As Google's indexing algorithms advance, new players enter to participate in users' search results. In this article, our experts, Blas Giffuni and Camilo Ramírez, teach us about Google Knowledge Graph, a structured knowledge base launched by Google in May 2012 that aims to improve users' search experience by helping them discover new information related to their search intent quickly and easily. In the face of this new technology, context becomes more relevant than keywords and is an element that allows for close relationships within searches, providing a broader view when answering a user's question. What implications does Google Knowledge Graph have for your website's SEO? How can you take advantage of it? These and other questions will be addressed throughout the article, so keep reading if you're interested in getting the most out of Google to grow your business or brand's online presence!
What is Google Knowledge Graph?
Google Knowledge Graph is a search result format that usually appears as a box with generic information about the term or query entered by the user. It is an enriched result that appears as the first response on Google's search results pages and aims to offer the most relevant information about the searched term quickly. It also provides routes to explore related topics that might interest the user. Keep in mind that Google's great mission is to improve the user search experience by organizing the information available on the Internet and interconnecting it to enrich the results on a specific topic and thus facilitate people's lives. This is precisely what Knowledge Graph allows, offering and delivering information to a user in an easy, simple, filtered, and digestible way and giving them routes to continue complementing and expanding that information.
Beyond keywords: with Google Knowledge Graph, context and thematic axes prevail.
Google Knowledge Graph is an exercise that allows, through technology, to generate an interconnection between various topics and understand how they relate to each other. Therefore, with Knowledge Graph, Google is able to identify that when a person asks about a particular topic, they probably also ask other questions related to that topic. Thus, Google Knowledge Graph offers other relevant subtopics for the search term and intent.
This is how Google collects and relates information from multiple sources and a wide range of resources that include, but go beyond, Freebase, Wikipedia, and the CIA World Factbook. Since 2012, its semantic network includes more than 570 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion data and relationships on different search terms. Thus, Google Knowledge Graph is an intelligent model that understands real-world entities and the relationships between them.
For this reason, in previous articles and episodes, we have talked about the importance of stopping thinking exclusively about keywords and rather thinking about thematic axes.
Some examples…
Let's say a user searches for the term 'James Rodríguez' on Google: the search engine will understand that, beyond those two keywords, the user wants to find news about the soccer player, information about his bibliography and demographic data, recent gossip, among others.
So what the Google Knowledge Graph will do is try to relate and group all available information about James Rodríguez to present it to the user in an easy and accessible way, and also give them routes to answer the other possible questions and topics of interest related to their search.
What if that user searches for 'Taj Mahal': according to Google, with Knowledge Graph, this search acquires a much richer meaning than just those two keywords, and its meaning can vary depending on the context of who is searching for it.
For example, the Taj Majal can be one of the most iconic monuments in the world located in India, but it can also refer to the Grammy-winning musician who also has this name, the name of a nearby casino, or be a renowned Indian food restaurant a few kilometers from the user.
What type of searches appear in the Google Knowledge Graph?
People or characters: whether celebrities, athletes, recognized historical figures, scientists, experts in various areas of knowledge, businessmen, fantastic or mythological beings, etc. Titles of books, movies, musical bands, works of art, or other artistic expressions. Companies, corporations, or well-known products. Elements of nature such as flora and fauna. Food and culinary dishes. Sports. Local businesses. Rankings. Among others. As you can see, Google Knowledge Graph covers a huge universe of themes and types of searches that are not mentioned in this list.
Common customer question: Can you pay to appear in the Google Knowledge Graph? No, you cannot pay to appear in the Knowledge Graph. The only way to achieve this is to be consistent, judicious, and work hard on your SEO strategy. Fortunately, you cannot pay because this helps democratize content and knowledge and, in a way, guarantees that small businesses can really compete with large companies for these coveted spots on search results pages.
How can your business take advantage of Google Knowledge Graph and appear in it?
What you need to do to try to be part of a result in the Knowledge Graph is to give Google as much information about your business as possible. How is this achieved? Here are some ways to do it:
Create the profile or listing of your business on Google My Business: My Business is a free tool created by Google to help companies manage their presence on the Internet. There you can add information about your business such as reviews, location, contact, hours, among others.
The key then is to work very well on this listing and complete it to the fullest, as it will give greater visibility to your brand and make it easier for your customers and prospects to find you.
Work to have a very good digital property and create pieces of excellent quality content through a blog: as is customary in SEO, quality prevails over quantity.
That is, it is not necessary to own many digital properties, but it is necessary to have at least one very good digital property.
What does this mean? That you must strive to generate within your website content of excellent quality, that adds value to users, that makes other websites want to reference you, and that, the sum of all this, gives you authority in front of search engines.
In a previous article, we talked about blogs as an excellent way to improve the SEO of our websites and share knowledge with users. There, we can answer, through good pieces of content, some questions about our area of expertise in an easy and quick way to read and understand.
Google values this very much and may show us in the Google Knowledge Graph of some user search intent.
So, let's get to work! Start strengthening your content strategy.
Build a strong digital ecosystem: make sure you have active profiles on social networks that suit your business (whether Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube), develop a backlink system where you are well referenced by different websites, blogs, and platforms, encourage your business to be discussed in online conversation forums, among others.
In short, work to build a digital ecosystem around your brand. This will help the Google Knowledge Graph detect and identify you and start interconnecting all that information to create the Graph of your business.
Get a profile on Wikipedia: the vast majority of Google Knowledge Graph results come from Wikipedia. So, if you manage to create a profile for your brand or business in this encyclopedia, your chances of appearing in the Knowledge Graph for certain types of topics or search intentions related to your business will probably increase.
Be consistent: make sure that all the listings, profiles, and information you provide on different digital media about your business remain consistent and are always the same.
That is, always write the name of your brand or business in the same way, always use the same address without any variation not even in the periods or commas, always provide the same contact information, etc. So as not to confuse the search engine.
Conclusion:
While implementing these tactics does not guarantee the appearance of your brand in the Google Knowledge Graph, this does not mean that it is wasted time or effort, since doing all these tasks well will considerably increase the online presence of your business, improve the SEO of your website and, therefore, help you gain greater visibility, quality traffic, and conversions. Dare to execute them! We hope that with this article you have learned about Google Knowledge Graph and its implications for the SEO of your website.
We invite you to continue reading our blog to learn more about search engine positioning.
Bibliography
https://blog.google/products/search/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not/ https://es.semrush.com/blog/knowledge-graph-que-es-como-afecta-seo/ https://www.inboundcycle.com/blog-de-inbound-marketing/google-my-business-que-es-como-funciona
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