Put Your Website Into Context

Okay, Google.

With the rise of electronic personal assistants, it is becoming increasingly important to coordinate and manage your online presence. Google Now and Siri are voice activated contextual search engines that determine relevance down to the most appropriate answer. While users still are presented a list of results, the most authoritative answer is generally spoken back to them.

What is contextual search?

Google has made great strides towards becoming a contextual search engine, and other search engines are following suit. Contextual search is the concept of trying to greatly understand what the user is searching for given various factors, including: time of day, location, search history, and web behaviors.

Search is still primarily looking for relevant text, but there are many new factors to consider. This means you, as a website owner, need to find ways of making this information available to this next generation of search engines.

What can you do?

Keep strong, stay adamant. As stated above, search is still about text. It is more crucial than ever to maintain strong content on your site, and become the authority of your industry.

To better understand how to improve your own contextual search, let’s look at the basic factors: time of day, location, and search history.

Time of Day

This factor is fairly easy to understand. If a search engine doesn’t know your operating hours, how can it prove your relevance? It is incredibly important for businesses with operating hours to ensure those are accurately displayed and perceived by search engines. There have been cases where businesses lost customers due to being incorrectly listed as “Closed”.

Location

Another factor to consider is location. This is twofold, your business may have a remote location listed, but operate globally; or your business may have no location listed, and operate locally. Ensuring both your location and operable area are properly understood by search is going to be a large factor moving forward.

Search History

This is a little bit out of your control, but leads to a couple good points:

1. Understanding the nature and lifestyles of your clients will help overall with proper ad placements and language used within the context of your site.
2. If you see yourself ranking first on broad terms, it may just mean Google knows you are looking for yourself.

The second point is a bit paranoid, but true. If you visit your site a lot, you will see it ranked higher than competitors. This can lead to a false sense of comfort when it comes to search engine standings.

Playing Ball

When it comes to being found, you have to provide these basic details, as well as providing rich content. IdeaBank Marketing can help with ensuring your listings are maintained on a variety of aggregation services, which is where Google, Yahoo, and Bing usually look for this kind of deep business data.

A simple thing you can do right now is sign up, or claim, your business on each of the search giants’ own listing services.

These services include:

Google Plus for Business is a free service for ensuring the accuracy of the data Google has already aggregated about you. Your business may already show up on Google Plus, but you will want to be sure that you are the one in control of that data by claiming it. Unfortunately, the data is pretty much limited to search within Google, but fortunately, Google is the primary search engine of most of the world.

Yahoo and Bing share search, though that may be coming to an end. As it stands, you will show up the same on Bing as you will on Yahoo. In their combined services, they now offer the steeply priced Yahoo Business Listings. At $29.99/mo Yahoo and Bing will give you the honor of maintaining your own data. The difference with Yahoo Business Listings is they will keep your data up-to-date on the larger aggregate listing services mentioned earlier.

I also have to mention IdeaBank Marketing. We offer a similar service to Yahoo Business Listings, but at a much lower cost. We will help you to get your information listed on various aggregate services, and let that information trickle throughout the internet. We start by helping you to claim your business on Google+, and then will have you fill out a simple worksheet answering many of the questions search engines are looking for. We take it form there to validate and place your information on the internet. It is really that simple.

Wrap-up

In conclusion, search is changing. The old basics of content and keywords are still there, but now search engines want to know who you are as both a business and a user. It is all working together to form more relevant search, but you need to make sure your information is readily available. For more information about what your business can do to get better listings, call us at (402) 463-0588.