail?”
1: “Big as Hail!” contest

This contest idea came from the owner of a large local gym. RZ’s will give $500 to the local homeowner who sends in the largest piece of hail, as judged by Facebook fans, during the season. In return, the gym will promote the contest at its multiple locations, link to the content promotion page on RZ’s website, and share images of its fans holding large pieces of hail via social media.

What does the gym get in return: A catchy slogan (e.g., it’s similar to “big as hell,” popular gym parlance) to market around during the hail season.

It’s a win-win for everyone involved, especially RZ.

He gets a link, but most important he realizes how to create content to nail each one of his goals. You can do the same. All it takes is a change in mindset. Away from content creation. Toward outreach, promote and amplify.

Summary

While the story of RZ’s entirely fictional, it is based on techniques I’ve used with other small and midsize businesses. The keys, I’ve found, are to get away from thinking about your industry/brand as being boring, even if it is, and marshal the resources to find the audience who’ll benefit from from your content and, most important, identify the influencers who’ll promote and amplify it.

What are your thoughts?

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Posted by kristihinesIf you are a Gmail user, you have likely received some emails that stand out from the rest with a call to action button within the subject line. If you’ve booked a flight recently, your airline may have sent you an email that incl… Continue reading →

Posted by kristihinesIf you are a Gmail user, you have likely received some emails that stand out from the rest with a call to action button within the subject line. If you’ve booked a flight recently, your airline may have sent you an email that incl… Continue reading →

Posted by Tom-Anthony

The Web is an ever-diminishing aspect of our online lives. We increasingly use apps, wearables, smart assistants (Google Now, Siri, Cortana), smart watches, and smart TVs for searches, and none of these are returning 10 blue links. In fact, we usually don’t end up on a website at all.

Apps are the natural successor, and an increasing amount of time spent optimising search is going to be spent focusing on apps. However, whilst app search is going to be very important, I don’t think it is where the trend stops.

This post is about where I think the trends take us—towards what I am calling “Data-Driven Search”. Along the way I am going to highlight another phenomenon: “Compound Queries”. I believe these changes will dramatically alter the way search and SEO work over the next 1-3 years, and it is important we begin now to think about how that future could look.

App indexing is just the beginning

With App Indexing Google is moving beyond the bounds of the web-search paradigm which made them famous. On Android, we are now seeing blue links which are not to web pages but are deep links to open specific pages within apps:

This is interesting in and of itself, but it is also part of a larger pattern which began with things like the answer box and knowledge graph. With these, we saw that Google was shifting away from sending you somewhere else but was starting to provide the answer you were looking for right there in the SERPs. App Indexing is the next step, which moves Google from simply providing answers to enabling actions—allow you to do things.

App Indexing is going to be around for a while—but here I want to focus on this trend towards providing answers and enabling actions.

Notable technology trends

Google’s mission is to build the “ultimate assistant”—something that anticipates your needs and facilitates fulfilling them. Google Now is just the beginning of what they are dreaming of.

So many of the projects and technologies that Google, and their competitors, are working on are converging with the trend towards “answers and actions”, and I think this is going to lead to a really interesting evolution in searches—namely what I am calling “Data-Driven Search”.

Let’s look at some of the contributing technologies.

Compound queries: query revisions & chained queries

There is a lot of talk about conversational search at the moment, and it is fascinating for many reasons, but in this instance I am mostly interested in two specific facets:

• Query revision
• Chained queries

The current model for multiple queries looks like this:

You do one query (e.g. “recipe books”) and then, after looking at the results of that search, you have a better sense of exactly what it is you are looking for and so you refine your query and run another search (e.g. “vegetarian recipe books”). Notice that you do two distinct searches—with the second one mostly completely separate from the first.

Conversational search is moving us towards a new model which looks more like this, which I’m calling the Compound Query model:

In this instance, after evaluating the results I got, I don’t make a new query but instead a Query Revision which relates back to that initial query. After searching “recipe books”, I might follow up with “just show me the vegetarian ones”. You can already do this with conversational search:

Example of a “Query Revision”—one type of Compound Query

Currently, we only see this intent revision model working in conversational search, but I expect we will see it migrate into desktop search as well. There will be a new generation of searchers who won’t have been “trained” to search in the unnatural and stilted keyword-oriented that we have. They’ll be used to conversational search on their phones and will apply the same patterns on desktop machines. I suspect we’ll also see other changes to desktop-based search which will merge in other aspects of how conversational search results are presented. There are also other companies working on radical new interfaces, such as Scinet by Etsimo (their interface is quite radical, but the problems it solves and addresses are ones Google will likely also be working on).

So many SEO paradigms don’t begin to apply in this scenario; things like keyword research and rankings are not compatible with a query model that has multiple phases.

This new query model has a second application, namely Chained Queries, where you perform an initial query, and then on receiving a response you perform a second query on the same topic (the classic example is “How tall is Justin Bieber?” followed by “How old is he?”—the second query is dependent upon the first):

Example of a Chained Query—the second type of Compound Query

It might be that in the case of chained queries, the latter queries could be converted to be standalone queries, such that they don’t muddy the SEO waters quite as much as as queries that have revisions. However, I’m not sure that this necessarily stands true, because every query in a chain adds context that makes it much easier for Google to accurately determine your intent in later queries.

If you are not convinced, consider that in the example above, as is often the case in examples (such as the Justin Bieber example), it is usually clear from the formulation that this is explicitly a chained query. However—there are chained queries where it is not necessarily clear that the current query is chained to the previous. To illustrate this, I’ve borrowed an example which Behshad Behzadi, Director of Conversational Search at Google, showed at SMX Munich last month:

Example of a “hidden” Chained Query—it is not explicit that the last search refers to the previous one.

If you didn’t see the first search for “pictures of mario” before the second and third examples, it might not be immediately obvious that the second “pictures of mario” query has taken into account the previous search. There are bound to be far more subtle examples than this.

New interfaces

The days of all Google searches coming solely via a desktop-based web browser are already long since dead, but mobile users using voice search are just the start of the change—there is an ongoing divergence of interfaces. I’m focusing here on the output interfaces—i.e., how we consume the results from a search on a specific device.

The primary device category that springs to mind is that of wearables and smart watches, which have a variety of ways in which they communicate with their users:

• Compact screens—devices like the Apple Watch and Microsoft Band have compact form factor screens, which allow for visual results, but not in the same format as days gone by—a list of web links won’t be helpful.
• Audio—with Siri, Google Now, and Cortana all becoming available via wearable interfaces (that pair to smart phones) users can also consume results as voice.
• Vibrations—the Apple Watch can give users directions using vibrations to signal left and right turns without needing to look or listen to the device. Getting directions already covers a number of searches, but you could imagine this also being useful for various yes/no queries (e.g. “is my train on time?”).

Each of these methods is incompatible with the old “title & snippet” method that made up the 10 blue links, but furthermore they are also all different from one another.

What is clear is that there is going to need to be an increase in the forms in which search engines can respond to an identical query, with responses being adaptive to the way in which the user will consume their result.

We will also see queries where the query may be “handed off” to another device: imagine me doing a search for a location on my phone and then using my watch to give me direction. Apple already has “Handover”which does this in various contexts, and I expect we’ll see the concept taken further.

This is related to Google increasingly providing us with encapsulated answers, rather than links to websites—especially true on wearables and smart devices. The interesting phenomenon here is that these answers don’t specify a specific layout, like a webpage does. The data and the layout are separated.

Which leads us to…

Cards

Made popular by Google Now, cards are prevalent in both iOS and Android, as well as on social platforms. They are a growing facet of the mobile experience:

Cards provide small units of information in an accessible chunk, often with a link to dig deeper by flipping a card over or by linking through to an app.

Cards exactly fit into the paradigm above—they are more concerned with the data you will see and less so about the way in which you will see it. The same cards look different in different places.

Furthermore, we are entering a point where you can now do more and more from a card, rather than it leading you into an app to do more. You can response to messages, reply to tweets, like and re-share, and all sorts of things all from cards, without opening an app; I highly recommend this blog post which explores this phenomenon.

It seems likely we’ll see Google Now (and mobile search as it becomes more like Google Now) allowing you to do more and more right from cards themselves—many of these things will be actions facilitated by other parties (by way of APIs of schema.org actions). In this way Google will become a “junction box” sitting between us and third parties who provide services; they’ll find an API/service provider and return us a snippet of data showing us options and then enable us to pass back data representing our response to the relevant API.

Shared screens

The next piece of the puzzle is “shared screens”, which covers several things. This starts with Google Chromecast, which has popularised the ability to “throw” things from one screen to another. At home, any guests I have over who join my wifi are able to “throw” a YouTube video from their mobile phone to my TV via the Chromecast. The same is true for people in the meeting rooms at Distilled offices and in a variety of other public spaces.

I can natively throw a variety of things: photos, YouTube videos, movies on Netflix etc., etc. How long until that includes searches? How long until I can throw the results of a search on an iPad on to the TV to show my wife the holiday options I’m looking at? Sure we can do that by sharing the whole screen now, but how long until, like photos of YouTube videos, the search results I throw to the TV take on a new layout that is suitable for that larger screen?

You can immediately see how this links back to the concept of cards and interfaces outlined above; I’m moving data from screen to screen, and between devices that provide different interfaces.

These concepts are all very related to the concept of “fluid mobility” that Microsoft recently presented in their Productivity Future Vision released in February this year.

An evolution of this is if we reach the point that some people have envisioned, whereby many offices workers, who don’t require huge computational power, no longer have computers at their desks. Instead their desks just house dumb terminals: a display, keyboard and mouse which connect to the phone in their pockets which provides the processing power.

In this scenario, it becomes even more usual for people to be switching interfaces “mid task” (including searches)—you do a search at your desk at work (powered by your phone), then continue to review the results on the train home on the phone itself before browsing further on your TV at home.

Email structured markup

This deserves a quick mention—it is another data point in the trend of “enabling action”. It doesn’t seem to be common knowledge that you can use structured markup and schema.org markup in emails, which works in both Gmail and Google Inbox.

Editor’s note: Stay tuned for more on this in tomorrow’s post!

The main concepts they introduce are “highlights” and “actions”—sound familiar? You can define actions that become buttons in emails allowing people to confirm, save, review, RSVP, etc. with a single click right in the email.

Currently, you have to apply to Google for them to whitelist emails you send out in order for them to mark the emails up, but I expect we’ll see this rolling out more and more. It may not seem directly search-related but if you’re building the “ultimate personal assistant”, then merging products like Google Now and Google Inbox would be a good place to start.

The rise of data-driven search

There is a common theme running through all of the above technologies and trends, namely data:

• We are increasingly requesting from Search Engines snippets of data, rather than links to strictly formatted web content
• We are increasingly being provided the option for direct action without going to an app/website/whatever by providing a snippet of data with our response/request

I think in the next 2 years small payloads of data will be the new currency of Google. Web search won’t go away anytime soon, but large parts of it will be subsumed into the data driven paradigm. Projects like Knowledge Vault, which aims to dislodge the Freebase/Wikipedia (i.e. manually curated) powered Knowledge Graph by pulling facts directly from the text of all pages on the web, will mean mining the web for parcels of data become feasible at scale. This will mean that Google knows where to look for specific bits of data and can extract and return this data directly to the user.

How all this might change the way users and search engines interact:

1. The move towards compound queries will mean it becomes more natural for people to use Google to “interact” with data in an iterative process; Google won’t just send us to a set of data somewhere else but will help us sift through it all.
2. Shared screens will mean that search results will need to be increasingly device agnostic. The next generation of technologies such as Apple Handover and Google Chromecast will mean we increasingly pass results between devices where they may take on a new layout.
3. Cards will be one part of making that possible by ensuring that results can rendered in various formats. Users will become more and more accustomed to interacting with sets of cards.
4. The focus on actions will mean that Google plugs directly into APIs such that they can connect users with third party backends and enable that right there in their interface.

What we should be doing

I don’t have a good answer to this—which is exactly why we need to talk about it more.

Firstly, what is obvious is that lots of the old facets of technical SEO are already breaking down. For example, as I mentioned above, things like keyword research and rankings don’t fit well with the conversational search model where compound queries are prevalent. This will only become more and more the case as we go further down the rabbit hole. We need to educate clients and work out what new metrics help us establish how Google perceive us.

Secondly, I can’t escape the feeling that APIs are not only going to increase further in importance, but also become more “mainstream”. Think how over the years ownership of company websites started in the technical departments and migrated to marketing teams—I think we could see a similar pattern with more core teams being involved in APIs. If Google wants to connect to APIs to retrieve data and help users do things, then more teams within a business are going to want to weigh in on what it can do.

APIs might seem out of the reach and unnecessary for many businesses (exactly as websites used to…), but structured markup and schema.org are like a “lite API”—enabling programmatic access to your data and even now to actions available via your website. This will provide a nice stepping stone where needed (and might even be sufficient).

Lastly, if this vision of things does play out, then much of our search behaviour could be imagined to be a sophisticated take on faceted navigation—we do an initial search and then sift through and refine the data we get back to drill down to the exact morsels we were looking for. I could envision “Query Revision” queries where the initial search happens within Google’s index (“science fiction books”) but subsequent searches happen in someone else’s, for example Amazon’s, “index” (‘show me just those with 5 stars and more than 10 reviews that were released in the last 5 years’).

If that is the case, then what I will be doing is ensuring that Distilled’s clients have a thorough and accurate “indexes” with plenty of supplementary information that users could find useful. A few years ago we started worrying about ensuring our clients’ websites have plenty of unique content, and this would see us worrying about ensuring they have a thorough “index” for their product/service. We should be doing that already, but suddenly it isn’t going to be just a conversion factor, but a ranking factor too (following the same trend as many other signals, in that regard)

Discussion

Please jump in the comments, or tweet me at @TomAnthonySEO, with your thoughts. I am sure many of the details for how I have envisioned this may not be perfectly accurate, but directionally I’m confident and I want to hear from others with their ideas.

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Posted by Tom-Anthony

The Web is an ever-diminishing aspect of our online lives. We increasingly use apps, wearables, smart assistants (Google Now, Siri, Cortana), smart watches, and smart TVs for searches, and none of these are returning 10 blue links. In fact, we usually don’t end up on a website at all.

Apps are the natural successor, and an increasing amount of time spent optimising search is going to be spent focusing on apps. However, whilst app search is going to be very important, I don’t think it is where the trend stops.

This post is about where I think the trends take us—towards what I am calling “Data-Driven Search”. Along the way I am going to highlight another phenomenon: “Compound Queries”. I believe these changes will dramatically alter the way search and SEO work over the next 1-3 years, and it is important we begin now to think about how that future could look.

App indexing is just the beginning

With App Indexing Google is moving beyond the bounds of the web-search paradigm which made them famous. On Android, we are now seeing blue links which are not to web pages but are deep links to open specific pages within apps:

This is interesting in and of itself, but it is also part of a larger pattern which began with things like the answer box and knowledge graph. With these, we saw that Google was shifting away from sending you somewhere else but was starting to provide the answer you were looking for right there in the SERPs. App Indexing is the next step, which moves Google from simply providing answers to enabling actions—allow you to do things.

App Indexing is going to be around for a while—but here I want to focus on this trend towards providing answers and enabling actions.

Notable technology trends

Google’s mission is to build the “ultimate assistant”—something that anticipates your needs and facilitates fulfilling them. Google Now is just the beginning of what they are dreaming of.

So many of the projects and technologies that Google, and their competitors, are working on are converging with the trend towards “answers and actions”, and I think this is going to lead to a really interesting evolution in searches—namely what I am calling “Data-Driven Search”.

Let’s look at some of the contributing technologies.

Compound queries: query revisions & chained queries

There is a lot of talk about conversational search at the moment, and it is fascinating for many reasons, but in this instance I am mostly interested in two specific facets:

• Query revision
• Chained queries

The current model for multiple queries looks like this:

You do one query (e.g. “recipe books”) and then, after looking at the results of that search, you have a better sense of exactly what it is you are looking for and so you refine your query and run another search (e.g. “vegetarian recipe books”). Notice that you do two distinct searches—with the second one mostly completely separate from the first.

Conversational search is moving us towards a new model which looks more like this, which I’m calling the Compound Query model:

In this instance, after evaluating the results I got, I don’t make a new query but instead a Query Revision which relates back to that initial query. After searching “recipe books”, I might follow up with “just show me the vegetarian ones”. You can already do this with conversational search:

Example of a “Query Revision”—one type of Compound Query

Currently, we only see this intent revision model working in conversational search, but I expect we will see it migrate into desktop search as well. There will be a new generation of searchers who won’t have been “trained” to search in the unnatural and stilted keyword-oriented that we have. They’ll be used to conversational search on their phones and will apply the same patterns on desktop machines. I suspect we’ll also see other changes to desktop-based search which will merge in other aspects of how conversational search results are presented. There are also other companies working on radical new interfaces, such as Scinet by Etsimo (their interface is quite radical, but the problems it solves and addresses are ones Google will likely also be working on).

So many SEO paradigms don’t begin to apply in this scenario; things like keyword research and rankings are not compatible with a query model that has multiple phases.

This new query model has a second application, namely Chained Queries, where you perform an initial query, and then on receiving a response you perform a second query on the same topic (the classic example is “How tall is Justin Bieber?” followed by “How old is he?”—the second query is dependent upon the first):

Example of a Chained Query—the second type of Compound Query

It might be that in the case of chained queries, the latter queries could be converted to be standalone queries, such that they don’t muddy the SEO waters quite as much as as queries that have revisions. However, I’m not sure that this necessarily stands true, because every query in a chain adds context that makes it much easier for Google to accurately determine your intent in later queries.

If you are not convinced, consider that in the example above, as is often the case in examples (such as the Justin Bieber example), it is usually clear from the formulation that this is explicitly a chained query. However—there are chained queries where it is not necessarily clear that the current query is chained to the previous. To illustrate this, I’ve borrowed an example which Behshad Behzadi, Director of Conversational Search at Google, showed at SMX Munich last month:

Example of a “hidden” Chained Query—it is not explicit that the last search refers to the previous one.

If you didn’t see the first search for “pictures of mario” before the second and third examples, it might not be immediately obvious that the second “pictures of mario” query has taken into account the previous search. There are bound to be far more subtle examples than this.

New interfaces

The days of all Google searches coming solely via a desktop-based web browser are already long since dead, but mobile users using voice search are just the start of the change—there is an ongoing divergence of interfaces. I’m focusing here on the output interfaces—i.e., how we consume the results from a search on a specific device.

The primary device category that springs to mind is that of wearables and smart watches, which have a variety of ways in which they communicate with their users:

• Compact screens—devices like the Apple Watch and Microsoft Band have compact form factor screens, which allow for visual results, but not in the same format as days gone by—a list of web links won’t be helpful.
• Audio—with Siri, Google Now, and Cortana all becoming available via wearable interfaces (that pair to smart phones) users can also consume results as voice.
• Vibrations—the Apple Watch can give users directions using vibrations to signal left and right turns without needing to look or listen to the device. Getting directions already covers a number of searches, but you could imagine this also being useful for various yes/no queries (e.g. “is my train on time?”).

Each of these methods is incompatible with the old “title & snippet” method that made up the 10 blue links, but furthermore they are also all different from one another.

What is clear is that there is going to need to be an increase in the forms in which search engines can respond to an identical query, with responses being adaptive to the way in which the user will consume their result.

We will also see queries where the query may be “handed off” to another device: imagine me doing a search for a location on my phone and then using my watch to give me direction. Apple already has “Handover”which does this in various contexts, and I expect we’ll see the concept taken further.

This is related to Google increasingly providing us with encapsulated answers, rather than links to websites—especially true on wearables and smart devices. The interesting phenomenon here is that these answers don’t specify a specific layout, like a webpage does. The data and the layout are separated.

Which leads us to…

Cards

Made popular by Google Now, cards are prevalent in both iOS and Android, as well as on social platforms. They are a growing facet of the mobile experience:

Cards provide small units of information in an accessible chunk, often with a link to dig deeper by flipping a card over or by linking through to an app.

Cards exactly fit into the paradigm above—they are more concerned with the data you will see and less so about the way in which you will see it. The same cards look different in different places.

Furthermore, we are entering a point where you can now do more and more from a card, rather than it leading you into an app to do more. You can response to messages, reply to tweets, like and re-share, and all sorts of things all from cards, without opening an app; I highly recommend this blog post which explores this phenomenon.

It seems likely we’ll see Google Now (and mobile search as it becomes more like Google Now) allowing you to do more and more right from cards themselves—many of these things will be actions facilitated by other parties (by way of APIs of schema.org actions). In this way Google will become a “junction box” sitting between us and third parties who provide services; they’ll find an API/service provider and return us a snippet of data showing us options and then enable us to pass back data representing our response to the relevant API.

Shared screens

The next piece of the puzzle is “shared screens”, which covers several things. This starts with Google Chromecast, which has popularised the ability to “throw” things from one screen to another. At home, any guests I have over who join my wifi are able to “throw” a YouTube video from their mobile phone to my TV via the Chromecast. The same is true for people in the meeting rooms at Distilled offices and in a variety of other public spaces.

I can natively throw a variety of things: photos, YouTube videos, movies on Netflix etc., etc. How long until that includes searches? How long until I can throw the results of a search on an iPad on to the TV to show my wife the holiday options I’m looking at? Sure we can do that by sharing the whole screen now, but how long until, like photos of YouTube videos, the search results I throw to the TV take on a new layout that is suitable for that larger screen?

You can immediately see how this links back to the concept of cards and interfaces outlined above; I’m moving data from screen to screen, and between devices that provide different interfaces.

These concepts are all very related to the concept of “fluid mobility” that Microsoft recently presented in their Productivity Future Vision released in February this year.

An evolution of this is if we reach the point that some people have envisioned, whereby many offices workers, who don’t require huge computational power, no longer have computers at their desks. Instead their desks just house dumb terminals: a display, keyboard and mouse which connect to the phone in their pockets which provides the processing power.

In this scenario, it becomes even more usual for people to be switching interfaces “mid task” (including searches)—you do a search at your desk at work (powered by your phone), then continue to review the results on the train home on the phone itself before browsing further on your TV at home.

Email structured markup

This deserves a quick mention—it is another data point in the trend of “enabling action”. It doesn’t seem to be common knowledge that you can use structured markup and schema.org markup in emails, which works in both Gmail and Google Inbox.

Editor’s note: Stay tuned for more on this in tomorrow’s post!

The main concepts they introduce are “highlights” and “actions”—sound familiar? You can define actions that become buttons in emails allowing people to confirm, save, review, RSVP, etc. with a single click right in the email.

Currently, you have to apply to Google for them to whitelist emails you send out in order for them to mark the emails up, but I expect we’ll see this rolling out more and more. It may not seem directly search-related but if you’re building the “ultimate personal assistant”, then merging products like Google Now and Google Inbox would be a good place to start.

The rise of data-driven search

There is a common theme running through all of the above technologies and trends, namely data:

• We are increasingly requesting from Search Engines snippets of data, rather than links to strictly formatted web content
• We are increasingly being provided the option for direct action without going to an app/website/whatever by providing a snippet of data with our response/request

I think in the next 2 years small payloads of data will be the new currency of Google. Web search won’t go away anytime soon, but large parts of it will be subsumed into the data driven paradigm. Projects like Knowledge Vault, which aims to dislodge the Freebase/Wikipedia (i.e. manually curated) powered Knowledge Graph by pulling facts directly from the text of all pages on the web, will mean mining the web for parcels of data become feasible at scale. This will mean that Google knows where to look for specific bits of data and can extract and return this data directly to the user.

How all this might change the way users and search engines interact:

1. The move towards compound queries will mean it becomes more natural for people to use Google to “interact” with data in an iterative process; Google won’t just send us to a set of data somewhere else but will help us sift through it all.
2. Shared screens will mean that search results will need to be increasingly device agnostic. The next generation of technologies such as Apple Handover and Google Chromecast will mean we increasingly pass results between devices where they may take on a new layout.
3. Cards will be one part of making that possible by ensuring that results can rendered in various formats. Users will become more and more accustomed to interacting with sets of cards.
4. The focus on actions will mean that Google plugs directly into APIs such that they can connect users with third party backends and enable that right there in their interface.

What we should be doing

I don’t have a good answer to this—which is exactly why we need to talk about it more.

Firstly, what is obvious is that lots of the old facets of technical SEO are already breaking down. For example, as I mentioned above, things like keyword research and rankings don’t fit well with the conversational search model where compound queries are prevalent. This will only become more and more the case as we go further down the rabbit hole. We need to educate clients and work out what new metrics help us establish how Google perceive us.

Secondly, I can’t escape the feeling that APIs are not only going to increase further in importance, but also become more “mainstream”. Think how over the years ownership of company websites started in the technical departments and migrated to marketing teams—I think we could see a similar pattern with more core teams being involved in APIs. If Google wants to connect to APIs to retrieve data and help users do things, then more teams within a business are going to want to weigh in on what it can do.

APIs might seem out of the reach and unnecessary for many businesses (exactly as websites used to…), but structured markup and schema.org are like a “lite API”—enabling programmatic access to your data and even now to actions available via your website. This will provide a nice stepping stone where needed (and might even be sufficient).

Lastly, if this vision of things does play out, then much of our search behaviour could be imagined to be a sophisticated take on faceted navigation—we do an initial search and then sift through and refine the data we get back to drill down to the exact morsels we were looking for. I could envision “Query Revision” queries where the initial search happens within Google’s index (“science fiction books”) but subsequent searches happen in someone else’s, for example Amazon’s, “index” (‘show me just those with 5 stars and more than 10 reviews that were released in the last 5 years’).

If that is the case, then what I will be doing is ensuring that Distilled’s clients have a thorough and accurate “indexes” with plenty of supplementary information that users could find useful. A few years ago we started worrying about ensuring our clients’ websites have plenty of unique content, and this would see us worrying about ensuring they have a thorough “index” for their product/service. We should be doing that already, but suddenly it isn’t going to be just a conversion factor, but a ranking factor too (following the same trend as many other signals, in that regard)

Discussion

Please jump in the comments, or tweet me at @TomAnthonySEO, with your thoughts. I am sure many of the details for how I have envisioned this may not be perfectly accurate, but directionally I’m confident and I want to hear from others with their ideas.

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