Page 6 - index

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

Semantic search

ousts keyword

based search

In the future Google wants to provide answers to After all, Asian consumers are leading global changes
specific questions - which is why the practice of in shopping behavior, with e.g. over 75% of Chinese
keyword-based search will soon belong to the past - consumers making purchases on their mobiles, ac-
and industry experts already predict that semantic cording to DigitasLBi’s global consumer study earlier
search will be standard by the year 2020. this year. Other studies provide evidence that a miss-
ing mobile optimization is a reason for shoppers to
However, any company that wants to assert itself in the abort a purchase.
semantic web has to know and understand its target
group perfectly to be able to provide relevant content. Google identified this trend quickly and communicated
It’s a fact that Internet users will soon only ask naturally that sites which are insufficiently mobile-optimized
formulated questions on search engines and expect to have to expect a lower ranking in the future. Besides,
get a concrete answer. This is creating serious implica- there is basically no big difference between traditional
tions to search engine optimization (SEO) and shop and mobile search engine optimization (SEO), as in
owners respectively, making the current practice of key- principle, the same fundamental SEO practices apply,
word-based search obsolete. The search giant in fact such as title-tag-optimization, content markup or meta-
laid the foundation quite early for SEO 3.0 with its algo- descriptions. Still, there are critical areas that didn’t get
rithm update Panda and Hummingbird, with the intend enough attention, yet.
to push the user interests into the forefront, by reward-
ing those that offer good and appropriate content for the Responsive Design vs. Dynamic Serving
target groups’ queries with higher rankings.
For a long time it was unclear what an optimal mobile
Ranking factor: user satisfaction site should look like - both for the users and Google:
As an individual mobile-optimized website on a subdo-
User satisfaction, is one of the increasingly important main, as responsive design or dynamic serving? Mo-
SEO ranking factors today, states Matt Cutts, Head of bile-optimized websites with separate code base offer
Google's Webspam team, who recently named web de- users content that is specifically tailored to the end de-
sign and user experience as clearly underestimated are- vice, which will be supplied on a separate URL. It
as in search engine optimization. And indeed, Google means, content can be shown irrespective of the desk-
includes usage data - such as click-through rate (CTR), top version in this case and adapted to the mobile ap-
bounce rates or length of stay - in their overall assess- plication context, however, with the disadvantage of
ment of the quality of a website. having an increased effort in website maintenance,
since desktop version and the mobile version must be
Therefore, companies have to consider more and more maintained independently.
how they can produce good content: As generally
known, big pictures, multimedia and clearly structured Responsive design is the variant that Google openly
content, cater for a good-feel experience for the visitors prefers, as this facilitates the work of the Google-bots,
of a website. However, keep in mind staying away from as it only adjusts the layout of the website to the re-
too sales- and marketing-heavy texts and activities with spective end device, content and URL remain un-
no perceived additional value for the user, as this just changed when accessing the site. However, anyone
results in high bounce rates. Ultimately, Google in par- who is considering the conversion of the site to respon-
ticular rates websites better that generate positive user sive design must bear in mind that there is a need for
data and rewards them with a higher ranking. comprehensive reprogramming of the existing site.

Ranking factor: mobile SEO Depending on the mobile end device, with dynamic
serving users see different HTML and CSS content
A website that isn’t optimized for mobile devices is not displayed on the same URL. Therefore, both represen-
only annoying for the user, but has also consequences tation and content are matched for the end device of

for the Google ranking of the site. the user.
6 Asian eMarketing September 2014 - Search Engine Marketing