Google Ups Its Search Game

Imagine throwing a last-minute party and searching for a quick smoked salmon recipe.

This is my user journey, without context, in 3 simple steps:

1. I google or search for “smoked salmon recipe” and I’m shown ~ 14,80,00,000 results in 0.89 seconds - that is really a lot to wade through!

2. Facing so many choices, I run a quick filter on multiple sites to see which website is more reputed or will give me the quickest solution since my guests are already on the way.

3. Close all other tabs that I think are irrelevant and run to the kitchen to prep the salmon.

With Context

1. I google or search for “smoked salmon recipe” and instead of searching through multiple sites, the results of the most reputed sites are displayed in an “About this site” section.

2. I save time by not falling down the rabbit hole of multiple “all things salmon” and can serve my guests faster!

Why Should This Matter to Marketers?

Though this is not a major functional change, one hopes it is a step in the right direction that allows search users to verify the reputation and authenticity of the website they are about to visit. While this won’t have a direct impact on SEO rankings, it may reduce users from opening multiple search results and being bounced around looking for relevant results.

While providing more context is an additional step for further validating your search results, it will not be a huge factor that will impact the marketing ecosystem’s efforts for SEO. If you are producing relevant content for keywords that you are targeting, “more context” becomes an added benefit and more of a hygiene check.

Since the importance of contextual search and targeting has been around for over 2 decades now, why does all of this even matter, you wonder? In the light of looming privacy concerns, a plethora of fake news sources, global congressional hearings and the announcement of 3P cookies crumbling (well, eventually), global search engines have decided to try to improve a customer’s experience, fight misinformation and deal with a world that has definitely been blindsided, even a year later by the pandemic. ROI is, of course, a happy ending. Today, trust is the key factor in everyone’s mind and a more contextual search is one way to build this trust. There are companies setting up ad-free search products with ex-Googlers. Their goal is to mitigate the risk of an increasing reliance on advertising that can negatively impact the quality of search. Decoupling the ad business from search engines would be one way to break monopolies where 90+% market share is commanded in a market of ~$100+ billion and to create a product whose roadmap is not driven by an agenda of digital advertising.

Hitting Closer to Home: What does this mean for us in India where data privacy laws are in a nascent stage and vastly misunderstood? 

Ad-revenue supported Indian publishers will have to keep a close eye on their search and revenue analytics to look for early signs of any impact. News publishers will have to run tighter ships to prevent the spread and consumption of fake news that will affect not only their reputation but also impact their revenue. The thing with Google updates that we have all faced is that it is never really revealed how much impact is to be expected until you are smack bang in the middle of it all. At Voiro, we have real-time programmatic and direct revenue analytics that will show any such anomalies in real-time. Our dashboards are what many ad-ops professionals start their day with. This helps publishers augment revenue with other additional sources like private deals while they work on updating their SEO contextual cards and mitigating any adverse effects brought about by new search algorithms or updates.

The factors that are key during any search are as follows (and I have taken this verbatim from Google). (https://blog.google/products/search/learn-more-and-get-more-from-search/)

1. Matching keywords: A simple, but important factor Google uses to determine if information is relevant is when a webpage contains the same keywords as your search.

2. Related terms: Google also looks for terms that our systems determined are related to the words in your query. If you search “how to cook fish in the oven,” we’ll also look for pages that have related terms like “bake” and “recipe.” 

3. Looking at links: When other pages link to a page using similar words as your query, that page might be relevant to your search. It can also be a helpful indicator of whether online content creators tend to regard the page as useful for that topic.

4. Local relevance: Search systems also look at factors like the language you’re using to search as well as your country and location, to deliver content relevant for your area. 

The ultimate goal, as a consumer of search, and ultimately as a business is to be able to have the most seamless and perhaps, delightful experience possible. If that can be monetised, it is an additional perk but must not be the sole reason for product development. This is how products, services and technology must come together in the right context -- to drive consumer delight through seamless experiences. Marketing is ultimately about understanding the larger ecosystems at play to create better narratives. 

I would hope that every search engine has contextual algorithms that run in the background to help me find the most relevant result, and lets me turn out a mean salmon starter! 

The author is Jonna Vyasulu, CMO, Voiro

Jonna Vyasulu

Guest Author CMO, Voiro