Whether Businesses Need to Worry About Google Knowledge Graph
These days when we search your brand on Google, you have probably seen the Knowledge Graph at work in the right side panel of search results. The Knowledge Graph displays some content about the brand you searched such as the current CEO of the company, founding date, headquarters and so on. The Google Knowledge Graph widgets are of many types, but the most concerning fact is that Google display content on its answer box from scratching off content from reputed websites.
According to Stone Temple Consulting, about one in five search results now consists of Knowledge Graph features, and the potential impact on organic search traffic is enormous. The digital marketing firm arrived at this conclusion after performing an in-depth look at 8, 50,000 search queries. They also found that about 19.45 percent trigger these rich answers. Another interesting fact about Knowledge Graph’s impact on search results is that after its introduction on Google’s SERPs Wikipedia page views declined to 21 percent. These developments may lead to many questions. Will the Knowledge Graph begin to impact SEO traffic of businesses? Do businesses need to show up their content in answer boxes? Will these answer boxes start to show up for keywords that are important to businesses?
Knowledge Graph Benefits Branded Searches
Many SEO industry experts say that searches associated with brands are displaying sidebar panels of Google’ Knowledge Graph, for everyone from big MNCs to small-medium enterprises. They also say that this will increases the brand visibility and conduct more searches on that brand. These panels might consist of following aspects depending on the brand and business model:
- Basic details and a brief description from reputed sites (especially Wikipedia)
- Photos and reviews (if possible) from Google+
- Social media profiles
- Stock prices from MSN Money, Google Finance and Yahoo Finance
- Competitors in the market
- Related searches
These panels are a powerful commentary on your brand. Not only do customers tend to trust information from third parties, the Google Knowledge Graph is assisting users to look for and trust what they read in these panels. If the information in your business’s Knowledge Graph panel is accurate and complimentary, then it is highly beneficial to your SEO efforts. If it is not, you have some power to update Knowledge Graph information about your brand and content as necessary.
How Does this Influence SEO Campaigns
As Google Knowledge Graph is scraping content and displaying it on answer boxes, businesses are thinking how it will influence their SEO visibility. Do you need to perform content optimization to try to get scraped, or do you have to avoid the answer box and focus on attracting search traffic that will actually convert? Fortunately, both of those questions will lead to the same solution.
First, in most cases, the source pulled into the Knowledge Graph’s answer box is already in the first few organic search results on Google anyway. In cases, where the answer box features a webpage further down the search result rankings – although here it only jumped to the number two position, the decision seems to be based on on-page SEO considerations. For search queries such as “How To”, Google favored the formatted numerical list on the KISSmetrics page over a broader discussion about schema. This means that good SEO positively impacts your ranking overall, and it will also improve your visibility in the answer box of Google Knowledge Graph. And even if you have never utilized the answer box, your target customers will still look for more than just a quick answer.
Prospects that require making a purchase, now or in the future, will need more than the short text provided on a search result. That means prospects will still click through to highly search-visible websites, although perhaps in fewer numbers. A strong SEO campaign is still a winning strategy, even as the Knowledge Graph keeps growing.
Even though Knowledge graph influence your SEO traffic going to your site, you can get your high-quality content in the Knowledge Graph’s answer box. That does not change the fact that you are probably wasting your time unless you are converting your organic web traffic into leads or at least gathering their email addresses.
